SmolVLA (450M)
Model idlerobot/smolvla_base
PricePrice not published
Checked29 September 2026
Where it stands
25newer robotics models since its release
- Praxis-130 Sep 2026
- Helix 2.517 Sep 2026
- UnifoLM-WLA-1.010 Sep 2026
- Skild S1 (Skild Brain)25 Aug 2026
- Generalist GEN-1.519 Aug 2026
The 5 newest are listed. All robotics models
- Weights
- Weights are public under a permissive licence (Apache-2.0).
How to call it
2 ways to use SmolVLA (450M), with the model id each provider expects.
| Provider | Model id | Endpoint | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hugging Face | lerobot/smolvla_base |
Docs Model page | |
| GitHub (LeRobot) | github.com |
Pricing
Price not published.
No price source linked. Checked 29 September 2026.
Specs
- Input
- Images and text
- Output
- Robot actions
- Context window
- Not published
- Max output
- Not published
- Open weights
- Yes
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- Released
- 3 June 2025
- Status
- Current
- Type
- Robotics model
What stands out
What its maker marketed at launch, and what people found later, each with its source.
VLA small enough for a laptop
450M params (SmolVLM2-500M backbone + flow-matching action expert); trains on a single GPU and runs on consumer hardware incl. MacBooks.
Trained on community-shared data
Pretrained on ~10M frames from 487 community LeRobot datasets (<30k episodes, an order of magnitude less than other VLAs); 78.3% success on real SO-100 tasks.
Asynchronous inference
Decouples action prediction from execution: ~30% faster task completion and 2x throughput.
Notes
Designed for low-cost arms (SO-100/SO-101). HF repo still updated in Sept 2026; variants lerobot/smolvla_libero, lerobot/smolvla_robotwin. NVIDIA announced it would acquire Hugging Face (see 2026-09-03 entry).