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By unifying prediction and control, NavWAM acts as a closed-loop policy out of the box. In evaluations, it outperforms planning-based world models without needing test-time action search, matches a much larger 7B VLA policy, and transfers successfully to real mobile robots.

Robots Digest 🤖

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11,076 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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AI for robotics has some monumental challenges, like high dimensionality and reasoning with the physical world. Ashok Elluswamy, AI lead at Tesla, thinks the hardest problem is Evaluation. - Loss isn't a perfect indicator of Policy Neural Network's quality. - Testing in the real world for all the long-tail failure cases is not possible. To solve the evaluation challenge, Tesla has developed a World Simulator Model. It is trained on state and action pairs, so for a given current camera feed and current action, the model generates the next frame in the cameras. Once the world simulation is good enough, it can be hooked up to the policy network for a closed-loop simulation. In this setup, the model generates the next video frames, and based on those, the policy network comes up with the next action, which feeds back into the world simulation; this continuous loop creates a coherent simulation. The world simulation neural network is not just applicable to self-driving but also to humanoids, because Tesla trains it on common data. The examples show Optimus navigating or manipulating inside the world simulation, with all the pixels being generated by the world simulation model. The robotic agents can be tested in an accurately reproduced edge case and in other potential variations of the same edge case.

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World models — action-conditioned predictive models of the environment — are an exciting are of research for robots that can be useful both for training and for test-time compute. But video-based world models waste a lot of predictive power on reconstructing pixels, which makes model and data requirements much higher and limits how far out into the future their predictions remain viable. Instead, what if we learned a purely semantic world model, one which predicts which properties will be true about the world after a sequence of actions, without reconstructing the whole images? Jacob Berg tells us more. Watch Episode #53 of RoboPapers now, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

World models — action-conditioned predictive models of the environment — are an exciting are of research for robots that can be useful both for training and for test-time compute. But video-based world models waste a lot of predictive power on reconstructing pixels, which makes model and data requirements much higher and limits how far out into the future their predictions remain viable. Instead, what if we learned a purely semantic world model, one which predicts which properties will be true about the world after a sequence of actions, without reconstructing the whole images? Jacob Berg tells us more. Watch Episode #53 of RoboPapers now, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

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Diffusion Policy was one of the big breakthroughs that has enabled an explosion in real-world robot learning. However, it’s always had a weakness, which is that it works by computing a final action trajectory from random noise, which leads to high latency when predicting a final action sequence. Instead, why not initialize the search based on previous actions? This allows for incredibly fast policy inference and in many cases improved generalization, generating high-quality predictions with sub-ms latency. Jindou Jia and Jianfei Yang join us to explain. Learn more on Episode 95 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

Diffusion Policy was one of the big breakthroughs that has enabled an explosion in real-world robot learning. However, it’s always had a weakness, which is that it works by computing a final action trajectory from random noise, which leads to high latency when predicting a final action sequence. Instead, why not initialize the search based on previous actions? This allows for incredibly fast policy inference and in many cases improved generalization, generating high-quality predictions with sub-ms latency. Jindou Jia and Jianfei Yang join us to explain. Learn more on Episode 95 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

RoboPapers

27,947 views • 11 days ago

Another robot from Disney! 🕺🏻 Just look at this dancing fella created by Disney Research. Creating control policies that work on real robots and handling diverse, unseen motions in physics-based character control is still difficult. The Disney team proposes a two-state solution. The first step involves learning a latent space encoding with an autoencoder. After encoding, the policy is trained to map kinematic input to dynamic output, ensuring accurate and adaptable movement. This method eliminates common mode collapse issues and improves motion encoding by separating these stages. This technique has proven effective in real robots in simulations, marking a significant leap forward in robot control. Can't wait for it in action live in 2025 :) ~~~ RT to help 1 robot find a new workplace.

Another robot from Disney! 🕺🏻 Just look at this dancing fella created by Disney Research. Creating control policies that work on real robots and handling diverse, unseen motions in physics-based character control is still difficult. The Disney team proposes a two-state solution. The first step involves learning a latent space encoding with an autoencoder. After encoding, the policy is trained to map kinematic input to dynamic output, ensuring accurate and adaptable movement. This method eliminates common mode collapse issues and improves motion encoding by separating these stages. This technique has proven effective in real robots in simulations, marking a significant leap forward in robot control. Can't wait for it in action live in 2025 :) ~~~ RT to help 1 robot find a new workplace.

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65,955 views • 1 year ago

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Agile Continuous Jumping in Discontinuous Terrains discuss: We focus on agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping of quadrupedal robots in discontinuous terrains such as stairs and stepping stones. Unlike single-step jumping, continuous jumping requires accurately executing highly dynamic motions over long horizons, which is challenging for existing approaches. To accomplish this task, we design a hierarchical learning and control framework, which consists of a learned heightmap predictor for robust terrain perception, a reinforcement-learning-based centroidal-level motion policy for versatile and terrain-adaptive planning, and a low-level model-based leg controller for accurate motion tracking. In addition, we minimize the sim-to-real gap by accurately modeling the hardware characteristics. Our framework enables a Unitree Go1 robot to perform agile and continuous jumps on human-sized stairs and sparse stepping stones, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. In particular, the robot can cross two stair steps in each jump and completes a 3.5m long, 2.8m high, 14-step staircase in 4.5 seconds. Moreover, the same policy outperforms baselines in various other parkour tasks, such as jumping over single horizontal or vertical discontinuities.

AK

35,794 views • 1 year ago