Igor Kulakov (MicroFactory)
@ihorbeaver • 9,377 subscribers
Building self-replicating robots.
Shorts
Videos
We’re shipping an interchangeable gripper. Our main goal, as usual, is to make modern AI tools work in environments where you need reliability. Humanoid hands have their use cases, but it’s hard to pick up a tool firmly and control precisely with them. We made an alternative - an interchangeable gripper. The tool is fixed to the gripper in advance, and the whole hand is swapped. AI is quite good at generating this kind of custom tooling.
Igor Kulakov (MicroFactory)929,622 次观看 • 1 个月前
Here is the full run of MicroFactory, that autonomously assembles a photo frame - a real product sold on Amazon. This is a good example of how to deal with complex tasks, while we do not yet have a large set of robotic data to train a big general ai model. Thread:
Igor Kulakov (MicroFactory)209,938 次观看 • 10 个月前
We have news! We created a new robotics model called Loop Model 1. On the zip-tie insertion task, it achieves 20x more throughput per unit of data than "Pi06 + RLT" from Physical Intelligence, a top model for such tasks. It’s the missing piece that makes MicroFactory work, because now deployment becomes so simple and fast that our users can do it themselves.
Igor Kulakov (MicroFactory)77,013 次观看 • 3 个月前
Bare imitation learning without robotic pre-training is an unfairly overlooked area. (it doesn't even have a name) When done right, it has the advantages of programming. It’s reliable, predictable, easy to modify and debug. The only difference is that the source of truth is a small dataset instead of code. And it is glued together by a vision encoder and a transformer model instead of being compiled. It's hard to imagine how Claude Code could appear without a ton of production-grade source code hardened over years of real use. Same for robotic models. Here is the robustness of such a model. It was trained on orange zip ties with no lighting changes.
Igor Kulakov (MicroFactory)20,234 次观看 • 1 个月前
Robotic insight 2: One undocumented feature of VLA models is that they can generalize pretty well from very little data, if you run them on good hardware. Here, with 35 demonstrations (5 mins in total), robot can pick up small pcb from any position and at any rotation angle.
Igor Kulakov (MicroFactory)47,571 次观看 • 7 个月前
Deployment is only the first step. You need to learn from it and take the next steps toward positive ROI. Our journey: Step 1. Nine month ago, our robot already assembled a complex real product for our customer, from start to finish. But it wasn’t reliable. Step 2. Our robot performed a complex benchmark task reliably 100 times in a row. Step 3. (Completing) Our robot assembling a complex real product from start to finish 100+ times in a row.
Igor Kulakov (MicroFactory)11,428 次观看 • 1 个月前
How to keep your fingers clean while eating chips? Use a robot! - $250 opensource robot with most advanced AI models inside (Tesla bot and Figure use them too) - 15 minutes of examples - $3 for training in Google Collab - Don't hesitate to give a star to the repo if it's interesting:
Igor Kulakov80,442 次观看 • 1 年前
Below is our open-source arm assembled by one of the discord members! Also, today Physical Intelligence shared their incredible top-notch robotics model Pi0. And I just want to remind you that you can use our arm together with this model and with LeRobot The arm has the same DOF as the arm used by Pi0, but has smaller size and cost starts from 200$ per arm. You can use better motors like we did in our demos, then it will be more precise and stable but the price will be about $600 per arm. Printable files, purchase list, and help with the assembly - in our discord channel.
Igor Kulakov53,711 次观看 • 1 年前
Robotic insight 3 There’s a widely held view among leading robotics thinkers: the current priority is to automate some commercially profitable work to get real-world data. If you set the goal as “the first profitable deployment that also generates data” you get a few insights: - People with industry experience may be better positioned to nail this than academic researchers. - You can try to find non obvious initial domain, that’s easier to deploy in practice, while still provide useful data.
Igor Kulakov19,659 次观看 • 7 个月前