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Collecting robot data at scale is key to deploying working manipulation policies, and the team from Tutor Intelligence Tutor is here to tell us about how to accomplish it. Their new announcement: a massive, 100-robot “data factory,” with a behind-the-scenes look at how to build a teleoperation platform and... how to make robots and policies that are useful for their customers. Tutor Intelligence is a full-stack robotics company: they build robot arms, they sell robot arms, they write the software and they train neural networks. Josh Gruenstein, Jesse Michel, Shiraz, and Joe McCalmon, and Joe McCalmon join us to tell us more about how they scale both teleop data and human interventions from their teleoperators in order to train the policies they need. Watch Episode #85 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!show more

RoboPapers

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36,041 views • 1 month ago •via X (Twitter)

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Training robot foundation models faces two key hurdles: how to get enough data to train an effective model, and how to make sure that new skills can be acquired quickly. The team at Rhoda AI believes that the answer is training Direct Video Action models from web data. Web data is plentiful, to the point where Rhoda can train their base model on hundreds of years of video data. And then, with the addition of robot data, they can quickly adapt it to new tasks with as little as 20 hours of in-domain data, performing complex, multi-step manipulation tasks with their purpose-built video foundation model. Tongzhou Mu 🤖🦾🦿 Eric Chan and Changan Chen joined us to talk more about their approach. Watch Episode #79 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc, Chris Paxton, and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

Training robot foundation models faces two key hurdles: how to get enough data to train an effective model, and how to make sure that new skills can be acquired quickly. The team at Rhoda AI believes that the answer is training Direct Video Action models from web data. Web data is plentiful, to the point where Rhoda can train their base model on hundreds of years of video data. And then, with the addition of robot data, they can quickly adapt it to new tasks with as little as 20 hours of in-domain data, performing complex, multi-step manipulation tasks with their purpose-built video foundation model. Tongzhou Mu 🤖🦾🦿 Eric Chan and Changan Chen joined us to talk more about their approach. Watch Episode #79 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc, Chris Paxton, and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

RoboPapers

24,352 views • 2 months ago

Sports like tennis are great examples of the sort of dynamic whole-body interaction that’s possible with humanoid robots. But capturing examples of fast, dynamic interactions from humans is really difficult. Enter LATENT, which uses lower-quality human data plus reinforcement learning to teach a robot to play tennis, able to complete back-and-forth volleys at a human level. LATENT has three steps: (1) collecting imperfect human data like a backswing, (2) using these to learn a latent action space, and (3) they train a high-level policy in simulation which can compose these actions and execute tennis skills on a robot. Haofei Lu and Yunrui Lian join us to tell us about their method. Watch Episode #80 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, now to learn more!

Sports like tennis are great examples of the sort of dynamic whole-body interaction that’s possible with humanoid robots. But capturing examples of fast, dynamic interactions from humans is really difficult. Enter LATENT, which uses lower-quality human data plus reinforcement learning to teach a robot to play tennis, able to complete back-and-forth volleys at a human level. LATENT has three steps: (1) collecting imperfect human data like a backswing, (2) using these to learn a latent action space, and (3) they train a high-level policy in simulation which can compose these actions and execute tennis skills on a robot. Haofei Lu and Yunrui Lian join us to tell us about their method. Watch Episode #80 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, now to learn more!

RoboPapers

29,886 views • 2 months ago

Just collecting manipulation data isn’t enough for robots - they need to be able to move around in the world, which has a whole different set of challenges from pure manipulation. And bringing navigation and manipulation together in a single framework is even more challenging. Enter HERMES, from Zhecheng Yuan and Tianming Wei. This is a four-stage process in which human videos are used to set up an RL sim-to-real training pipeline in order to overcome differences between robot and human kinematics, and used together with a navigation foundation model to move around in a variety of environments. To learn more, join us as Zhecheng Yuan and Tianming Wei tell us about how they built their system to perform mobile dexterous manipulation from human videos in a variety of environments. Watch Episode #45 of RoboPapers today, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

Just collecting manipulation data isn’t enough for robots - they need to be able to move around in the world, which has a whole different set of challenges from pure manipulation. And bringing navigation and manipulation together in a single framework is even more challenging. Enter HERMES, from Zhecheng Yuan and Tianming Wei. This is a four-stage process in which human videos are used to set up an RL sim-to-real training pipeline in order to overcome differences between robot and human kinematics, and used together with a navigation foundation model to move around in a variety of environments. To learn more, join us as Zhecheng Yuan and Tianming Wei tell us about how they built their system to perform mobile dexterous manipulation from human videos in a variety of environments. Watch Episode #45 of RoboPapers today, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

RoboPapers

15,045 views • 7 months ago

Pretraining is essential for good performance on a wide variety of robotics tasks, and so most vision-language-action models build off of a vision language model (VLM) trained on a wide variety of image-language data. But how does the choice of VLM translate to downstream robotics performance? Jianke Zhang and @GYanjiang join us to talk about this key part of the robot policy, looking at a wide variety of different VLMs and how they perform. Interestingly, they see that performance on auxiliary tasks like quesiton answering did not lead to downstream improvements in control. To learn more, watch episode 65 of RoboPapers now, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan!

Pretraining is essential for good performance on a wide variety of robotics tasks, and so most vision-language-action models build off of a vision language model (VLM) trained on a wide variety of image-language data. But how does the choice of VLM translate to downstream robotics performance? Jianke Zhang and @GYanjiang join us to talk about this key part of the robot policy, looking at a wide variety of different VLMs and how they perform. Interestingly, they see that performance on auxiliary tasks like quesiton answering did not lead to downstream improvements in control. To learn more, watch episode 65 of RoboPapers now, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan!

RoboPapers

23,905 views • 4 months ago

For robots to be useful, they must be able to interact with a wide variety of environments; and yet, scaling interaction data is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Instead, much research revolves around sim-to-real manipulation — but mostly this has not been mobile manipulation. Recently, though, this has begun to change. Two recent papers from Tairan He and Haoru Xue show us how to unlock the potential of this technique, building policies which, without any real data at all, can move objects around in the world and open doors in the real world with a humanoid robot. Watch Episode #60 of RoboPapers now to learn more, hosted by Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan. In this episode, we cover two papers:. First is VIRAL: Visual Sim-to-Real at Scale for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation; and second is DoorMan: Opening the Sim-to-Real Door for Humanoid Pixel-to-Action Policy Transfer.

For robots to be useful, they must be able to interact with a wide variety of environments; and yet, scaling interaction data is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Instead, much research revolves around sim-to-real manipulation — but mostly this has not been mobile manipulation. Recently, though, this has begun to change. Two recent papers from Tairan He and Haoru Xue show us how to unlock the potential of this technique, building policies which, without any real data at all, can move objects around in the world and open doors in the real world with a humanoid robot. Watch Episode #60 of RoboPapers now to learn more, hosted by Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan. In this episode, we cover two papers:. First is VIRAL: Visual Sim-to-Real at Scale for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation; and second is DoorMan: Opening the Sim-to-Real Door for Humanoid Pixel-to-Action Policy Transfer.

RoboPapers

30,767 views • 5 months ago

Most robot policies today still largely lack memory: they make all their decisions based on what they can see right now. MemER aims to change that by learning which frames are important; this lets it deal with tasks like object search. Ajay Sridhar, Jenny Pan, and @satviks107Sharma tell us about how to achieve this fundamental capability for long-horizon task execution. Watch Episode #54 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

Most robot policies today still largely lack memory: they make all their decisions based on what they can see right now. MemER aims to change that by learning which frames are important; this lets it deal with tasks like object search. Ajay Sridhar, Jenny Pan, and @satviks107Sharma tell us about how to achieve this fundamental capability for long-horizon task execution. Watch Episode #54 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

RoboPapers

17,850 views • 7 months ago

Evaluating robot policies is hard. Ideally, instead of testing every new policy on a real robot, you could test in simulation; but simulations rarely correlate well with real-world performance. In order to make good, useful simulations, you need to spend a great deal of time and effort. That’s where PolaRiS comes in: it’s a toolkit that lets you take a short video of a real scene and turn it into a high-fidelity simulation. It provides what you need to build a good evaluation environment, and it “ships” with off-the-shelf environments that already show strong sim-to-real correlation, meaning that they can be used to inform policy performance. Arhan Jain and Karl Pertsch join us to talk about what they have built, why, and how you can use it. Watch Episode #62 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, now!

Evaluating robot policies is hard. Ideally, instead of testing every new policy on a real robot, you could test in simulation; but simulations rarely correlate well with real-world performance. In order to make good, useful simulations, you need to spend a great deal of time and effort. That’s where PolaRiS comes in: it’s a toolkit that lets you take a short video of a real scene and turn it into a high-fidelity simulation. It provides what you need to build a good evaluation environment, and it “ships” with off-the-shelf environments that already show strong sim-to-real correlation, meaning that they can be used to inform policy performance. Arhan Jain and Karl Pertsch join us to talk about what they have built, why, and how you can use it. Watch Episode #62 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, now!

RoboPapers

14,689 views • 5 months ago

Robots, unfortunately, tend to be expensive. And finding a robot that’s both capable of performing a wide variety of mobile manipulation tasks, and is affordable and “hackable”, is extremely difficult. Many different problems need to be addressed, from arm control to navigation to integrating your data collection strategy into hardware design. This can make it difficult for all but the most well-funded teams to “scale” real-world robotics research. Fortunately, the team behind Build Your Own Robot has a solution. Manan Anjaria, Mahi Shafiullah 🏠🤖,Jeff Cui, and Enes Erciyes joined us to talk about how they build a fully open-source mobile manipulator out of off-the-shelf parts, which has humanlike range of motion, and can perform a wide variety of tasks, all while being only roughly $10,000 to build. Watch Episode 71 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, today to learn more!

Robots, unfortunately, tend to be expensive. And finding a robot that’s both capable of performing a wide variety of mobile manipulation tasks, and is affordable and “hackable”, is extremely difficult. Many different problems need to be addressed, from arm control to navigation to integrating your data collection strategy into hardware design. This can make it difficult for all but the most well-funded teams to “scale” real-world robotics research. Fortunately, the team behind Build Your Own Robot has a solution. Manan Anjaria, Mahi Shafiullah 🏠🤖,Jeff Cui, and Enes Erciyes joined us to talk about how they build a fully open-source mobile manipulator out of off-the-shelf parts, which has humanlike range of motion, and can perform a wide variety of tasks, all while being only roughly $10,000 to build. Watch Episode 71 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, today to learn more!

RoboPapers

34,151 views • 3 months ago

Teaching robots from human video is an important part of overcoming the “data gap” in robotics, but many of the details still need to be worked out. Homanga Bharadhwaj tells us about two recent research papers, Gen2Act and Spider, which go over different aspects of the problem: Gen2Act uses generative video models to create a reference of how a task should be performed given a language prompt; then, it uses a multi-purpose policy that can “translate” from human video to robot motion. However, Gen2Act has its limitations, in particular when it comes to dexterous, contact-rich tasks. That’s where SPIDER comes in: it uses human data together with simulation to train policies across many different humanoid hands and datasets. Also of note is that this is our first episode with our new rotating co-host, Jiafei Duan. To learn more, watch Episode #57 of RoboPapers now, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan!

Teaching robots from human video is an important part of overcoming the “data gap” in robotics, but many of the details still need to be worked out. Homanga Bharadhwaj tells us about two recent research papers, Gen2Act and Spider, which go over different aspects of the problem: Gen2Act uses generative video models to create a reference of how a task should be performed given a language prompt; then, it uses a multi-purpose policy that can “translate” from human video to robot motion. However, Gen2Act has its limitations, in particular when it comes to dexterous, contact-rich tasks. That’s where SPIDER comes in: it uses human data together with simulation to train policies across many different humanoid hands and datasets. Also of note is that this is our first episode with our new rotating co-host, Jiafei Duan. To learn more, watch Episode #57 of RoboPapers now, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan!

RoboPapers

24,286 views • 6 months ago

Robot policies must be both reliable and highly capable to be useful; the best way to achieve this level of performance is with reinforcement learning. However, for reinforcement learning you are usually stuck between two difficult options: reinforcement in the real world is often risky and expensive, while reinforcement learning in a traditional simulator takes a lot of engineering work and has a persistent sim-to-real gap. What if instead you could train your robot purely in a world model? RISE by Jiazhi Yang et al. uses a compositional world model to predict the future and evaluate progress. This allows for a self-improving pipeline, which learns a world model from real data and then learns how the robot should perform different tasks. This pipeline results in a data-driven way to improve policy performance from real data but without real-world reinforcement learning. Watch Episode #86 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

Robot policies must be both reliable and highly capable to be useful; the best way to achieve this level of performance is with reinforcement learning. However, for reinforcement learning you are usually stuck between two difficult options: reinforcement in the real world is often risky and expensive, while reinforcement learning in a traditional simulator takes a lot of engineering work and has a persistent sim-to-real gap. What if instead you could train your robot purely in a world model? RISE by Jiazhi Yang et al. uses a compositional world model to predict the future and evaluate progress. This allows for a self-improving pipeline, which learns a world model from real data and then learns how the robot should perform different tasks. This pipeline results in a data-driven way to improve policy performance from real data but without real-world reinforcement learning. Watch Episode #86 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

RoboPapers

38,334 views • 1 month ago

Collecting dexterous humanoid robot data is difficult to scale. That's why Mengda Xu and Han Zhang built DexUMI: a tool for demonstrating how to control a dexterous robot hand, which allows you to quickly collect task data. Co-hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton

Collecting dexterous humanoid robot data is difficult to scale. That's why Mengda Xu and Han Zhang built DexUMI: a tool for demonstrating how to control a dexterous robot hand, which allows you to quickly collect task data. Co-hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton

RoboPapers

26,344 views • 11 months ago

It’s long been a dream of roboticists to be able to teach a robot in simulation so as to skip the long and expensive process of collecting large amounts of real-world training data. However, building simulations for robot tasks is extremely hard. Ideally, we could go from real data to a useful simulation. This is exactly what Guangqi Jiang and his co-authors do. they use 3d Gaussian splatting to reconstructed scenes which let them create interactive environments that, when combined with a physcs engine, allow for training robot policies that show zero-shot sim-to-real transfer (i.e., using no real-world demonstrations). To learn more, watch Episode 56 of Robopapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

It’s long been a dream of roboticists to be able to teach a robot in simulation so as to skip the long and expensive process of collecting large amounts of real-world training data. However, building simulations for robot tasks is extremely hard. Ideally, we could go from real data to a useful simulation. This is exactly what Guangqi Jiang and his co-authors do. they use 3d Gaussian splatting to reconstructed scenes which let them create interactive environments that, when combined with a physcs engine, allow for training robot policies that show zero-shot sim-to-real transfer (i.e., using no real-world demonstrations). To learn more, watch Episode 56 of Robopapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

RoboPapers

20,434 views • 6 months ago

Every home is different. That means that to build a useful home robot, we must be able to perform zero-shot generalization on a wide range of tasks. Humanoid company 1X has a solution: world models. 1X Director of Evaluations Daniel Ho joins us on RoboPapers to talk about: - why world models are the future for scaling robot learning - how to use world models for robot control - what world models unlock for evaluating robot model performance - how we can hill-climb from here to general purpose robots Watch Episode #61 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now!

Every home is different. That means that to build a useful home robot, we must be able to perform zero-shot generalization on a wide range of tasks. Humanoid company 1X has a solution: world models. 1X Director of Evaluations Daniel Ho joins us on RoboPapers to talk about: - why world models are the future for scaling robot learning - how to use world models for robot control - what world models unlock for evaluating robot model performance - how we can hill-climb from here to general purpose robots Watch Episode #61 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now!

RoboPapers

27,567 views • 5 months ago

Robots has a data problem, in that robotics data is rare. While human video is quite common, it’s not usually directly usable for robots for a variety of reasons, most significantly that it’s missing explicit, accurate robot actions. Instead, Jeremy Collins proposes that we predict keypoint trajectories — basically, how any given point in an object will move as a robot performs a task. This lets us use action-free human video to train robot skills. Learn more by watching Episode #37 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now.

Robots has a data problem, in that robotics data is rare. While human video is quite common, it’s not usually directly usable for robots for a variety of reasons, most significantly that it’s missing explicit, accurate robot actions. Instead, Jeremy Collins proposes that we predict keypoint trajectories — basically, how any given point in an object will move as a robot performs a task. This lets us use action-free human video to train robot skills. Learn more by watching Episode #37 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now.

RoboPapers

89,011 views • 8 months ago

Spatial understanding is important to moving around in complex environments and is a huge part of the challenge of generalizing to new scenes. Most world models, however, largely ignore this spatial dimension, focusing on 2D images. Not PointWorld, though. PointWorld is a 3D world model trained from real and simulated data which can perform a wide variety of manipulation tasks on a real robot, including grasping or handling articulated objects, all without any additional fine tuning. Wenlong Huang joins us to tell us more about what makes this work and how it’s different from other world models. Watch Episode #83 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

Spatial understanding is important to moving around in complex environments and is a huge part of the challenge of generalizing to new scenes. Most world models, however, largely ignore this spatial dimension, focusing on 2D images. Not PointWorld, though. PointWorld is a 3D world model trained from real and simulated data which can perform a wide variety of manipulation tasks on a real robot, including grasping or handling articulated objects, all without any additional fine tuning. Wenlong Huang joins us to tell us more about what makes this work and how it’s different from other world models. Watch Episode #83 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

RoboPapers

16,197 views • 1 month ago

Teaching robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks currently requires teleoperation, which limits demonstration quality, speed, and scalability. Instead, why not use human videos? The problem is that a human hand isn’t a robot hand, so data must be retargeted using simulation to resolve issues like collisions and interpenetration when controlling the hand. In VideoManip, Hongyi Chen and co-authors built a system to solve this problem, taking in RGB videos of humans performing manipulation tasks and using them to create accurate simulations with which to learn robot policies. Watch episode #73 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now to learn more!

Teaching robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks currently requires teleoperation, which limits demonstration quality, speed, and scalability. Instead, why not use human videos? The problem is that a human hand isn’t a robot hand, so data must be retargeted using simulation to resolve issues like collisions and interpenetration when controlling the hand. In VideoManip, Hongyi Chen and co-authors built a system to solve this problem, taking in RGB videos of humans performing manipulation tasks and using them to create accurate simulations with which to learn robot policies. Watch episode #73 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now to learn more!

RoboPapers

27,249 views • 2 months ago

Robotics fundamentally involves understanding the dynamics of how things change in the world in response to action and force. This is impossible to learn from static images; instead, it’s far more effective and more data-efficient to learn from video. Elvis Nava joins us to talk about Mimic Robotic. One of the key findings from mimic-video is that pretraining on webscale video allows robots to learn physics priors; as a result, policies train faster, generalize better, and are capable of more impressive dexterity, versus training on static images or image-language pairs as per a VLM. Watch Episode #81 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

Robotics fundamentally involves understanding the dynamics of how things change in the world in response to action and force. This is impossible to learn from static images; instead, it’s far more effective and more data-efficient to learn from video. Elvis Nava joins us to talk about Mimic Robotic. One of the key findings from mimic-video is that pretraining on webscale video allows robots to learn physics priors; as a result, policies train faster, generalize better, and are capable of more impressive dexterity, versus training on static images or image-language pairs as per a VLM. Watch Episode #81 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

RoboPapers

46,190 views • 1 month ago

Evaluating robot policies is hard. Every lab has a different robot; reproducible evaluations are really challenging. This makes it hard for us to know which methods for learning robot policies are likely to perform the best in real-world scenarios. Taking a page from LLM evaluations like Chatbot Arena, RoboArena aims to address this problem through crowdsourcing evaluations with a network of different evaluators. Watch Episode #34 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton , now to learn more from authors Pranav Atreya and Karl Pertsch!

Evaluating robot policies is hard. Every lab has a different robot; reproducible evaluations are really challenging. This makes it hard for us to know which methods for learning robot policies are likely to perform the best in real-world scenarios. Taking a page from LLM evaluations like Chatbot Arena, RoboArena aims to address this problem through crowdsourcing evaluations with a network of different evaluators. Watch Episode #34 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton , now to learn more from authors Pranav Atreya and Karl Pertsch!

RoboPapers

15,056 views • 9 months ago

Humanoid robotics is hitting a data wall. Teleop and mocap took us far, but they don’t scale to every object, terrain, and behavior. We’re releasing GRAIL: — a fully digital pipeline for generating loco-manipulation data before the robot moves. 🧵(1/8)

Humanoid robotics is hitting a data wall. Teleop and mocap took us far, but they don’t scale to every object, terrain, and behavior. We’re releasing GRAIL: — a fully digital pipeline for generating loco-manipulation data before the robot moves. 🧵(1/8)

Ye Yuan

42,970 views • 1 month ago

How can we build a general-purpose “foundation model” for robot motion? Zhengyi “Zen” Luo joins us to talk about SONIC, which uses motion tracking as a foundational task for humanoid robot control, and scales humanoid control training to 9k GPU hours and 100 million frames worth of data. The result: a model with a generally-useful embedding space that can be controlled by a VLA, or from human video, to perform a wide variety of humanoid whole-body-control tasks, including with zero-shot transfer to previously unseen motions. Watch episode 72 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Jiafei Duan, now!

How can we build a general-purpose “foundation model” for robot motion? Zhengyi “Zen” Luo joins us to talk about SONIC, which uses motion tracking as a foundational task for humanoid robot control, and scales humanoid control training to 9k GPU hours and 100 million frames worth of data. The result: a model with a generally-useful embedding space that can be controlled by a VLA, or from human video, to perform a wide variety of humanoid whole-body-control tasks, including with zero-shot transfer to previously unseen motions. Watch episode 72 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Jiafei Duan, now!

RoboPapers

24,802 views • 3 months ago