Mise en Place: Intel Bimanual VLA

Mise en Place is a dual SO-101 bimanual robot project for the Intel AI Infra Summit. The robots place a fork and spoon on a plate in parallel, then do a right-to-left spoon handoff. The system has four parts. First, SmolVLM2-256M takes an overhead camera image and a text instruction and outputs a task plan as JSON. Second, a validation gate checks the plan schema, object names, and arm assignments. Bad plans are rejected and a rule-based planner takes over. Third, a geometric controller runs inverse kinematics, parallel arm motion, collision-free handoff, and fixed grasp/release timing. Fourth, a small LoRA behavior cloning model runs on OpenVINO as a bounded correction at 50% authority. The geometric controller still guards grasps. We tested at scale: 100/100 T1 seeds, 50/50 T2 seeds, zero arm collisions in audited runs, and 10/10 hybrid INT8 closed-loop success. OpenVINO static INT8 is about 2.6x faster than FP32 on Intel iGPU. What does not work: pure behavior cloning fails closed-loop (0/10), SmolVLM failed grounding stress tests so it is proposal-only, and we had no NPU on our machine. The project is reproducible multimodal manipulation on Intel hardware, not a fully learned end-to-end policy.