LeRobot v0.5.0 expands hardware and policies with Unitree G1 humanoid support, RTC, and streaming encoding

AI Impact Summary

LeRobot v0.5.0 delivers a sweeping upgrade across hardware, policies, data pipelines, and the stack. The standout is full Unitree G1 humanoid support with whole-body control, enabling end-to-end humanoid demonstrations, while new Pi0-FAST autoregressive VLAs and Real-Time Chunking (RTC) dramatically reduce inference latency for flow-matching policies. EnvHub integration and NVIDIA IsaacLab-Arena support loading Hugging Face Hub environments and simulation tooling, complemented by streaming video encoding to remove episode wait times. The modernization to Python 3.12 and Transformers v5 with PEFT/LoRA support expands model experimentation and deployment options, and broader CAN bus motor controller support extends hardware compatibility.