How to contribute to 🤗 LeRobot

Everyone is welcome to contribute, and we value everybody’s contribution. Code is not the only way to help the community. Answering questions, helping others, reaching out, and improving the documentation are immensely valuable.

Whichever way you choose to contribute, please be mindful to respect our code of conduct and our AI policy.

Ways to Contribute

You can contribute in many ways:

• Fixing issues: Resolve bugs or improve existing code.
• New features: Develop new features.
• Extend: Implement new models/policies, robots, or simulation environments and upload datasets to the Hugging Face Hub.
• Documentation: Improve examples, guides, and docstrings.
• Feedback: Submit tickets related to bugs or desired new features.

Adding new hardware? Robots, teleoperators, and cameras usually work best as a standalone plugin package rather than a change to the core library. Follow Bring Your Own Hardware, publish your package, then open a PR adding it to Third-Party Robots & Teleoperators or Third-Party Cameras & Sensors.

If you are unsure where to start, join our Discord Channel.

Development Setup

To contribute code, you need to set up a development environment.

1. Fork and Clone

Fork the repository on GitHub, then clone your fork:

git clone https://github.com/<your-handle>/lerobot.git
cd lerobot
git remote add upstream https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot.git

2. Environment Installation

Please follow our Installation Guide for the environment setup & installation from source.

Running Tests & Quality Checks

Code Style (Pre-commit)

Install pre-commit hooks to run checks automatically before you commit:

pre-commit install

To run checks manually on all files:

pre-commit run --all-files

Docstrings

The API reference is generated from the docstrings in src/lerobot/. If you add or change anything public, follow the docstring standard — the format is parsed by the renderer and checked in CI.

Running Tests

We use pytest. First, ensure you have test artifacts by installing git-lfs:

git lfs install
git lfs pull

Run the full suite (this may require extras installed):

pytest -sv ./tests

Or run a specific test file during development:

pytest -sv tests/test_specific_feature.py

The Fast Tests CI runs one tier per extra (base, dataset, hardware, viz) and selects the tests of each tier with a pytest mark. If your test needs the dataset, hardware or viz extra, mark it (pytestmark = pytest.mark.dataset for a whole file, @pytest.mark.dataset for one test). Unmarked tests run in the base tier only, where a test that needs an extra is skipped. To run one tier locally:

pytest -sv tests -m dataset

The GPU Tests CI only runs tests marked gpu. Every test under tests/policies and every @require_cuda test gets it automatically; mark any other test that uses CUDA with @pytest.mark.gpu.

Submitting Issues & Pull Requests

Use the templates for required fields and examples.

• Issues: Follow the ticket template.
• Pull requests: Rebase on upstream/main, use a descriptive branch (don’t work on main), run pre-commit and tests locally, and follow the PR template.

Community Review Policy: To help scale our efforts and foster a collaborative environment, we ask contributors to review at least one other person’s open PR before their own receives attention. This shared responsibility multiplies our review capacity and helps everyone’s code get merged faster!

Once you have submitted your PR and completed a peer review, a member of the LeRobot team will review your contribution.

Thank you for contributing to LeRobot!