Comment by carlosdp

I highly recommend starting with the SO-ARM101 and the LeRobot tutorial. They're super cheap, its insanely quick to get started, and you can even buy pre-made kits like at https://partabot.com . It's the "Hello World" of robotics now, imo.

Don't bother with a Jetson Nano, you don't need that to get started, and by the time you need that you'll know a lot already. You can just drive the robot from your laptop!

Getting to training your own VLA fine-tuned model is a super quick and easy process. You can see examples of other people completing the tutorial and uploading their training/evaluation datasets here (shameless plug for my thing): https://app.destroyrobots.com

I wouldn't bother much with ROS at first tbh. It'll bog you down, and startups are moving toward using other approaches that are more developer friendly, like Rust-based embedded.

You can go far with a robot connected to USB though!