Viam Debuts Box Opening Robot at IROS 2026

Sep 22, 2026
BoxBot uses visual servoing and a vision language action model to cut tape and open cardboard box flaps.

Viam AI will debut BoxBot at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh from September 27 to October 3, the company announced in a press release. The research robot uses image based visual servoing to cut tape seams and a vision language action model to open cardboard box flaps.

The system runs a fine tuned SmolVLA model locally on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Engineers trained it from 125 human demonstrations collected with a virtual reality controller over about five hours across four days, then tuned the model with LeRobot on Hugging Face Jobs.

Viam released the code and training data publicly on Hugging Face. IROS attendees can watch BoxBot operate and test virtual reality teleoperation and SO-101 leader follower stations at Booth 828.

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