Multi-robot learning is getting a serious boost! 📚 Researchers... have extended Isaac Lab to train heterogeneous multi-agent robotic policies at scale. The new framework supports high-resolution physics, GPU-accelerated simulation, and both homogeneous and heterogeneous agents working together on coordination tasks. They benchmarked different approaches (MAPPO: Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization and HAPPO: Heterogeneous Agent PPO) across six challenging scenarios and showed that large-scale multi-robot training is not only feasible, but efficient. It’s an important step for real-world robotic collaboration, where teams of robots need to coordinate, split tasks, adapt roles, and interact dynamically, not just operate as identical clones. The code is open-source, and it pushes Isaac Lab closer to what robotics actually needs: scalable, physics-driven environments where many different robots can learn to work together. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

A monowheel security robot from Estonia! 🇪🇪 Rollo Robotics... just raised €3.7M pre-seed led by FoodLabs and PROTOTYPE to bring the world's first stable autonomous monowheel robot to market. Founded by Arno Kütt (the mind behind Cleveron) and Sander Sebastian Agur, this Estonian startup has cracked what they call the "stability paradox" of the monowheel. Instead of clunky multi-wheeled platforms, Rollo uses high-frequency sensor fusion and proprietary balance control to create a slim, agile robot that navigates tight urban spaces and industrial corridors where traditional robots simply can't fit. The application? Autonomous security patrolling. With hybrid threats to physical infrastructure growing, the demand for scalable robotic security is massive. The funding will go toward two things: hardening the tech for extreme weather and high-traffic environments, and scaling production to meet demand from early pilot programs. 💰 P.S. Monowheels have been sci-fi for decades. Excited to see if Rollo can make them practical at scale. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Microsoft presents Windows Agent Arena Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents... at Scale discuss: Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable potential to act as computer agents, enhancing human productivity and software accessibility in multi-modal tasks that require planning and reasoning. However, measuring agent performance in realistic environments remains a challenge since: (i) most benchmarks are limited to specific modalities or domains (e.g. text-only, web navigation, Q&A, coding) and (ii) full benchmark evaluations are slow (on order of magnitude of days) given the multi-step sequential nature of tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce the Windows Agent Arena: a reproducible, general environment focusing exclusively on the Windows operating system (OS) where agents can operate freely within a real Windows OS and use the same wide range of applications, tools, and web browsers available to human users when solving tasks. We adapt the OSWorld framework (Xie et al., 2024) to create 150+ diverse Windows tasks across representative domains that require agent abilities in planning, screen understanding, and tool usage. Our benchmark is scalable and can be seamlessly parallelized in Azure for a full benchmark evaluation in as little as 20 minutes. To demonstrate Windows Agent Arena's capabilities, we also introduce a new multi-modal agent, Navi. Our agent achieves a success rate of 19.5% in the Windows domain, compared to 74.5% performance of an unassisted human. Navi also demonstrates strong performance on another popular web-based benchmark, Mind2Web. We offer extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of Navi's performance, and provide insights into the opportunities for future research in agent development and data generation using Windows Agent Arena.show more

Robora Sim: A PyBullet-Powered Environment for Learning Robotic Physical... Intelligence We are currently building our Robora simulation environment setup for our sim based learning, leveraging PyBullet, an industry-standard physics engine widely used in AI-driven robotics research and development. The environment is optimized with GPU-accelerated learning algorithms, enabling high-speed imitation learning and reinforcement learning within a safe and controlled virtual setup before shipping out to real world. This simulation platform allows our models to learn, adapt, and generalize across different robot morphologies, terrain types and task objectives - all before deployment to the real world. At it's core, the system combines a VLA-powered high-level planner with low-level motion control algorithms, working cohesively to produce emergent, physically intelligent behaviors. This synergy between simulation, learning, and real-world transfer marks a major step forward in our pursuit of adaptive and intelligent robotic systems. Through advanced domain randomization and synthetic data generation, the Robora Simulation Environment ensures that policies trained in simulation transfer effectively to real-world robots, minimizing the sim-to-real gap. Moreover, users will be able to test and integrate their own hardware kits within selected simulation environments in the Robora Dapp, ensuring seamless compatibility and safer real-world implementation.show more

🚨 BREAKING: NVIDIA just announced the Isaac GR00T Reference... Humanoid Robot. The first fully open humanoid robot reference design built on Jetson Thor, and it's going straight to the world's top research institutions. This is Jensen Huang's bet on open physical AI infrastructure. The hardware stack is serious: → Unitree H2 Plus chassis, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 31 degrees of freedom → Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, 22 degrees of freedom, bringing total to 75 across the full body → NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor onboard compute, 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, 128GB unified memory → Multi-view sensing, stereo head camera, wrist cameras, IMU Alongside this announcement, Unitree also introduced the H2 Plus as a standalone product, a frontier humanoid combining Unitree's own body, Sharpa's five-finger hands and NVIDIA Robotics Jetson Thor compute into one fully integrated research platform. The full Isaac GR00T software stack ships with it, teleoperation for data capture, open foundation models, Isaac Sim for training, Isaac Lab for evaluation, and accelerated ROS middleware for deployment. The complete loop from data to real-world robot in one unified platform. ETH Zürich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego and Ai2 are already on board as launch research partners. NVIDIA Robotics did to AI what it's now doing to robotics, build the platform, open the ecosystem, let the world build on top of it. Whoever owns the infrastructure layer wins. NVIDIA knows this better than anyone. 👀 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Trained on zero real-world data. Learned to walk, pick... up boxes, and follow multi-step instructions... in the REAL world. ( 📌 Paper below) Researchers from Amazon FAR, Berkeley, Stanford, and CMU scanned real rooms with an iPhone, rebuilt them as 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes, then generated 48,000 synthetic trajectories of a Unitree G1 walking, grasping, and placing objects inside those virtual replicas. They rendered the robot's first-person camera view from each run and paired it with the matching language instruction and motion data. That's the dataset every humanoid team needs and nobody has: synced egocentric video + language + kinematics, at scale. Instead of collecting it in the real world, they manufactured it. They trained a vision-language-kinematics policy on that synthetic data alone, then deployed it on the physical G1 across five task types: navigation to a named object, lifting boxes of three different sizes with no per-size tuning, chained multi-step tasks, robustness to mid-task layout changes and flickering lights, and multi-minute long-horizon runs. No real-world fine-tuning at any point. Real-world interaction data has been the hard limit on humanoid learning... slow, expensive, and small. If scanning a room once and synthesizing thousands of labeled interactions holds up as a general recipe, that limit moves. Data stops being the bottleneck robotics teams have to solve for. 📌 Paper: Project: ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:show more

As a newly appointed 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿 at Imperial College... London, I'm thrilled to announce the 𝗦𝗮𝗳𝗲 𝗪𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗲-𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗟𝗮𝗯 (𝗦𝗪𝗜𝗥𝗟) at 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗻. 𝗦𝗮𝗳𝗲 𝗪𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗲-𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗟𝗮𝗯 (𝗦𝗪𝗜𝗥𝗟) ( is a new research lab focused on the intersection of safety and intelligence in next-generation robotics. We're hiring exceptional PhD students who are passionate about pushing the boundaries of robot learning. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗦𝗪𝗜𝗥𝗟 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲? We operate at the exciting convergence of: • Online & offline reinforcement learning • Imitation learning & human demonstrations • Sample-efficient learning methods • Whole-body and soft robotics systems We're 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗣𝗵𝗗 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 interested in: • Developing safe exploration algorithms for robotic systems • Creating sample-efficient learning methods that minimize real-world trials • Building foundation models for robotics with safety guarantees • Advancing soft robotics and compliant human-robot interaction • Bridging theory and practice in embodied AI Why now? As robots become more capable and work closer with humans, we need systems that are both intelligent enough to handle complex tasks 𝗔𝗡𝗗 safe enough for real-world deployment. Traditional approaches treat safety and intelligence as competing priorities, we believe they're synergistic. If you're a motivated researcher who wants to develop the theoretical foundations and practical algorithms for tomorrow's safe, intelligent robots, I'd love to hear from you. Want to join? Apply viashow more

Something big is happening in robotics - and it’s... hiding in plain sight. This post is not about dancing robots but in the data that powers them. Open robotics datasets have exploded this year, turning the field into a more scalable and collaborative ecosystem. In just two years, Hugging Face datasets grew from 11k to over 600k - and robotics is by far the fastest-growing segment. We went from 1k robotics datasets in 2024 to 27k in 2025! For comparison, text generation, the second-largest category, has only around 5k datasets in 2025. That gap is massive. Open datasets are important because robotics lives and dies by real-world robot data - video, actions, sensors, failures. By making this data easy to upload, reuse, and benchmark, researchers, startups, and large players are now releasing real-robot datasets that would have stayed locked inside labs just a few years ago. Major contributors include NVIDIA, LeRobot initiative, and a rapidly growing maker community. This surge is also enabled by cheaper video storage, better tooling, and an open-source AI culture now spilling into the physical world. And it really matters: open robotics data dramatically lowers entry barriers, accelerates learning-by-doing, and speeds up progress toward generalist and humanoid robots. Robotics won’t scale through hardware alone - but to a large extent through shared data. Viz below from AI World - link to the story and more viz/filters in comment.show more

Robotics keeps hitting the same wall. Single task RL... works, but... it does not scale to hundreds of tasks or new embodiments. This new paper looks like a real step toward fixing that. The team introduces MMBench, a benchmark with 200 tasks across many domains and robots, and Newt, a language conditioned world model trained online across all 200 tasks at once. The simple idea behind Newt: The model learns from demos to get the right priors It trains across many tasks through online interaction It uses language to ground the goal It adapts fast when a new task shows up What stood out to me: ✅ One model trained on 200 tasks at the same time ✅ Language conditioned control for both states and RGB ✅ Better data efficiency than strong baselines ✅ Strong open loop control ✅ Fast adaptation to new tasks and embodiments ✅ Full release of 200 checkpoints, 4000 demos, code, and benchmark This is a good push toward general control instead of one model per task. If you want the full paper: Project page: —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:show more

Back when we were developing GEN3C, we often imagined... a Holodeck-like future: a simulator where multiple agents can enter the same generated world, act independently, and learn to collaborate. Gamma-World makes this feel more concrete. It is a generative multi-agent world model that takes synchronized observations and actions, then rolls out what each agent will see next in the same evolving world — action-responsive at 24 FPS. For me, the key challenge is going beyond two players. As more agents enter, identity cannot be tied to fixed slots, interaction cannot rely on dense pairwise attention, and independent actions still need to resolve into one shared state. Two ideas make this work: 1⃣ Simplex RoPE Distinct agent identities without slot bias — unique, but permutation-equivalent. 2⃣ Sparse Hub Attention Agents communicate through learnable hubs instead of dense all-to-all attention: agent → hub → agent This keeps cross-agent communication scalable. The exciting part: training on two-player data can generalize to four-player rollouts without additional training, and the same formulation extends to real-world bimanual robot coordination. A step toward populated world models: many agents, one shared world. Congrats to the team on Gamma-World! Project:show more

The entire timeline is filled with talks on sentient... and all, but I love being as informative and precise as possible on pressing issues. Let’s quickly talk about @SentientAGI’s Recursive Open Meta Agent (ROMA); ROMA is an open-source meta-agent framework used to build high performance multi-agent systems. ROMA serves as the conductor in a mass choir, or a captain of a ship . The captain gives commands for the other subordinates to follow to ensure efficiency on all sides. In this like manner, it provides a hierarchical tress system where the parent agents break down complex tasks to create simpler subtasks that are then passed on to children nodes. A family tree has the parents above, likewise the same tree analogy works here, but that’s not all that makes it stand out The results and solutions gotten by these child nodes are then aggregated together and there’s an up flow of results sent back up to the parent nodes. And at the center of it all is ROMA engineering and making sure all is running smoothly without break or fail. Are you really bullish on Sentient and the future of AGIs?show more

AI-Powered weed control! 🌱 The LaserWeeder machine from Carbon... Robotics has captured the imagination of American farmers. This technology uses AI system to identify weeds in crops and zap them with precision thermal bursts from lasers. Bit of facts about the cool robot: → The machine can remove weeds from over 40 crops and can also be used for thinning crops. → It can operate in virtually all weather conditions, with millimeter accuracy at all times, and can work through the night thanks to its built-in lighting system. → High-resolution cameras and computer machine learning enable it to distinguish weeds from crops in milliseconds. → The LaserWeeder can replace about 70 workers on farms where manual weeding is used, and can weed up to four acres per hour. What other applications can we expect to see in the future in farming applications? Btw. I believe farming robots are A HUGE THING in robotics! 🔥 ~~ ♻ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

LangGraph. CrewAI. Agno. Which one to pick? The good... news is that this will not matter soon! Finally, we have a full picture of how the industry is solving this with just three open protocols that work across ALL frameworks. It's not about picking the best framework. Instead, it's about understanding how protocols create interoperability. The Agent Protocol Landscape shows how three complementary protocols are creating a universal language for Agents: > AG-UI (Agent-User Interaction): - The bi-directional connection between agentic backends and frontends. - This is how agents become truly interactive inside your apps, not just as chatbots, but collaborative co-workers. > MCP (Model Context Protocol): - The standard for how agents connect to tools, data, and workflows. > A2A (Agent-to-Agent): - The protocol for multi-agent coordination. - How agents delegate tasks and share intent across systems. These aren't competing standards. They're layers of the same stack and have handshakes with each other. So instead of building point-to-point integrations, you build to protocols. Moreover, you can integrate LangGraph, CrewAI, or Agno into the same frontend, without rewriting your UI logic. These protocols let everything work together. For instance: - Your LangGraph agent pulls data via MCP. - It delegates analysis to a CrewAI agent via A2A. - Results stream to your React app via AG-UI. - Users see real-time collaboration in your interface. This way, you can focus on building agent capabilities instead of integration mechanics. The protocols handle interoperability automatically. CopilotKit unifies this entire stack into one framework so you can build "Cursor for X" style apps without implementing each protocol from scratch. It gives you all three protocols, generative UI support, and production-ready infrastructure in one framework. I have shared this playbook in the replies! It breaks down handshakes, misconceptions, and real examples and shows exactly how to start building.show more

Dynamic workflows are a generalization of harnesses, automations, loops,... routing, and graphs. It's the most powerful feature I have built into my agent orchestrator. Supports all kinds of patterns that leverage different agent backends (claude, codex, pi, hermes,...). It's a meta-harness approach that unlocks new forms of test-time compute. Example of use cases it supports: > LLM councils to get different perspectives from LLMs or plan more intensively > Dynamically routing tasks to different agents based on needs (e.g., cost efficiency and optimal intelligence) > Advisor/Judge + executor workflows and pretty much any complex graph-based pattern required by the task. I find it especially useful for long-running work and code reviewing. > Agent teams that talk to each other if needed for the task. I like to use this for AI editing, artifact creation, and other creative tasks. And I am sure it supports so many things that I haven't discovered yet. I got inspired by the dynamic workflow feature released by the Claude Code team. I had actually built it earlier this year but wanted to generalize it across different agent backends. I think this is going to become more popular in the coming days. I will share more of my findings soon.show more

A Letter to Our Community: The Road Ahead for... Robotics To our Community and Partners, As we step into 2026, our mission at Axis is clearer than ever: Constructing the definitive End-to-End Scaling Layer for Robotics. Our goal is to accelerate the transfer of diverse human intelligence into Robotics General Intelligence (RGI). By owning the critical path of intelligence creation, we are turning the physical limitations of robotics into a scalable, software-driven future. Here is our strategic outlook and roadmap for the year ahead. The Core Thesis: Simulation is the Only Way Out The path to RGI is currently blocked by Data Scarcity, Generalization Fragility, and Hardware Fragmentation. At Axis, we believe Simulation is the only way out. Our Simulation Data Platform and Data Augmentation Engine transform raw data into "Synthetic Gold". Backed by academic milestones like Roboverse, Skill Blending, and GraspVLA, we have proven that pure simulation can achieve the generalization required for the real world. We don’t just collect data; we architect it. The Engine: Why Crypto? We believe RGI should come from all, not a few. Crypto is not just a feature; it is the primitive that powers our entire ecosystem flywheel: - Incentive Mechanism: Democratizing contribution and rewarding the trainers and developers. - Assetization: Turning proprietary data and refined models into liquid, ownable assets. - Verifiable Workflow: We are opening the "Black Box" of AI. By bringing total transparency to the Task Generation → Data Collection → Model Training pipeline, we ensure every byte of intelligence is verifiable, traceable, and secure. 2026 Strategic Deliverables This year, we are committed to delivering three foundational pillars: - The World's Largest Training Dataset for Robots: A robot training set—diverse, high-quality interaction data at an unprecedented scale. - A Robotics Foundation Model: A universal robotic brain trained on our pure simulation and synthetic data, capable of robust cross-embodiment transfer and open-world adaptability. - Evolvable Robot Hardware: Robots deployed with Axis models that autonomously evolve through continuous interaction, turning every deployment into a self-improving node within our RGI network. The Ultimate Vision We are building more than models; we are architecting the Distributed Machine Economy. A future where every dataset, model, and robotic embodiment is a verifiable asset in a global, autonomous network. Thank you for building the future of intelligence with us✌️📷show more

China now has its own “Bolt” — a robot... named after sprint legend Usain Bolt. A Chinese research team has unveiled the world’s first full-size humanoid robot to reach a peak speed of 10 meters per second, setting a new global benchmark for humanoid running. Bolt runs like a body pushed to the limit. Its joints and power systems work in tight coordination, keeping it balanced even at sprint speed. Built to match the build of an adult man—1.75 meters tall and 75 kilograms—it is a life-sized system operating at the edge of physics. Compared with Usain Bolt’s iconic 9.58-second 100-meter world record, which many experts believe may stand for decades, the gap between humans and machines is narrowing fast. Chinese robots are now challenging the ceiling of human performance—much as AlphaGo once challenged Go champion Ke Jie. The breakthrough builds on earlier world-record achievements in high-speed robotic running and marks a giant leap for China in humanoid motion and control. Beyond records, Bolt also carries practical value: robots are leaving the lab and stepping into real-world settings—sports training, emergency response, and demanding industrial tasks where speed, balance and control truly matter.show more

Multi-axis 3D printing with curved layers! 🖨️ Researchers from... the The University of Manchester introduced a neural network-based computational pipeline as a representation-agnostic slicer for multi-axis 3D printing. Traditional 3D printing works like stacking pancakes, flat layers on top of each other. 🥞 This often requires temporary support structures that get thrown away after printing, wastes material, and creates weaker parts. Multi-axis 3D printing can print along curved paths that follow the object's natural shape. This eliminates support structures and makes stronger parts. But figuring out these curved paths is mathematically complex, you need to avoid collisions, respect what the printer can physically do, and optimize for strength. The neural network solves this automatically. It learns to create a "field" around the object, then extracts curved printing paths from this field. Because the entire process is differentiable (translation for non-math specialists, meaning you can optimize it end-to-end), the AI can directly optimize for manufacturing goals like "no support structures needed" and "make it as strong as possible." Here's the project: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Imagine you go to a store and you want... to buy candy. The shopkeeper knows you're a real kid because they can see you standing right there. Now imagine you send a robot to buy candy for you. The shopkeeper looks at the robot and thinks: wait, who sent this? Is this robot allowed to buy candy? What if someone else's robot pretends to be yours and steals your candy money? That's basically what's happening with AI right now. Companies like Visa let people buy things all over the world. But now, smart computer robots (AI agents) want to buy things too. Shop around, compare prices, even pay for stuff. Visa looked at this and said: nope, not yet. Because they have no way to check if the robot is real, who it belongs to, or if it's allowed to spend that money. The problem is that all the rules we have for checking identity - showing your ID, scanning your face, typing your password - only work for humans. Robots can't do any of that. Worse, bad robots can actually copy and fake human identities really well. So Evin McMullen evin, Billions Network co-founder and CEO, says we need a new kind of ID system. One where you can prove something is true without showing all your private stuff. Like proving you're tall enough for a ride without telling anyone your exact height. That's called zero-knowledge proof. And for the robots specifically, we need something called KYA - Know Your Agent. It's like giving every robot its own ID card that says: this is who I am, this is what I'm allowed to do, and this is the human responsible for me. Until we build that, the robot economy can't really get going. Here is Evin’s Thought Leader article at Silicon Valleys Journalshow more

🚨 BREAKING: Walden Robotics has just come out of... stealth with $300 million in funding and a $1.1 billion valuation. Another unicorn in the robotics space. 🦄 Just 6 months after incubation. The company was spun out of Toyota's robotics research lab by co-founder Russ Tedrake, a former Toyota Research Institute executive and MIT professor who taught a course on robotic legs. The seed round was co-led by Deviation Capital and Toyota, with participation from: NVIDIA, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, CoreWeave Ventures and AE Ventures. The robot is already working. A pilot is live at a North American Toyota factory where a Walden humanoid is pulling eight-hour shifts alongside human workers, loading and unloading car parts, cleaning machinery, kitting for assembly. A shift. Every day. Walden builds its own hardware, software and AI models, designed to continuously learn and improve in real production environments. Tedrake's words on the opportunity are worth noting: "Everyone recognises the magnitude of the opportunity and the technology feels ready, but success is not assured. You have to think through the business case, the unit economics, and how to marry the best of manufacturing and logistics with disruptive AI technology." Rare honesty in a space full of hype. The race to own that market is accelerating every single week. 🤖 Great story by Bloomberg here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Furniture assembly is the task everyone name-drops and nobody... actually attempts at real scale. Every demo I have seen is a scaled down IKEA leg or a single arm on a toy chair. This paper does it properly, real scale, bimanual, up to 7 subtasks and 1,550 control steps per episode, and it is validated on a real Kinova Gen3, not just in sim. That real-robot number is the one that matters: only a 16 percent drop on the hardest task going from simulation to hardware. That is a small enough gap to take seriously, and it did not happen by accident. They built a VR teleoperation rig specifically for coordinated dual-arm collection, because generic single-arm teleop setups do not capture the coordination real assembly needs, and the model predicts a continuous progress signal alongside the action chunk rather than a discrete subtask label, letting it auto-transition and catch drift before it compounds into total failure. The simulation ablation is what got them there, 48 to 80 percent over baselines, with another 21 points from their perception and control design study alone, but that is groundwork, not the headline. Watch the video, there is a clip of the robot misgrasping the seat panel, reopening the gripper, and regrasping on its own. That is not scripted recovery behaviour, it emerged from training, and it emerged on hardware. Excellent work from the team from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, with Oxford and UNC Chapel Hill Clinical Laboratory Science. Video and project page in comments. #Robotics #Manipulation #VLAshow more

Today may be the ImageNet moment for robotics. RT-X:... the largest open-source robot dataset ever compiled, across 33 institutes, 22 robot hardware, 527 skills, and 1M episodes. Why is robotics lagging so far behind NLP, vision, and other AI domains? Data scarcity is the main culprit to blame, among other difficulties. Unlike text, images, and videos, you cannot download mass amounts of onboard robot control data from the internet. They simply don't exist in the wild. 11 yrs ago, ImageNet kicked off the deep learning revolution. 3-4 yrs ago, internet-scale data fueled the first GPTs and Diffusions that define this era of foundation models. I think 2023 is finally the year for robotics to scale up. Robot foundation models like VIMA ( my team's work at NVIDIA) and RT-1/2 ( Google DeepMind's effort) are extremely data hungry. While massively parallel simulations like NVIDIA IsaacGym & Omniverse can alleviate the problem to some extent, it's still not quite enough to bridge the gap to the messy, physical world. This new dataset is not just a technical contribution. I also see it as a commendable effort to overcome institutional bureaucracies and unite researchers from around the world to tackle a grand challenge together. Robotics will be the final holy grail that we capture in AI. We are not there yet, but ascending in the right gradient direction. RT-X website: Launch blog:show more