What can you build during 48h Robotics Hackathon?
Nicodeme from Hugging Face talks with winners of the Robot Worldwide Hackathon about what they built in 48 hours and how the event shaped their work a year later.
In this talk
- 0:00
A first step into robotics
Nicodeme introduces a hackathon that brought thousands of people together across dozens of cities to build with a shared open-source robotics stack. Several participants said the ready-made tools made robotics easier to approach, including one builder whose first hackathon led to nine more events and six wins.
- 1:06
Projects built in 48 hours
Teams used robot arms for varied projects: folding T-shirts with a reported success rate of about 80%, sorting LEGO into pixel art, and passing dishes based on a text instruction. Other projects included a phone-controlled arm, a four-arm walking robot, real-hardware reinforcement learning, and camera data augmentation. One team’s teleoperation work later became part of the robot library, while the Loqui team’s graphical interface was announced as its official GUI.
- 3:57
What happened after the event
A year later, participants described continuing into robotics through agentic orchestration, technical videos, research, and tactile sensing. One winner said hackathon experience helped lead to internships and then a full-time job. Others pointed to the community and shared data, datasets, and models as useful for their ongoing work.
- 5:40
Advice for new participants
Participants encouraged newcomers to join even without a detailed plan or prior experience. They said building on real hardware helped them learn more than passively following a course, and that robotics requires trying, failing, and trying again. Nicodeme closes by noting that most participants were still building a year later.
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