SmolVLA is a compact 450M open-source Vision-Language-Action model from Hugging Face, pretrained on community-shared LeRobot datasets.
Product passport
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- Category
- Robot Development
- Maturityi
- Available
- Deploymenti
- Not specified
- Purchase access
- Public purchase / signup
- Official source
- Official website
- Verifiedi
- Not yet verified
Reality check
The useful boundary is what works repeatedly in a real environment—not what looks impressive in a demo.
- Simulation, control, perception and repeatable experiments
- Teams that can manage dependencies and hardware interfaces
- Prototyping before committing to a physical deployment
- Supported hardware, GPU requirements and version compatibility
- Documentation, examples and community response
- How simulation results transfer to the real robot
- A guarantee that simulation equals a production cell
- A replacement for safety validation on hardware
- A low-maintenance toolchain without version ownership
About
SmolVLA is a 450M-parameter open-source Vision-Language-Action model released by Hugging Face on June 3, 2025. It combines a SmolVLM2 vision-language backbone with a flow-matching action expert, and is pretrained only on compatibly licensed community datasets under the lerobot tag. The model runs on consumer hardware, including CPU and a single GPU, and supports asynchronous inference for faster response and higher task throughput. It is evaluated on simulation benchmarks such as LIBERO and Meta-World and on real-world SO100 and SO101 tasks.
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The cost iceberg
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