A global wave of open-source robotics hit Miami this weekend as Hugging Face and Miami AI Hub hosted the city’s first LeRobot Worldwide Hackathon, a 36-hour sprint that ran in parallel with 100-plus hubs on six continents. More than 150 coders, students, researchers—even first-time builders—filled The Lab Miami on June 14–15 to assemble SO-series robot arms, tune vision-language-action models, and record demo videos that now feed into the global leaderboard.
Hackathon kicks off with Clem Delangue fireside chat
The marathon opened Saturday at 10 a.m. with a live fireside chat featuring Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, who urged U.S. innovators to keep AI research transparent and collaborative. "The beauty of open source is that it isn’t a zero-sum game—we want everyone racing as fast as possible because it benefits everyone,” Delangue told the packed room, cautioning against a future of “black-box” home robots controlled by a single company.
From code to coffee-pouring robots
Once the talk wrapped, hacking began in earnest:
- Teams bolted together SO-ARM101 and SO-101 kits, flashed firmware, and wired custom sensors.
- Cloud-based simulators spun up using the free GPU credits each participant received from Hugging Face.
- Demo videos—showcasing everything from imitation-learning guitar arms to reinforcement-trained robot arms—were recorded for worldwide judging.
Teams fanned out across five official tracks (Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning, New Robot Integrations, Hardware Mods, and Dataset & Tooling) tackling everything from teaching SO-ARM101s by human demonstration to wiring brand-new sensor rigs and expanding the LeRobot data pipeline for future builders.
A cross-section of Miami’s tech scene
Attendees ranged from university freshmen to veteran founders and corporate engineers, many of whom first met before diving into the hackathon floor the next morning.
The hackathon caps a streak of packed gatherings that has put Miami AI Hub on the national map: April’s AI Agent Summit drew more than 250 founders and researchers to debate agent-native infrastructure, while May’s AI in E-Commerce Forum packed Northeastern University’s campus with retailers and data scientists exploring generative checkout flows. Together, the back-to-back events—now followed by a worldwide robotics sprint—underscore Miami’s growing reputation as a U.S. hot-spot for generative AI.
“Miami prototypes the future in public. Dropping a worldwide robotics hackathon here proves that open hardware, open models, and our city’s creative energy belong in the same conversation," stated Burhan Sebin, founder of Miami AI Hub.
Cast AI, fresh off a $108 million Series C aimed at scaling its Kubernetes-based cloud-cost platform, and 4A Labs, a global devshop known for guiding founders from idea to polished, investor-ready MVPs, picked up the food, caffeine and high-speed Wi-Fi tabs so hackers could keep their GPU jobs running nonstop without throttling.
"None of this would happen without our volunteers and supporters,” added Sebin. “They turned an idea into a global showcase—proving once again that Miami can host the future.”
