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The Trossen Aloha is the most-cited open bimanual platform in 2026 manipulation research — easy to recognize, well-documented, and present in MuJoCo Menagerie with correct joint limits, gripper kinematics, and inertias. Drift composes the scene, the objects, the dual-arm controller, and the sensor logging around the Menagerie Aloha model.
Recommended setup: MuJoCo 3.8.1+, Python 3.10+. Drift can clone Menagerie for you on the first run if it isn’t on disk yet.

The prompt

From this single prompt, Drift:
  • Locates or clones mujoco_menagerie
  • Composes aloha_scene.xml that <include>s the Menagerie Aloha and adds the table + three cubes at the requested colors and positions
  • Writes joint-space targets per arm that approximate the wrist hovering over each target cube. The first attempt comes from MuJoCo’s forward kinematics — pose, check wrist position, nudge — but it’s not a full IK solver and may overshoot or undershoot by a few centimetres. Refine with a follow-up like "the left wrist is 5cm short — adjust the shoulder-pitch target by +0.1 rad".
  • Writes a run_sim.py that linearly interpolates between current and target joint angles over 5 seconds, applies position control, and logs at 100 Hz
  • Runs headless, prints the final EE positions vs targets, and notes any contact between wrist and table

What ends up on disk

What the viewer shows

Both Aloha arms move smoothly from their start pose. The left wrist tracks over the red cube; the right wrist tracks over the blue cube. The middle (green) cube stays untouched. The F/T traces in sensor_log.csv are near-zero through the motion (free space) and would spike if the arms touched the table.

Iterating from here

Where the demo gets interesting is the follow-ups:

Honest scope

Things this guide does:
  • Compose the bimanual scene around the Menagerie Aloha model
  • Write a per-arm joint-space interpolation controller
  • Wire both wrist F/T sensors and the 14 joint angles, log them
  • Open the viewer / run headless
Things this guide does not do:
  • A learned bimanual grasp policy (ALOHA Unleashed–style behaviour cloning) — those are policies you train; Drift can scaffold the data-collection environment but not the policy
  • Full collision-aware motion planning between the arms
  • Tactile-sensor-driven manipulation — Aloha’s grippers don’t carry tactile sensors in the Menagerie model
If you have a policy from a training run, ask Drift to wire it in:

Common gotchas

The table needs condim=3 (or higher) on its contact and a non-zero friction. The default plane material in some Menagerie scenes is frictionless. Tell Drift "the cubes fall through the table — make the table-cube contact realistic" and it’ll fix the <geom> block.
Position-control PD gains are model-specific. Aloha’s default kp in Menagerie is conservative. Ask Drift to ramp the gains:
Aloha’s right arm has a different joint convention than the left in the original ROS package — but Menagerie normalises this. If you see overshoot only on one side, double-check the sign convention in your interpolation. Drift will catch this if you ask "why is the right arm overshooting".

Next steps

Quadruped Go2

Locomotion-shaped showcase

Humanoid H1

Full-body PD-balanced demo

Building a MuJoCo Scene

The base MuJoCo guide — useful background for everything in Showcase

Custom Skills

Capture your manipulation conventions (IK solver pick, gripper-force rules) as a skill