zero2robot: a free from-scratch course whose VLA chapters send you to read openpi (pi0)

[kaushikb11]

Sharing this since openpi is the "read the real thing" reference for the VLA chapters of the course.

zero2robot is a free, from-scratch course on embodied AI: you build a robot brain one readable file per chapter, from a bare MuJoCo loop up to a vision-language-action policy you train, evaluate, and drive in the browser.

The VLA track builds up to a small VLA from scratch and then sends learners to read openpi (pi0) as the production ground truth: ch3.8 (frontier models), ch5.4 (VLA shape), and ch5.5 (the fast/action-expert path). The goal is that by the time someone opens openpi, the pieces are familiar rather than a wall. Everything runs on a free Colab T4 or a CPU laptop, no robot or GPU required.

Textbook: https://www.zero2robot.com/
Source: https://github.com/kaushikb11/zero2robot

Thanks for open-sourcing openpi; having a real, readable pi0 to point people to is a big part of what makes the from-scratch path land. Feedback on the VLA chapters very welcome.