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Introducing Tether 🪢, a fun little idea to scale data by having our robot “play” in the real world for over 24 hours, throughout the day and overnight—improving policies from zero to mastery with minimal supervision! But play is messy, with out-of-distribution scenarios that are hard to anticipate. To...

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Will Liang

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45,671 views • 5 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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A humanoid robot policy trained solely on synthetic data generated by a world model. Research Scientist Joel Jang presents NVIDIA's DreamGen pipeline: ⦿ Post-train the world model Cosmos-Predict2 with a small set of real teleoperation demos. ⦿ Prompt the world model to generate synthetic video data with verbs and scenarios not used in the world model’s post-training. ⦿ Auto-label synthetic video data with action sequences. ⦿ Train robot policies using only synthetic data. That's it. Deploy zero-shot to a real humanoid robot.
2:05

A humanoid robot policy trained solely on synthetic data generated by a world model. Research Scientist Joel Jang presents NVIDIA's DreamGen pipeline: ⦿ Post-train the world model Cosmos-Predict2 with a small set of real teleoperation demos. ⦿ Prompt the world model to generate synthetic video data with verbs and scenarios not used in the world model’s post-training. ⦿ Auto-label synthetic video data with action sequences. ⦿ Train robot policies using only synthetic data. That's it. Deploy zero-shot to a real humanoid robot.

The Humanoid Hub

20,968 views • 1 year ago

Imitation learning is great, but needs us to have (near) optimal data. We throw away most other data (failures, evaluation data, suboptimal data, undirected play data), even though this data can be really useful and way cheaper! In our new work - RISE, we show a simple way to *use all of this non-optimal data to robustify imitation learning* with minimal requirements beyond BC. Key idea: use non-expert data to learn how to *recover* back to expert data with a minimal frills offline RL that works under sparse data coverage. Allows usage of *all* available data, not just expert data - never throw your data away! Paper: Website: A 🧵(1/10)
0:57

Imitation learning is great, but needs us to have (near) optimal data. We throw away most other data (failures, evaluation data, suboptimal data, undirected play data), even though this data can be really useful and way cheaper! In our new work - RISE, we show a simple way to *use all of this non-optimal data to robustify imitation learning* with minimal requirements beyond BC. Key idea: use non-expert data to learn how to *recover* back to expert data with a minimal frills offline RL that works under sparse data coverage. Allows usage of *all* available data, not just expert data - never throw your data away! Paper: Website: A 🧵(1/10)

Abhishek Gupta

20,619 views • 9 months ago

Amazon is training humanoids to move boxes. Makes sense! OmniRetarget is a data generation engine that enables complex loco-manipulation for humanoids. It uses offline retargeting from human MoCap datasets and augments data from single demos to produce 8 hours of trajectories that train RL policies in simulation, transferred zero-shot to real robots. Amazon FAR is the primary affiliation for the paper:
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Amazon is training humanoids to move boxes. Makes sense! OmniRetarget is a data generation engine that enables complex loco-manipulation for humanoids. It uses offline retargeting from human MoCap datasets and augments data from single demos to produce 8 hours of trajectories that train RL policies in simulation, transferred zero-shot to real robots. Amazon FAR is the primary affiliation for the paper:

The Humanoid Hub

106,447 views • 10 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!
53:45

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

In order for robots to be deployed in the real world, performing tasks of real value, they must be reliable. Unfortunately, even more, most robotic demos work maybe 70-80% of the time at best. The way to get better reliability is to do real-world reinforcement learning: having the robot teach itself how to perform the task up to a high level of success. The key to doing this is to start with a core of expert human data, use that to train a policy then iteratively improve it, until finally finishing with on-policy reinforcement learning. Kun Lei talks through a unified framework for imitation and reinforcement learning based on PPO, which enables this improvement process. In this episode, Kun Lei explains the theory behind his reinforcement learning method and how it allowed his robot to run in a shopping mall juicing oranges for seven hours at a time, among experiments on a wide variety of tasks and embodiments. Watch episode 58 of RoboPapers now, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!
1:11:51

In order for robots to be deployed in the real world, performing tasks of real value, they must be reliable. Unfortunately, even more, most robotic demos work maybe 70-80% of the time at best. The way to get better reliability is to do real-world reinforcement learning: having the robot teach itself how to perform the task up to a high level of success. The key to doing this is to start with a core of expert human data, use that to train a policy then iteratively improve it, until finally finishing with on-policy reinforcement learning. Kun Lei talks through a unified framework for imitation and reinforcement learning based on PPO, which enables this improvement process. In this episode, Kun Lei explains the theory behind his reinforcement learning method and how it allowed his robot to run in a shopping mall juicing oranges for seven hours at a time, among experiments on a wide variety of tasks and embodiments. Watch episode 58 of RoboPapers now, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

RoboPapers

18,813 views • 6 months ago

Over the last few months, we’ve been thinking about how to learn from “off-domain” data - data from non-robot sources like video or simulation. These data sources are not quite good enough to learn policies (even monolithic VLA models) directly, but they still contain lots of information that can be useful for generalizable robot control. How can we develop robot learning models that are able to make use of this type of data for generalizable control? In new work, that we call HAMSTER, we show that VLMs can be useful for enabling robotic learning from off-domain data, but specifically when used through hierarchical VLA architectures. We show that this class of models can learn generalizable robot policies for the real world from large-scale, off-domain data. A 🧵 (1/10)
1:00

Over the last few months, we’ve been thinking about how to learn from “off-domain” data - data from non-robot sources like video or simulation. These data sources are not quite good enough to learn policies (even monolithic VLA models) directly, but they still contain lots of information that can be useful for generalizable robot control. How can we develop robot learning models that are able to make use of this type of data for generalizable control? In new work, that we call HAMSTER, we show that VLMs can be useful for enabling robotic learning from off-domain data, but specifically when used through hierarchical VLA architectures. We show that this class of models can learn generalizable robot policies for the real world from large-scale, off-domain data. A 🧵 (1/10)

Abhishek Gupta

11,994 views • 1 year ago

Experiments in progress. The one on the right has been learning for ~3 hours, the one in the middle for ~1 hour, and the one on the left just started a few minutes ago. The initial motivation for making the physical Atari was just to commit ourselves to a subset of algorithms that can make progress in this setup. This commitment rules out algorithms that require billions of samples to learn (or worse, require multiple environments running in parallel). Atari games are simple enough that we should be able to show learning on them in a short amount of time with no prior knowledge. Since then, I've realized that this setup is also a good way to compare different paradigms in robotics in a principled way. These paradigms are sim2real, learning from tele-operated data, and learning directly on the robots. So far, I have observed that getting sim2real to work reliably is hard. It requires tweaks that don't scale. Policies that can play perfectly in simulation fall apart because of latencies and the messiness of the real world. These aspects could be modeled to improve the simulation, but not without sinking significant human engineering hours. I have higher hopes for learning from tele-operated data, but that requires a human to learn the task first. These experiments are on my to-do list. I have to learn to play some of the games well through the robot. I’m half-decent at playing Pong and Ms Pacman now. Learning directly on robots is looking like the most promising approach. This approach takes away pesky distribution shifts and makes it possible to have algorithms that continually improve with more data and time without any human intervention. It feels great to let experiments run overnight and wake up to find improved policies. With learning on robots, I should, in principle, be able to go on a long vacation and come back to find better policies for complex tasks beyond Atari games. Whether that is possible with current learning algorithms is a different question.
1:05

Experiments in progress. The one on the right has been learning for ~3 hours, the one in the middle for ~1 hour, and the one on the left just started a few minutes ago. The initial motivation for making the physical Atari was just to commit ourselves to a subset of algorithms that can make progress in this setup. This commitment rules out algorithms that require billions of samples to learn (or worse, require multiple environments running in parallel). Atari games are simple enough that we should be able to show learning on them in a short amount of time with no prior knowledge. Since then, I've realized that this setup is also a good way to compare different paradigms in robotics in a principled way. These paradigms are sim2real, learning from tele-operated data, and learning directly on the robots. So far, I have observed that getting sim2real to work reliably is hard. It requires tweaks that don't scale. Policies that can play perfectly in simulation fall apart because of latencies and the messiness of the real world. These aspects could be modeled to improve the simulation, but not without sinking significant human engineering hours. I have higher hopes for learning from tele-operated data, but that requires a human to learn the task first. These experiments are on my to-do list. I have to learn to play some of the games well through the robot. I’m half-decent at playing Pong and Ms Pacman now. Learning directly on robots is looking like the most promising approach. This approach takes away pesky distribution shifts and makes it possible to have algorithms that continually improve with more data and time without any human intervention. It feels great to let experiments run overnight and wake up to find improved policies. With learning on robots, I should, in principle, be able to go on a long vacation and come back to find better policies for complex tasks beyond Atari games. Whether that is possible with current learning algorithms is a different question.

Khurram Javed

52,110 views • 8 months ago

Policies trained on real robot data via imitation can be surprisingly capable. But for domains like dexterous manipulation, they are often not quite good enough: they move slowly, miss grasps, make unreliable contact, and fail under small perturbations. Can we improve them without any additional data collection on the real robot? In SCORE, we show that we can improve real-world diffusion/flow policies cheaply by using simulation to simply learn how to steer them on deployment. This leads to large gains in real-world success and speed across a variety of tasks, without requiring additional real-world experience: 🧵 (1/10)
0:44

Policies trained on real robot data via imitation can be surprisingly capable. But for domains like dexterous manipulation, they are often not quite good enough: they move slowly, miss grasps, make unreliable contact, and fail under small perturbations. Can we improve them without any additional data collection on the real robot? In SCORE, we show that we can improve real-world diffusion/flow policies cheaply by using simulation to simply learn how to steer them on deployment. This leads to large gains in real-world success and speed across a variety of tasks, without requiring additional real-world experience: 🧵 (1/10)

Abhishek Gupta

34,406 views • 1 month ago

In my experience, robot 'generalists' are often jacks of all trades but masters of none. In training across multiple tasks and environments, robot policies fail to generalize robustly and effectively to each particular test setting. What if at test time, we non-parametrically *retrieved* “relevant” data from the training set and used it to significantly improve the performance of few-shot imitation learning to be robust to various test time scenes. Notably, we are *not* collecting lots of new data, just training more on sub-components of the same training data! Now, we’re certainly not the first to suggest retrieval, but in our new work - STRAP, we show how retrieving relevant *sub-trajectories* from offline datasets can significantly increase data reuse across tasks, when paired with an appropriate metric space. A 🧵 (1/7)
0:43

In my experience, robot 'generalists' are often jacks of all trades but masters of none. In training across multiple tasks and environments, robot policies fail to generalize robustly and effectively to each particular test setting. What if at test time, we non-parametrically *retrieved* “relevant” data from the training set and used it to significantly improve the performance of few-shot imitation learning to be robust to various test time scenes. Notably, we are *not* collecting lots of new data, just training more on sub-components of the same training data! Now, we’re certainly not the first to suggest retrieval, but in our new work - STRAP, we show how retrieving relevant *sub-trajectories* from offline datasets can significantly increase data reuse across tasks, when paired with an appropriate metric space. A 🧵 (1/7)

Abhishek Gupta

12,045 views • 1 year ago

A big part of scaling robot learning to solve real-world problems is that we somehow need to get enough diverse, high-quality data to train our robots to perform useful things. GPT and its fellow large language models were bootstrapped and proved out on a massive dataset of real-world language data. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, similarly massive datasets don’t really exist for robotics — so, in our unending pursuit of high-quality, useful data, we turn to simulation. I compared a couple recent works on sim-to-real robot manipulation, which discuss how to train perception-driven manipulation policies in simulation, in such a way that they’re useful in the real world. - DextraH-RGB, from NVIDIA - Sim-and-Real Co-Training: A Simple Recipe for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation, also from NVIDIA — specifically the GEAR lab - Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids, another GEAR lab paper - Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-Horizon Manipulation, from CMU (video from DextrAH-RGB)
0:33

A big part of scaling robot learning to solve real-world problems is that we somehow need to get enough diverse, high-quality data to train our robots to perform useful things. GPT and its fellow large language models were bootstrapped and proved out on a massive dataset of real-world language data. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, similarly massive datasets don’t really exist for robotics — so, in our unending pursuit of high-quality, useful data, we turn to simulation. I compared a couple recent works on sim-to-real robot manipulation, which discuss how to train perception-driven manipulation policies in simulation, in such a way that they’re useful in the real world. - DextraH-RGB, from NVIDIA - Sim-and-Real Co-Training: A Simple Recipe for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation, also from NVIDIA — specifically the GEAR lab - Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids, another GEAR lab paper - Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-Horizon Manipulation, from CMU (video from DextrAH-RGB)

Chris Paxton

20,486 views • 1 year ago

I'm extremely excited to announce that we've successfully inferenced π0.5 on our excavator! We've collected a massive corpus of real-world data with natural language labels from operators in the industry and are using it to create some really cool policies. Here's our first demo of it successfully completing a task with just 200 trajectories. More on the way :) Read our blog post: Physical Intelligence
1:04

I'm extremely excited to announce that we've successfully inferenced π0.5 on our excavator! We've collected a massive corpus of real-world data with natural language labels from operators in the industry and are using it to create some really cool policies. Here's our first demo of it successfully completing a task with just 200 trajectories. More on the way :) Read our blog post: Physical Intelligence

Lane Burgett

121,422 views • 5 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!
46:05

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 • 7 months ago

So we did a bunch of projects with real world reinforcement learning - but it was often too inefficient to be practical to train tabula rasa. This suggests we need better priors, but acquiring these from on-robot data can often be expensive as well. In our recent work, we show that despite being fundamentally inaccurate, simulation can guide provide a cheap way to guide real-world RL finetuning to be super efficient! We propose Simulation-Guided Fine-Tuning (SGFT) - a simple paradigm for sim2real finetuning that uses simulation to provide reward shaping that accelerates real world RL finetuning *beyond* just providing an initialization. TLDR: Use value functions from sim to shape rewards for real-world RL, see large sample efficiency improvements 🧵(1/6)
0:48

So we did a bunch of projects with real world reinforcement learning - but it was often too inefficient to be practical to train tabula rasa. This suggests we need better priors, but acquiring these from on-robot data can often be expensive as well. In our recent work, we show that despite being fundamentally inaccurate, simulation can guide provide a cheap way to guide real-world RL finetuning to be super efficient! We propose Simulation-Guided Fine-Tuning (SGFT) - a simple paradigm for sim2real finetuning that uses simulation to provide reward shaping that accelerates real world RL finetuning *beyond* just providing an initialization. TLDR: Use value functions from sim to shape rewards for real-world RL, see large sample efficiency improvements 🧵(1/6)

Abhishek Gupta

13,637 views • 1 year ago

World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li & SceniX Co-Founder Yunzhu Li on the data bottleneck in robotics and how world models help: "The lack of data in training, the lack of data in evaluation, this is very, very different from language models, where data is abundant on the internet." "And we know that in order for robotics to work, we have to somehow unlock the power of scaling law. But where does that come from?" "It's a profound problem that everybody's battling with in robotics." "We see a lot of unlock in being able to do this whole process through the modeling of the environments." "Being able to create these digital worlds... that's just going to unlock so much more potential for being able to replace all the costly and the unsafe data in the real environments with the data generated from the worlds for robots to be able to do scalable learning and evaluations." Fei-Fei Li Yunzhu Li martin_casado
1:49

World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li & SceniX Co-Founder Yunzhu Li on the data bottleneck in robotics and how world models help: "The lack of data in training, the lack of data in evaluation, this is very, very different from language models, where data is abundant on the internet." "And we know that in order for robotics to work, we have to somehow unlock the power of scaling law. But where does that come from?" "It's a profound problem that everybody's battling with in robotics." "We see a lot of unlock in being able to do this whole process through the modeling of the environments." "Being able to create these digital worlds... that's just going to unlock so much more potential for being able to replace all the costly and the unsafe data in the real environments with the data generated from the worlds for robots to be able to do scalable learning and evaluations." Fei-Fei Li Yunzhu Li martin_casado

a16z

71,652 views • 13 days ago

So I heard we need more data for robot learning :) Purely real world teleop is expensive and slow, making large scale data collection challenging. I’ve been excited about getting more data into robot learning, going beyond just real-world teleop data. To this end, we’ve been scaling up data generation with RL in realistic simulations generated on the fly from crowdsourced videos. Enables realistic data collection, much more cheaply than purely real world teleop. Importantly, data collection becomes even*cheaper* with more environments, allowing training with over 100x more data. Transfers to real robots for generalizable manipulation. A 🧵 (1/N)
0:41

So I heard we need more data for robot learning :) Purely real world teleop is expensive and slow, making large scale data collection challenging. I’ve been excited about getting more data into robot learning, going beyond just real-world teleop data. To this end, we’ve been scaling up data generation with RL in realistic simulations generated on the fly from crowdsourced videos. Enables realistic data collection, much more cheaply than purely real world teleop. Importantly, data collection becomes even*cheaper* with more environments, allowing training with over 100x more data. Transfers to real robots for generalizable manipulation. A 🧵 (1/N)

Abhishek Gupta

13,350 views • 1 year ago

We might be solving the wrong problem in robotics. That’s what this makes clear. UMI → Universal Manipulation Interface A simple $400 gripper that lets you teach robots by demonstration. You hold it like a tool. Show the task. The robot learns. No teleoperation. No expensive hardware. No robot-specific data. Stanford open-sourced everything → hardware, code, datasets. What stands out to me is the bottleneck. Not algorithms. Data. Teleoperation → ~35 demos/hour UMI → ~111 demos/hour And the data transfers across robots → UR5, Franka, others. The design is surprisingly practical: → GoPro fisheye lens (155° FOV) + mirrors for depth → SLAM + IMU for precise 6DoF tracking → latency matching for dynamic tasks → diffusion policies for multimodal actions Then it scales. Cheng Chi takes this further with Sunday Robotics (with Tony Zhao). A $200 glove → deployed in 500+ homes → ~10 million real-world interactions. Not lab data. Real human behavior. Their robot learns dishes, laundry, espresso → with zero robot-specific data. This is where the shift becomes obvious. From training robots in controlled environments → to learning directly from humans at scale So here’s the real question: Will robotics be unlocked by better models… or by unlocking data? #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #AI #Innovation #FutureOfWork
0:20

We might be solving the wrong problem in robotics. That’s what this makes clear. UMI → Universal Manipulation Interface A simple $400 gripper that lets you teach robots by demonstration. You hold it like a tool. Show the task. The robot learns. No teleoperation. No expensive hardware. No robot-specific data. Stanford open-sourced everything → hardware, code, datasets. What stands out to me is the bottleneck. Not algorithms. Data. Teleoperation → ~35 demos/hour UMI → ~111 demos/hour And the data transfers across robots → UR5, Franka, others. The design is surprisingly practical: → GoPro fisheye lens (155° FOV) + mirrors for depth → SLAM + IMU for precise 6DoF tracking → latency matching for dynamic tasks → diffusion policies for multimodal actions Then it scales. Cheng Chi takes this further with Sunday Robotics (with Tony Zhao). A $200 glove → deployed in 500+ homes → ~10 million real-world interactions. Not lab data. Real human behavior. Their robot learns dishes, laundry, espresso → with zero robot-specific data. This is where the shift becomes obvious. From training robots in controlled environments → to learning directly from humans at scale So here’s the real question: Will robotics be unlocked by better models… or by unlocking data? #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #AI #Innovation #FutureOfWork

Pascal Bornet

186,551 views • 4 months ago

I don’t know if we live in a Matrix, but I know for sure that robots will spend most of their lives in simulation. Let machines train machines. I’m excited to introduce DexMimicGen, a massive-scale synthetic data generator that enables a humanoid robot to learn complex skills from only a handful of human demonstrations. Yes, as few as 5! DexMimicGen addresses the biggest pain point in robotics: where do we get data? Unlike with LLMs, where vast amounts of texts are readily available, you cannot simply download motor control signals from the internet. So researchers teleoperate the robots to collect motion data via XR headsets. They have to repeat the same skill over and over and over again, because neural nets are data hungry. This is a very slow and uncomfortable process. At NVIDIA, we believe the majority of high-quality tokens for robot foundation models will come from simulation. What DexMimicGen does is to trade GPU compute time for human time. It takes one motion trajectory from human, and multiplies into 1000s of new trajectories. A robot brain trained on this augmented dataset will generalize far better in the real world. Think of DexMimicGen as a learning signal amplifier. It maps a small dataset to a large (de facto infinite) dataset, using physics simulation in the loop. In this way, we free humans from babysitting the bots all day. The future of robot data is generative. The future of the entire robot learning pipeline will also be generative. 🧵
0:58

I don’t know if we live in a Matrix, but I know for sure that robots will spend most of their lives in simulation. Let machines train machines. I’m excited to introduce DexMimicGen, a massive-scale synthetic data generator that enables a humanoid robot to learn complex skills from only a handful of human demonstrations. Yes, as few as 5! DexMimicGen addresses the biggest pain point in robotics: where do we get data? Unlike with LLMs, where vast amounts of texts are readily available, you cannot simply download motor control signals from the internet. So researchers teleoperate the robots to collect motion data via XR headsets. They have to repeat the same skill over and over and over again, because neural nets are data hungry. This is a very slow and uncomfortable process. At NVIDIA, we believe the majority of high-quality tokens for robot foundation models will come from simulation. What DexMimicGen does is to trade GPU compute time for human time. It takes one motion trajectory from human, and multiplies into 1000s of new trajectories. A robot brain trained on this augmented dataset will generalize far better in the real world. Think of DexMimicGen as a learning signal amplifier. It maps a small dataset to a large (de facto infinite) dataset, using physics simulation in the loop. In this way, we free humans from babysitting the bots all day. The future of robot data is generative. The future of the entire robot learning pipeline will also be generative. 🧵

Jim Fan

165,246 views • 1 year ago

I am happy to be finally able to post what I was able to build over the last few weeks. A full real-time high-frequency state estimation and mapping algorithm completely written line by line from scratch in Rust, which can be used by robots to navigate and reason within the 3D world also in complicated scenarios. TBH this took me longer than expected (which was still super fast :D) but you need to get a lot right: From the sensors over the drivers to their respective estimation pipeline and then fusing everything together - a covariance nightmare - and something that can be refined over years to come (currently using Fisher Information from the real measurements). What you see here is not the output of some structure from motion or Gaussian splatting, these are the points of a tight mesh (high res for the video) that a robot can use in real time to plan a path using any open-source planner. The flight you experience through the world is the actual state estimate of the scanner which is published at IMU rate. Yes, currently we have some artefacts of filtered-out humans (GDPR compliant of course :) ) and moving cars and there is still some calibration that could be improved. Offline refinement with SFM and Gaussian splats is possible as well but currently not on the road map. What is on the road map is an exciting step of now being able to collect data from customers at construction sites and in warehouses (currently handheld in the near future with a robot). This data can then be used by our physical agents to reason within this world and automate any customer’s task related to 3D data. If you have anyone who wastes time manually looking 👀 through 3D data, or cannot collect enough 3D data and interpret: Tell me how to reach them!
1:15

I am happy to be finally able to post what I was able to build over the last few weeks. A full real-time high-frequency state estimation and mapping algorithm completely written line by line from scratch in Rust, which can be used by robots to navigate and reason within the 3D world also in complicated scenarios. TBH this took me longer than expected (which was still super fast :D) but you need to get a lot right: From the sensors over the drivers to their respective estimation pipeline and then fusing everything together - a covariance nightmare - and something that can be refined over years to come (currently using Fisher Information from the real measurements). What you see here is not the output of some structure from motion or Gaussian splatting, these are the points of a tight mesh (high res for the video) that a robot can use in real time to plan a path using any open-source planner. The flight you experience through the world is the actual state estimate of the scanner which is published at IMU rate. Yes, currently we have some artefacts of filtered-out humans (GDPR compliant of course :) ) and moving cars and there is still some calibration that could be improved. Offline refinement with SFM and Gaussian splats is possible as well but currently not on the road map. What is on the road map is an exciting step of now being able to collect data from customers at construction sites and in warehouses (currently handheld in the near future with a robot). This data can then be used by our physical agents to reason within this world and automate any customer’s task related to 3D data. If you have anyone who wastes time manually looking 👀 through 3D data, or cannot collect enough 3D data and interpret: Tell me how to reach them!

Benedikt Seidel

16,656 views • 3 months ago

Exciting updates on Project GR00T! We discover a systematic way to scale up robot data, tackling the most painful pain point in robotics. The idea is simple: human collects demonstration on a real robot, and we multiply that data 1000x or more in simulation. Let’s break it down: 1. We use Apple Vision Pro (yes!!) to give the human operator first person control of the humanoid. Vision Pro parses human hand pose and retargets the motion to the robot hand, all in real time. From the human’s point of view, they are immersed in another body like the Avatar. Teleoperation is slow and time-consuming, but we can afford to collect a small amount of data. 2. We use RoboCasa, a generative simulation framework, to multiply the demonstration data by varying the visual appearance and layout of the environment. In Jensen’s keynote video below, the humanoid is now placing the cup in hundreds of kitchens with a huge diversity of textures, furniture, and object placement. We only have 1 physical kitchen at the GEAR Lab in NVIDIA HQ, but we can conjure up infinite ones in simulation. 3. Finally, we apply MimicGen, a technique to multiply the above data even more by varying the *motion* of the robot. MimicGen generates vast number of new action trajectories based on the original human data, and filters out failed ones (e.g. those that drop the cup) to form a much larger dataset. To sum up, given 1 human trajectory with Vision Pro -> RoboCasa produces N (varying visuals) -> MimicGen further augments to NxM (varying motions). This is the way to trade compute for expensive human data by GPU-accelerated simulation. A while ago, I mentioned that teleoperation is fundamentally not scalable, because we are always limited by 24 hrs/robot/day in the world of atoms. Our new GR00T synthetic data pipeline breaks this barrier in the world of bits. Scaling has been so much fun for LLMs, and it's finally our turn to have fun in robotics! We are building tools to enable everyone in the ecosystem to scale up with us. Links in thread:
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Exciting updates on Project GR00T! We discover a systematic way to scale up robot data, tackling the most painful pain point in robotics. The idea is simple: human collects demonstration on a real robot, and we multiply that data 1000x or more in simulation. Let’s break it down: 1. We use Apple Vision Pro (yes!!) to give the human operator first person control of the humanoid. Vision Pro parses human hand pose and retargets the motion to the robot hand, all in real time. From the human’s point of view, they are immersed in another body like the Avatar. Teleoperation is slow and time-consuming, but we can afford to collect a small amount of data. 2. We use RoboCasa, a generative simulation framework, to multiply the demonstration data by varying the visual appearance and layout of the environment. In Jensen’s keynote video below, the humanoid is now placing the cup in hundreds of kitchens with a huge diversity of textures, furniture, and object placement. We only have 1 physical kitchen at the GEAR Lab in NVIDIA HQ, but we can conjure up infinite ones in simulation. 3. Finally, we apply MimicGen, a technique to multiply the above data even more by varying the *motion* of the robot. MimicGen generates vast number of new action trajectories based on the original human data, and filters out failed ones (e.g. those that drop the cup) to form a much larger dataset. To sum up, given 1 human trajectory with Vision Pro -> RoboCasa produces N (varying visuals) -> MimicGen further augments to NxM (varying motions). This is the way to trade compute for expensive human data by GPU-accelerated simulation. A while ago, I mentioned that teleoperation is fundamentally not scalable, because we are always limited by 24 hrs/robot/day in the world of atoms. Our new GR00T synthetic data pipeline breaks this barrier in the world of bits. Scaling has been so much fun for LLMs, and it's finally our turn to have fun in robotics! We are building tools to enable everyone in the ecosystem to scale up with us. Links in thread:

Jim Fan

364,514 views • 2 years ago