What is Viam BoxBot hybrid visual-servo/VLA box-opening robot?

Robots that handle everyday objects face tasks involving touch and contact that are hard to describe with exact equations, so BoxBot combines two methods. Visual servoing steers a robot using live camera feedback, and a vision-language-action (VLA) model is an AI model that turns camera images and a text instruction into robot movements. BoxBot is a robot arm that opens taped cardboard boxes: visual servoing guides the cutting tip along the tape seam, and a fine-tuned SmolVLA model peels open the four box flaps. It was trained on 125 demonstrations in which humans remotely controlled the arm. Viam, a robotics software company, announced it in September 2026.

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