GPT-6 Astra with a robot arm: one night on NIST gear assembly
A team gave Astra camera feeds and arm-control tools for the NIST gear assembly task; it could pick up the gear but failed to align it with the peg, and they shared their setup and prompting lessons.
we gave GPT-6 Astra a robot arm and spent the night trying to get it to assemble gears it could pick up the gear. getting it lined up with the peg was where we got stuck curious if you can get further in one night! sharing our setup + what we tried below built this with @PrathamJainAI, @cspaliwa1 and chirag using @robocurve’s inspect-robots harness for the NIST gear assembly task. astra gets camera images and calls tools to move the arm. no task-specific training or expert demonstrations we had 3 cameras: one in front, one on the wrist, and a tiny one between the gripper fingers we exposed that third camera as a separate tool. astra could request a close-up once it had the gear over the peg and was trying to align it. the idea was to give it the view it needed at that stage instead of stuffing all 3 views into every step also ended up peeling apart a new table tennis racket to make gripper pads hahaha good, dense prompts matter a lot. being precise about the task and how to use the tools made a difference in our attempts. still plenty to figure out with alignment though would love to see people try the same challenge with different camera angles, depth cameras or depth anything, tactile sensors, other models like claude or gemini. tag me if you try it, would love to see how far you get and what you do differently! dexterity and tactile sensing feel like big unlocks here. working on this at http://wakenrobotics.com :) task board, paper + harness links in the replies if you wanna take a shot