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Meta just open-sourced its dexterity stack! 🪬 Most physics simulators were built for things that move through space. Walking robots, drones, cars. Contact is the part they approximate worst, and obviously dexterous manipulation is nothing but contact. Project SuperDex, from Meta Reality Labs Research, is built the other way...

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Lukas Ziegler

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41,086 views • 1 day ago •via X (Twitter)

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Open-source dexterous hands with fingertip sensors! 🪬 ORCA Dexterity just released three dexterous hand models. Their mission: is to democratize robotic hand dexterity. They're sharing progress on exceptional, low-cost hardware and a software layer from low-level control to robotic hand learning. This is the open-source approach to dexterous manipulation. It has 83 taxels per finger with 0.1 N force detection which pretty is impressive for an open-source design. Tactile sensing is critical for dexterous manipulation, knowing contact forces enables gentle grasping, slip detection, and force-controlled assembly. Also 700g weight for the lite version makes it practical for mounting on robot arms without exceeding payload limits. Lower weight means faster movements and lower torque requirements. Open hardware accelerates robotics by letting researchers and builders modify designs for their specific needs without starting from scratch! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
0:20

Open-source dexterous hands with fingertip sensors! 🪬 ORCA Dexterity just released three dexterous hand models. Their mission: is to democratize robotic hand dexterity. They're sharing progress on exceptional, low-cost hardware and a software layer from low-level control to robotic hand learning. This is the open-source approach to dexterous manipulation. It has 83 taxels per finger with 0.1 N force detection which pretty is impressive for an open-source design. Tactile sensing is critical for dexterous manipulation, knowing contact forces enables gentle grasping, slip detection, and force-controlled assembly. Also 700g weight for the lite version makes it practical for mounting on robot arms without exceeding payload limits. Lower weight means faster movements and lower torque requirements. Open hardware accelerates robotics by letting researchers and builders modify designs for their specific needs without starting from scratch! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

38,094 views • 5 months ago

A policy that teaches robot hands to touch things the way humans do... not just grab and move, but feel and adjust in real time. Robot manipulation research often stops at picking up objects and placing them. CGP goes further: it handles tasks like opening jars, flipping objects in-hand, wiping dishes, and grasping fragile eggs, the kind of dexterous, contact-rich skills that require constant micro-adjustments based on what the fingers are actually feeling. The robot doesn't just see what it's doing; it predicts what contact should feel like at each step, then checks whether reality matches the prediction. If a finger is slipping, the policy knows before the object drops. Works on real robot hands (both 4-finger and 5-finger designs) with tactile sensors embedded in the fingertips Robust to visual distractions! The robot keeps flipping a box correctly even when the camera view is disrupted, because it's grounding decisions in touch, not just vision. Baseline policies without contact grounding fail in predictable ways: slipping mid-task, incomplete motions, loss of grasp, CGP avoids these This is a meaningful step toward robots that can handle the physical world with the kind of reliable, adaptive grip that humans take for granted. Relevant for manufacturing, logistics, assistive robotics, and anywhere fragile or irregular objects need to be handled carefully. Published at RSS 2026, developed with Meta Reality Labs Research. Thanks for sharing, Zhengtong Xu / Zhengtong Xu ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:
0:36

A policy that teaches robot hands to touch things the way humans do... not just grab and move, but feel and adjust in real time. Robot manipulation research often stops at picking up objects and placing them. CGP goes further: it handles tasks like opening jars, flipping objects in-hand, wiping dishes, and grasping fragile eggs, the kind of dexterous, contact-rich skills that require constant micro-adjustments based on what the fingers are actually feeling. The robot doesn't just see what it's doing; it predicts what contact should feel like at each step, then checks whether reality matches the prediction. If a finger is slipping, the policy knows before the object drops. Works on real robot hands (both 4-finger and 5-finger designs) with tactile sensors embedded in the fingertips Robust to visual distractions! The robot keeps flipping a box correctly even when the camera view is disrupted, because it's grounding decisions in touch, not just vision. Baseline policies without contact grounding fail in predictable ways: slipping mid-task, incomplete motions, loss of grasp, CGP avoids these This is a meaningful step toward robots that can handle the physical world with the kind of reliable, adaptive grip that humans take for granted. Relevant for manufacturing, logistics, assistive robotics, and anywhere fragile or irregular objects need to be handled carefully. Published at RSS 2026, developed with Meta Reality Labs Research. Thanks for sharing, Zhengtong Xu / Zhengtong Xu ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Ilir Aliu

12,769 views • 2 months ago

That's sick! 🤯 Genesis AI simulates robots playing yo-yo! 🪀 Genesis AI just open-sourced Genesis World 1.0, and it might be one of the most important infrastructure releases in robotics this year. Robotics is still bottlenecked by the 1× speed of the physical world. Every model needs to be tested on real hardware, slowly, expensively, with limited coverage. Genesis World 1.0 from Genesis AI flips that equation: One hour in reality becomes 100 days in simulation. That turns a wall-clock bottleneck into a compute problem. And compute problems are solvable. The technical stack they rebuilt from scratch is serious: → GPU-accelerated cross-platform compiler via Quadrants, 10x faster launch time and up to 4.6x runtime vs the initial Genesis release → Penetration-free multi-physics contact solvers, the thing that makes simulation actually trustworthy → Unified rigid AND deformable physics in a single engine → Nyx, a high-performance path-traced rendering engine purpose-built for physical AI The sim-to-real gap has historically been the graveyard of robotics research. Policies that work beautifully in simulation fall apart on real hardware. Genesis World 1.0 is a direct attack on that problem. And it's fully open-source. The companies that master simulation infrastructure will train better robots faster than anyone else. Find it here: Genesis World 1.0: Quadrants: Nyx: Theophile Gervet, Zhou Xian congrats! 👏🏼 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
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That's sick! 🤯 Genesis AI simulates robots playing yo-yo! 🪀 Genesis AI just open-sourced Genesis World 1.0, and it might be one of the most important infrastructure releases in robotics this year. Robotics is still bottlenecked by the 1× speed of the physical world. Every model needs to be tested on real hardware, slowly, expensively, with limited coverage. Genesis World 1.0 from Genesis AI flips that equation: One hour in reality becomes 100 days in simulation. That turns a wall-clock bottleneck into a compute problem. And compute problems are solvable. The technical stack they rebuilt from scratch is serious: → GPU-accelerated cross-platform compiler via Quadrants, 10x faster launch time and up to 4.6x runtime vs the initial Genesis release → Penetration-free multi-physics contact solvers, the thing that makes simulation actually trustworthy → Unified rigid AND deformable physics in a single engine → Nyx, a high-performance path-traced rendering engine purpose-built for physical AI The sim-to-real gap has historically been the graveyard of robotics research. Policies that work beautifully in simulation fall apart on real hardware. Genesis World 1.0 is a direct attack on that problem. And it's fully open-source. The companies that master simulation infrastructure will train better robots faster than anyone else. Find it here: Genesis World 1.0: Quadrants: Nyx: Theophile Gervet, Zhou Xian congrats! 👏🏼 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

57,061 views • 3 months ago

Turning video into humanoid robot motion! 🤳🏼 Training humanoid robots needs huge amounts of motion data, but real-world capture doesn’t scale. Mocap is expensive, dangerous edge cases are rare, and you can’t ask humans to repeatedly fall or crash. Video2Robot tackles this by converting videos into physics-grounded humanoid simulations. Motion is generated to respect balance, inertia, ground contact, and joint limits, then directly retargeted to robot simulators. One prompt can generate a full humanoid motion sequence, including multi-agent interactions and failure cases like falls or collisions, scenarios that are hard or impossible to capture safely in the real world. The pipeline is model-agnostic and works with existing video generators, making it a practical way to scale data for robots. If robots are going to operate in the real world, they need to be trained on the failures too, not just the perfect demos. Here's the GitHub: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
0:26

Turning video into humanoid robot motion! 🤳🏼 Training humanoid robots needs huge amounts of motion data, but real-world capture doesn’t scale. Mocap is expensive, dangerous edge cases are rare, and you can’t ask humans to repeatedly fall or crash. Video2Robot tackles this by converting videos into physics-grounded humanoid simulations. Motion is generated to respect balance, inertia, ground contact, and joint limits, then directly retargeted to robot simulators. One prompt can generate a full humanoid motion sequence, including multi-agent interactions and failure cases like falls or collisions, scenarios that are hard or impossible to capture safely in the real world. The pipeline is model-agnostic and works with existing video generators, making it a practical way to scale data for robots. If robots are going to operate in the real world, they need to be trained on the failures too, not just the perfect demos. Here's the GitHub: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

59,835 views • 8 months ago

We are back again :) After three weeks of quiet building. Introducing Genesis World 1.0, our latest simulation platform, the second release in our full-stack suite. Open-sourced. Robotics is still bottlenecked by the 1× speed of the physical world. Every model, checkpoint, and data recipe eventually needs to be tested on physical hardware, slowly, expensively, and with limited coverage. One hour in reality can become 100 days in simulation. That is how robotics model iteration moves from a wall-clock bottleneck to a compute problem. To make this work, simulation has to be both fast and trustworthy. Over the past year, we rebuilt the entire stack: a GPU-accelerated cross-platform compiler, penetration-free multi-physics contact solvers, unified rigid and deformable physics, and a photo-realistic renderer purpose-built for physical AI applications. We built Nyx, a high-performance path-traced rendering engine for robotics application. Genesis World 1.0 achieves near realtime performance with our latest development for penetration-free IPC solver, supporting various types of deformables beyond rigid bodies. It supports contact-rich, dexterous manipulation simulation across different embodiments: unitree, sharpa, wuji, genesis hand and various types of grippers. Under the hood is Quadrants, our effort in pushing forward cross-platform GPU-accelerated computation. Quadrants started as a fork of Taichi, and we rebuilt most of the critical parts for optimizing simulation workloads, giving 10x faster launch time and up to 4.6x runtime performance compared to the initial Genesis release. Together, they bring us to an unprecedentedly low sim-to-real gap, enabling zero-shot real-to-sim model evaluation and much faster iteration of GENE. All available today. Genesis World 1.0: Quadrants: Nyx:
2:51

We are back again :) After three weeks of quiet building. Introducing Genesis World 1.0, our latest simulation platform, the second release in our full-stack suite. Open-sourced. Robotics is still bottlenecked by the 1× speed of the physical world. Every model, checkpoint, and data recipe eventually needs to be tested on physical hardware, slowly, expensively, and with limited coverage. One hour in reality can become 100 days in simulation. That is how robotics model iteration moves from a wall-clock bottleneck to a compute problem. To make this work, simulation has to be both fast and trustworthy. Over the past year, we rebuilt the entire stack: a GPU-accelerated cross-platform compiler, penetration-free multi-physics contact solvers, unified rigid and deformable physics, and a photo-realistic renderer purpose-built for physical AI applications. We built Nyx, a high-performance path-traced rendering engine for robotics application. Genesis World 1.0 achieves near realtime performance with our latest development for penetration-free IPC solver, supporting various types of deformables beyond rigid bodies. It supports contact-rich, dexterous manipulation simulation across different embodiments: unitree, sharpa, wuji, genesis hand and various types of grippers. Under the hood is Quadrants, our effort in pushing forward cross-platform GPU-accelerated computation. Quadrants started as a fork of Taichi, and we rebuilt most of the critical parts for optimizing simulation workloads, giving 10x faster launch time and up to 4.6x runtime performance compared to the initial Genesis release. Together, they bring us to an unprecedentedly low sim-to-real gap, enabling zero-shot real-to-sim model evaluation and much faster iteration of GENE. All available today. Genesis World 1.0: Quadrants: Nyx:

Genesis AI

315,468 views • 3 months ago

Robots might learn better from video than from language! 📼 Most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models learn what to do from text, but still struggle with how things move in the real world. That makes them data-hungry and slow to train. mimic video takes a different route. Instead of grounding robot control in text, it grounds it in video, using large pre-trained video models that already capture physical motion and dynamics. The idea is straightforward: let the video model handle “what will happen next,” and let a smaller control model focus only on turning that visual plan into robot actions. The result is big gains in practice. Robots trained this way need 10× less data, converge twice as fast, and perform better on both simulated benchmarks and real bimanual manipulation tasks. If robots can “imagine” motion using video, control becomes a much simpler problem. Shoutout to Jonas Pai, Liam Achenbach, Oier Mees, Elvis Nava and the rest of the team! Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
0:47

Robots might learn better from video than from language! 📼 Most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models learn what to do from text, but still struggle with how things move in the real world. That makes them data-hungry and slow to train. mimic video takes a different route. Instead of grounding robot control in text, it grounds it in video, using large pre-trained video models that already capture physical motion and dynamics. The idea is straightforward: let the video model handle “what will happen next,” and let a smaller control model focus only on turning that visual plan into robot actions. The result is big gains in practice. Robots trained this way need 10× less data, converge twice as fast, and perform better on both simulated benchmarks and real bimanual manipulation tasks. If robots can “imagine” motion using video, control becomes a much simpler problem. Shoutout to Jonas Pai, Liam Achenbach, Oier Mees, Elvis Nava and the rest of the team! Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

50,090 views • 8 months ago

Feeling what a robot feels is becoming real! 🫰 Fluid Reality just ran its first full end-to-end touch teleoperation system, and the demo shows why high-resolution haptics might be the missing piece in robot control. A 22 mm fingertip display with 32 independently actuated “bubbles” was mapped directly to tactile sensors on a robot hand. 🫧 Three fingers streamed real-time touch data robot → human, giving the operator actual contact feedback instead of waving their hands blind, like most teleop systems today. It’s still early, but this is a real step toward dexterous ops and high-quality data for training Physical AI systems. Companies involved: Samsung Electronics, Alt-Bionics, Inc. (the robot hand), MANUS™ (hand tracking), and Sensible Robotics (fingertip sensors) Touch isn’t a nice-to-have in robotics. It’s the difference between manipulation that works in the real world P.S. Guess how many touch receptors we humans, have in our hand! :) ~~ ♻ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
1:23

Feeling what a robot feels is becoming real! 🫰 Fluid Reality just ran its first full end-to-end touch teleoperation system, and the demo shows why high-resolution haptics might be the missing piece in robot control. A 22 mm fingertip display with 32 independently actuated “bubbles” was mapped directly to tactile sensors on a robot hand. 🫧 Three fingers streamed real-time touch data robot → human, giving the operator actual contact feedback instead of waving their hands blind, like most teleop systems today. It’s still early, but this is a real step toward dexterous ops and high-quality data for training Physical AI systems. Companies involved: Samsung Electronics, Alt-Bionics, Inc. (the robot hand), MANUS™ (hand tracking), and Sensible Robotics (fingertip sensors) Touch isn’t a nice-to-have in robotics. It’s the difference between manipulation that works in the real world P.S. Guess how many touch receptors we humans, have in our hand! :) ~~ ♻ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

46,927 views • 8 months ago

Today at Meta FAIR we’re announcing three new cutting-edge developments in robotics and touch perception — and releasing a collection of artifacts to empower the community to build on this work. Details on all of this new work ➡️ 1️⃣ Meta Sparsh is the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing that works across many tactile sensors and many tasks. Trained on 460K+ tactile images using self-supervised learning. 2️⃣ Meta Digit 360 is a breakthrough artificial fingertip-based tactile sensor, equipped with 18+ sensing features to deliver detailed touch data with human-level precision and touch-sensing capabilities. 3️⃣ Meta Digit Plexus is a standardized platform for robotic sensor connections and interactions. It provides a hardware-software solution to integrate tactile sensors on a single robot hand and enables seamless data collection, control and analysis over a single cable. The potential impact of expanding capabilities and components like these for the open source community ranges from medical research to supply chain, manufacturing and much more. We’re excited to continue this work with the broader community.
2:35

Today at Meta FAIR we’re announcing three new cutting-edge developments in robotics and touch perception — and releasing a collection of artifacts to empower the community to build on this work. Details on all of this new work ➡️ 1️⃣ Meta Sparsh is the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing that works across many tactile sensors and many tasks. Trained on 460K+ tactile images using self-supervised learning. 2️⃣ Meta Digit 360 is a breakthrough artificial fingertip-based tactile sensor, equipped with 18+ sensing features to deliver detailed touch data with human-level precision and touch-sensing capabilities. 3️⃣ Meta Digit Plexus is a standardized platform for robotic sensor connections and interactions. It provides a hardware-software solution to integrate tactile sensors on a single robot hand and enables seamless data collection, control and analysis over a single cable. The potential impact of expanding capabilities and components like these for the open source community ranges from medical research to supply chain, manufacturing and much more. We’re excited to continue this work with the broader community.

AI at Meta

453,343 views • 1 year ago

THIS GUY BUILT REAL FLYING SWORD DRONES AND CONTROLS THEM WITH HAND GESTURES fan shisan is a physics student in chengdu who coded and built flying drones shaped like actual swords he controls them entirely with hand gestures. no controller or a phone. just his hands wave your hand and the sword follows. point and it flies where you direct it. multiple swords in the air at the same time responding to different gestures he built the gesture recognition system HIMSELF and coded the flight control algorithms. designed the drone hardware in the shape of swords. the gesture tracking uses sensors that read the position and movement of his hands in real time and translate them into flight commands for each drone independently he even built one large enough to ride on a physics student with coding skills just brought something straight out of a kung fu movie into the real world the line between science fiction and side projects is getting thinner every month
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THIS GUY BUILT REAL FLYING SWORD DRONES AND CONTROLS THEM WITH HAND GESTURES fan shisan is a physics student in chengdu who coded and built flying drones shaped like actual swords he controls them entirely with hand gestures. no controller or a phone. just his hands wave your hand and the sword follows. point and it flies where you direct it. multiple swords in the air at the same time responding to different gestures he built the gesture recognition system HIMSELF and coded the flight control algorithms. designed the drone hardware in the shape of swords. the gesture tracking uses sensors that read the position and movement of his hands in real time and translate them into flight commands for each drone independently he even built one large enough to ride on a physics student with coding skills just brought something straight out of a kung fu movie into the real world the line between science fiction and side projects is getting thinner every month

Om Patel

307,609 views • 3 months ago

Force-sensing fingers! 🧤 Stanford researchers just released UMI-FT, a handheld data collection platform that puts compact six-axis force/torque sensors on each finger, enabling finger-level wrench measurements alongside RGB, depth, and pose data. Many manipulation tasks require careful force modulation: too little force and the task fails, too much and you cause damage. But commercial force/torque sensors are expensive, bulky, and fragile, which has limited large-scale force-aware policy learning. UMI-FT changes the economics. The platform uses an iPhone for RGB vision, ultrawide RGB, depth, and pose via ARKit, with each finger sensorized using a CoinFT sensor to capture per-finger wrench information during manipulation. This multimodal data trains an adaptive compliance policy that predicts position targets, grasp force, and stiffness for execution on standard compliance controllers. The learned policy runs slowest and generates reference targets, while model-based compliance and force controllers provide delicate 6D compliance control and real-time force modulation. They tested on three contact-rich, force-sensitive tasks: whiteboard wiping (locate eraser, grasp, wipe until clean), skewering zucchini (grasp slice firmly, push onto stick until punctured), and lightbulb insertion (grasp bulb, align bayonet pin with socket slit, insert while overcoming spring force, rotate to light up). The results are clear. Policies without compliance struggle to modulate contact force and trigger safety faults from excessive force. Policies without force sensing fail to grasp unseen objects or resist reaction forces, causing slippage. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
0:29

Force-sensing fingers! 🧤 Stanford researchers just released UMI-FT, a handheld data collection platform that puts compact six-axis force/torque sensors on each finger, enabling finger-level wrench measurements alongside RGB, depth, and pose data. Many manipulation tasks require careful force modulation: too little force and the task fails, too much and you cause damage. But commercial force/torque sensors are expensive, bulky, and fragile, which has limited large-scale force-aware policy learning. UMI-FT changes the economics. The platform uses an iPhone for RGB vision, ultrawide RGB, depth, and pose via ARKit, with each finger sensorized using a CoinFT sensor to capture per-finger wrench information during manipulation. This multimodal data trains an adaptive compliance policy that predicts position targets, grasp force, and stiffness for execution on standard compliance controllers. The learned policy runs slowest and generates reference targets, while model-based compliance and force controllers provide delicate 6D compliance control and real-time force modulation. They tested on three contact-rich, force-sensitive tasks: whiteboard wiping (locate eraser, grasp, wipe until clean), skewering zucchini (grasp slice firmly, push onto stick until punctured), and lightbulb insertion (grasp bulb, align bayonet pin with socket slit, insert while overcoming spring force, rotate to light up). The results are clear. Policies without compliance struggle to modulate contact force and trigger safety faults from excessive force. Policies without force sensing fail to grasp unseen objects or resist reaction forces, causing slippage. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

12,822 views • 7 months ago

We RL'ed humanoid robots to Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, and Kobe Byrant! These are neural nets running on real hardware at our GEAR lab. Most robot demos you see online speed videos up. We actually *slow them down* so you can enjoy the fluid motions. I'm excited to announce "ASAP", a "real2sim2real" model that masters extremely smooth and dynamic motions for humanoid whole body control. We pretrain the robot in simulation first, but there is a notorious "sim2real" gap: it's very difficult for hand-engineered physics equations to match real world dynamics. Our fix is simple: just deploy a pretrained policy on real hardware, collect data, and replay the motion in sim. The replay will obviously have many errors, but that gives a rich signal to compensate for the physics discrepancy. Use another neural net to learn the delta. Basically, we "patch up" a traditional physics engine, so that the robot can experience almost the real world at scale in GPUs. The future is hybrid simulation: combine the power of classical sim engines refined over decades and the uncanny ability of modern NNs to capture a messy world.
0:50

We RL'ed humanoid robots to Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, and Kobe Byrant! These are neural nets running on real hardware at our GEAR lab. Most robot demos you see online speed videos up. We actually *slow them down* so you can enjoy the fluid motions. I'm excited to announce "ASAP", a "real2sim2real" model that masters extremely smooth and dynamic motions for humanoid whole body control. We pretrain the robot in simulation first, but there is a notorious "sim2real" gap: it's very difficult for hand-engineered physics equations to match real world dynamics. Our fix is simple: just deploy a pretrained policy on real hardware, collect data, and replay the motion in sim. The replay will obviously have many errors, but that gives a rich signal to compensate for the physics discrepancy. Use another neural net to learn the delta. Basically, we "patch up" a traditional physics engine, so that the robot can experience almost the real world at scale in GPUs. The future is hybrid simulation: combine the power of classical sim engines refined over decades and the uncanny ability of modern NNs to capture a messy world.

Jim Fan

566,544 views • 1 year ago

Tired of teleoperation? One human video → 1,000s of robot demos. (📍GitHub ) Scaling Robot Data Without Dynamics Simulation or Robot Hardware Real2Render2Real (R2R2R) is a new way to scale robot data without physics simulation or hardware. You take a phone scan + a single monocular human demo. It tracks the motion, renders photorealistic scenes, and generates diverse, robot-agnostic trajectories ready for training. > No teleop, no sim, no robot, just a phone and a video > Train VLA models and diffusion policies directly on the output > Supports multiple robot embodiments with kinematic consistency > 1000s of demos in 1/27 the time of real-world collection Thank you, Max Fu, for sharing!! Project: Paper: Code coming soon: It shows that with the right pipeline, you can scale robot learning data without touching a robot. One of the most interesting directions in scalable robotics today. —— Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:
0:29

Tired of teleoperation? One human video → 1,000s of robot demos. (📍GitHub ) Scaling Robot Data Without Dynamics Simulation or Robot Hardware Real2Render2Real (R2R2R) is a new way to scale robot data without physics simulation or hardware. You take a phone scan + a single monocular human demo. It tracks the motion, renders photorealistic scenes, and generates diverse, robot-agnostic trajectories ready for training. > No teleop, no sim, no robot, just a phone and a video > Train VLA models and diffusion policies directly on the output > Supports multiple robot embodiments with kinematic consistency > 1000s of demos in 1/27 the time of real-world collection Thank you, Max Fu, for sharing!! Project: Paper: Code coming soon: It shows that with the right pipeline, you can scale robot learning data without touching a robot. One of the most interesting directions in scalable robotics today. —— Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Ilir Aliu

42,864 views • 6 months ago

Carlos to Dazn about Liam and the penalty “The liam incident has cost me 10 points today, a possible p5 for the team, is the 4th or 5th time it has happened this season” “You can imagine my frustration, there are pilots which you can drive on parallel on a curve.. a race move i've done for years with checo, fernando, gasly, verstappen, leclerc, piastri.. for some reason we has contact with liam, is not the first time someone on the grid has had contact with liam, it is what it is" "The penalty is incomprehensible, i saw the replay and now i'm going to the stewards so someone can explain to me, as this not only concerns me but it concerts the sport” “The driver from the outside is just a passenger to what the driver in the inside decides to do, leaving you no room and on top of that touching you and on top of that the driver on the outside gets a 10s penalty?? is unheard of and it doesn't make sense” #DutchGP
2:27

Carlos to Dazn about Liam and the penalty “The liam incident has cost me 10 points today, a possible p5 for the team, is the 4th or 5th time it has happened this season” “You can imagine my frustration, there are pilots which you can drive on parallel on a curve.. a race move i've done for years with checo, fernando, gasly, verstappen, leclerc, piastri.. for some reason we has contact with liam, is not the first time someone on the grid has had contact with liam, it is what it is" "The penalty is incomprehensible, i saw the replay and now i'm going to the stewards so someone can explain to me, as this not only concerns me but it concerts the sport” “The driver from the outside is just a passenger to what the driver in the inside decides to do, leaving you no room and on top of that touching you and on top of that the driver on the outside gets a 10s penalty?? is unheard of and it doesn't make sense” #DutchGP

ari

240,386 views • 1 year ago

The sense of touch is the most criminally under-explored modality in robotics. Imagine doing sleight of hand wearing thick oven mitts. That's exactly how a robot feels today if it were alive. A magnetic piece snapping into place, a paper cup peeling out of a stack, a USB negotiating its way into the port - all invisible to the camera. Learning how to feel must be a full-stack co-designed effort. We are open-sourcing a principled methodology called "T-Rex": 1. Tactile as first-class citizen of the model. Our mixture-of-transformer runs two clocks asynchronously: a slow visuomotor expert plans the motion, and a fast tactile expert refines it in real time with high-frequency corrections at 4 "touch ticks" per vision tick. Forces change faster than frames arrive, so the architecture had to as well. 2. Open data. The largest tactile dataset ever released to our knowledge: a 50-hour (~5,500 episodes) high-quality, carefully synchronized robot play corpus, collected on SOTA tactile hand hardware with 22 degrees of freedom. Available today on HuggingFace! 3. Training recipe: T-Rex extends our prior work, EgoScale. Human egocentric videos for pretraining, a diverse dose of tactile robot play for mid-training. Our experiments show this bridges contact-free pretraining to contact-rich manipulation remarkably well. Pixels are cheap and everywhere, but they run out of steam at the moment of contact. Tactile will carry the last mile. The next scaling curve will be measured in hours of touch. T-Rex is a great collaboration between NVIDIA and Berkeley: 🧵
2:21

The sense of touch is the most criminally under-explored modality in robotics. Imagine doing sleight of hand wearing thick oven mitts. That's exactly how a robot feels today if it were alive. A magnetic piece snapping into place, a paper cup peeling out of a stack, a USB negotiating its way into the port - all invisible to the camera. Learning how to feel must be a full-stack co-designed effort. We are open-sourcing a principled methodology called "T-Rex": 1. Tactile as first-class citizen of the model. Our mixture-of-transformer runs two clocks asynchronously: a slow visuomotor expert plans the motion, and a fast tactile expert refines it in real time with high-frequency corrections at 4 "touch ticks" per vision tick. Forces change faster than frames arrive, so the architecture had to as well. 2. Open data. The largest tactile dataset ever released to our knowledge: a 50-hour (~5,500 episodes) high-quality, carefully synchronized robot play corpus, collected on SOTA tactile hand hardware with 22 degrees of freedom. Available today on HuggingFace! 3. Training recipe: T-Rex extends our prior work, EgoScale. Human egocentric videos for pretraining, a diverse dose of tactile robot play for mid-training. Our experiments show this bridges contact-free pretraining to contact-rich manipulation remarkably well. Pixels are cheap and everywhere, but they run out of steam at the moment of contact. Tactile will carry the last mile. The next scaling curve will be measured in hours of touch. T-Rex is a great collaboration between NVIDIA and Berkeley: 🧵

Jim Fan

162,352 views • 7 days ago

15–30 minutes of real-world robot data. That's now enough to go from sim-to-real failure to working robot. Let’s see… You train a robot in simulation. You deploy it in the real world. It fails. The physics don't match. So you try to fine-tune it with real data, but… you never have enough real data, and the fine-tuning breaks everything the simulation taught it. SimDist fixes this with one key decision: don't transfer the policy. Transfer the world model. Keep the reward and value knowledge from simulation frozen. Only update the part that's actually wrong, how the robot predicts physics. Now the robot doesn't have to relearn the entire task in the real world. It already knows what success looks like. It just needs to correct its understanding of how the real world moves. The part that makes this work: they also trained on failures and recoveries; not just perfect demonstrations. Without that, the planner finds the gaps and exploits them. With it, the robot can tell a good future from a bad one. That's all it needs. Results on peg insertion, table leg assembly, locomotion on slippery and uneven surfaces. Tasks that require precision, force, and quick reaction. Thanks for sharing, Tyler Westenbroek ([Tyler Westenbroek]. Interactive visualization + paper: ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:
0:41

15–30 minutes of real-world robot data. That's now enough to go from sim-to-real failure to working robot. Let’s see… You train a robot in simulation. You deploy it in the real world. It fails. The physics don't match. So you try to fine-tune it with real data, but… you never have enough real data, and the fine-tuning breaks everything the simulation taught it. SimDist fixes this with one key decision: don't transfer the policy. Transfer the world model. Keep the reward and value knowledge from simulation frozen. Only update the part that's actually wrong, how the robot predicts physics. Now the robot doesn't have to relearn the entire task in the real world. It already knows what success looks like. It just needs to correct its understanding of how the real world moves. The part that makes this work: they also trained on failures and recoveries; not just perfect demonstrations. Without that, the planner finds the gaps and exploits them. With it, the robot can tell a good future from a bad one. That's all it needs. Results on peg insertion, table leg assembly, locomotion on slippery and uneven surfaces. Tasks that require precision, force, and quick reaction. Thanks for sharing, Tyler Westenbroek ([Tyler Westenbroek]. Interactive visualization + paper: ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Ilir Aliu

14,222 views • 3 months ago

Bridgit Mendler on how Northwood is fixing the space economy's ground infrastructure problem: "The problem that we're solving is for every satellite, it requires a connection point back to Earth so that they can control the spacecraft." "That point of contact on Earth is called the ground infrastructure." "If you don't have it, you don't have a space mission." "It literally is just like a rock in space you're doing nothing with." "There was this whole boom around spacecraft manufacturing." "And interestingly what started becoming the longest pole in the tent was just getting the point of contact on the ground to connect with." "You could build a satellite and launch it faster than you could actually connect with it from the ground." "Which just seemed absurd." Bridgit Mendler with Erik Torenberg
1:42

Bridgit Mendler on how Northwood is fixing the space economy's ground infrastructure problem: "The problem that we're solving is for every satellite, it requires a connection point back to Earth so that they can control the spacecraft." "That point of contact on Earth is called the ground infrastructure." "If you don't have it, you don't have a space mission." "It literally is just like a rock in space you're doing nothing with." "There was this whole boom around spacecraft manufacturing." "And interestingly what started becoming the longest pole in the tent was just getting the point of contact on the ground to connect with." "You could build a satellite and launch it faster than you could actually connect with it from the ground." "Which just seemed absurd." Bridgit Mendler with Erik Torenberg

a16z

13,444 views • 5 months ago

Build a humanoid robot yourself! 🪚 OpenArm is an open-source humanoid robot. It comes with full CAD, control code, firmware, and simulation tools, everything needed to build, modify, and operate it. The arms are designed to be compliant and backdrivable. Teleoperation is supported, with force feedback and real-time gravity compensation so operators can guide the arm naturally. Super important, on the simulation side, OpenArm works with platforms like MuJoCo and Isaac Sim, letting developers test policies in virtual environments before running on hardware. Assemble it yourself from a kit or get it prebuilt, the goal is accessibility for research labs, small teams, and enthusiasts. The project is run by Enactic in Tokyo, Japan, and aims to lower the barrier for experimenting with dexterous manipulation. Let's put robotics in mainstream! 🔥🔥 P.S. I put the project page in the comments!
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Build a humanoid robot yourself! 🪚 OpenArm is an open-source humanoid robot. It comes with full CAD, control code, firmware, and simulation tools, everything needed to build, modify, and operate it. The arms are designed to be compliant and backdrivable. Teleoperation is supported, with force feedback and real-time gravity compensation so operators can guide the arm naturally. Super important, on the simulation side, OpenArm works with platforms like MuJoCo and Isaac Sim, letting developers test policies in virtual environments before running on hardware. Assemble it yourself from a kit or get it prebuilt, the goal is accessibility for research labs, small teams, and enthusiasts. The project is run by Enactic in Tokyo, Japan, and aims to lower the barrier for experimenting with dexterous manipulation. Let's put robotics in mainstream! 🔥🔥 P.S. I put the project page in the comments!

Lukas Ziegler

233,153 views • 10 months ago

Everything you love about generative models — now powered by real physics! Announcing the Genesis project — after a 24-month large-scale research collaboration involving over 20 research labs — a generative physics engine able to generate 4D dynamical worlds powered by a physics simulation platform designed for general-purpose robotics and physical AI applications. Genesis's physics engine is developed in pure Python, while being 10-80x faster than existing GPU-accelerated stacks like Isaac Gym and MJX. It delivers a simulation speed ~430,000 faster than in real-time, and takes only 26 seconds to train a robotic locomotion policy transferrable to the real world on a single RTX4090 (see tutorial: The Genesis physics engine and simulation platform is fully open source at We'll gradually roll out access to our generative framework in the near future. Genesis implements a unified simulation framework all from scratch, integrating a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art physics solvers, allowing simulation of the whole physical world in a virtual realm with the highest realism. We aim to build a universal data engine that leverages an upper-level generative framework to autonomously create physical worlds, together with various modes of data, including environments, camera motions, robotic task proposals, reward functions, robot policies, character motions, fully interactive 3D scenes, open-world articulated assets, and more, aiming towards fully automated data generation for robotics, physical AI and other applications. Open Source Code: Project webpage: Documentation: 1/n
3:26

Everything you love about generative models — now powered by real physics! Announcing the Genesis project — after a 24-month large-scale research collaboration involving over 20 research labs — a generative physics engine able to generate 4D dynamical worlds powered by a physics simulation platform designed for general-purpose robotics and physical AI applications. Genesis's physics engine is developed in pure Python, while being 10-80x faster than existing GPU-accelerated stacks like Isaac Gym and MJX. It delivers a simulation speed ~430,000 faster than in real-time, and takes only 26 seconds to train a robotic locomotion policy transferrable to the real world on a single RTX4090 (see tutorial: The Genesis physics engine and simulation platform is fully open source at We'll gradually roll out access to our generative framework in the near future. Genesis implements a unified simulation framework all from scratch, integrating a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art physics solvers, allowing simulation of the whole physical world in a virtual realm with the highest realism. We aim to build a universal data engine that leverages an upper-level generative framework to autonomously create physical worlds, together with various modes of data, including environments, camera motions, robotic task proposals, reward functions, robot policies, character motions, fully interactive 3D scenes, open-world articulated assets, and more, aiming towards fully automated data generation for robotics, physical AI and other applications. Open Source Code: Project webpage: Documentation: 1/n

Zhou Xian

3,819,890 views • 1 year ago

🚨 BREAKING: Microsoft's first robotics foundation model! 🤯 Microsoft just announced Rho-alpha (ρα), their first robotics model derived from the Phi series of vision-language models. Rho-alpha translates natural language commands into control signals for robotic systems performing bimanual manipulation tasks. Commands like "push the green button with the right gripper," "pull out the red wire," "flip the top switch on," or "turn the knob to position 5" get executed directly by dual-arm robots. What makes this different from standard vision-language-action (VLA) models is the additional modalities. Rho-alpha is a VLA+ model that adds tactile sensing to the perceptual mix, with plans to incorporate force feedback. On the learning side, the model is designed to continually improve during deployment by learning from human feedback. The training approach combines trajectories from physical demonstrations and simulated tasks with web-scale visual question answering data. Since teleoperation data is scarce and expensive, Microsoft is using NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Azure to generate physically accurate synthetic datasets via reinforcement learning. These simulated trajectories get combined with commercial and open physical demonstration datasets. The model is currently under evaluation on dual-arm setups and humanoid robots. Microsoft is opening an Early Access Program for organizations interested in evaluating Rho-alpha. Robots that can adapt to dynamic situations and human preferences are more useful in real environments and more trusted by the people operating them. Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
0:34

🚨 BREAKING: Microsoft's first robotics foundation model! 🤯 Microsoft just announced Rho-alpha (ρα), their first robotics model derived from the Phi series of vision-language models. Rho-alpha translates natural language commands into control signals for robotic systems performing bimanual manipulation tasks. Commands like "push the green button with the right gripper," "pull out the red wire," "flip the top switch on," or "turn the knob to position 5" get executed directly by dual-arm robots. What makes this different from standard vision-language-action (VLA) models is the additional modalities. Rho-alpha is a VLA+ model that adds tactile sensing to the perceptual mix, with plans to incorporate force feedback. On the learning side, the model is designed to continually improve during deployment by learning from human feedback. The training approach combines trajectories from physical demonstrations and simulated tasks with web-scale visual question answering data. Since teleoperation data is scarce and expensive, Microsoft is using NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Azure to generate physically accurate synthetic datasets via reinforcement learning. These simulated trajectories get combined with commercial and open physical demonstration datasets. The model is currently under evaluation on dual-arm setups and humanoid robots. Microsoft is opening an Early Access Program for organizations interested in evaluating Rho-alpha. Robots that can adapt to dynamic situations and human preferences are more useful in real environments and more trusted by the people operating them. Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

60,985 views • 7 months ago

One of the largest trading firms in the world teaches new hires poker before it lets them near a book. A newspaper brought a camera to the table and sat down to play. The men across the felt are working Wall Street traders. The firm is Susquehanna, which built poker into its training programme decades ago and still runs it that way, on the argument that the card room teaches something no finance degree does. Gunjan Banerji from the Wall Street Journal plays the hands herself rather than interviewing them about it. A green table, a dealer, chips, 4 people who do this for a living. No lecture hall, no slides. The teaching happens between deals, while money is actually at stake. They break it into parts on camera. Risk management first. Then bet sizing. Then patience, which sounds like the soft one and is not. Then reading the person opposite when the only data available is how they behave with money on the table. The section on patience is the one most people skip. Folding is the correct action in the overwhelming majority of hands, and almost nobody can do it for hours without inventing a reason to play. The same failure shows up in a trading account as overtrading, and it kills more people than bad analysis. Then bet sizing, which is where the video earns the watch. Being right about the odds is the easy half. How much you put behind a correct read is the part that ends careers, and they work through it hand by hand instead of describing it in the abstract. The turn is what the traders admit about being wrong. A good decision loses regularly, a bad decision wins regularly, and the only way to last is to grade the process instead of the result. Everything else in the video sits downstream of that. It matters more now than when the firm started running these tables. Every model prices probability in a second and hands it to you for free. Nothing on the screen tells you how much of your account to put behind the number, or what to do after the number was right and you lost anyway. Free on YouTube, produced by a newspaper, filmed at a real table with real hands. The maths is public. The sizing is the job. 1 table. 4 traders. It is in the video.
16:30

One of the largest trading firms in the world teaches new hires poker before it lets them near a book. A newspaper brought a camera to the table and sat down to play. The men across the felt are working Wall Street traders. The firm is Susquehanna, which built poker into its training programme decades ago and still runs it that way, on the argument that the card room teaches something no finance degree does. Gunjan Banerji from the Wall Street Journal plays the hands herself rather than interviewing them about it. A green table, a dealer, chips, 4 people who do this for a living. No lecture hall, no slides. The teaching happens between deals, while money is actually at stake. They break it into parts on camera. Risk management first. Then bet sizing. Then patience, which sounds like the soft one and is not. Then reading the person opposite when the only data available is how they behave with money on the table. The section on patience is the one most people skip. Folding is the correct action in the overwhelming majority of hands, and almost nobody can do it for hours without inventing a reason to play. The same failure shows up in a trading account as overtrading, and it kills more people than bad analysis. Then bet sizing, which is where the video earns the watch. Being right about the odds is the easy half. How much you put behind a correct read is the part that ends careers, and they work through it hand by hand instead of describing it in the abstract. The turn is what the traders admit about being wrong. A good decision loses regularly, a bad decision wins regularly, and the only way to last is to grade the process instead of the result. Everything else in the video sits downstream of that. It matters more now than when the firm started running these tables. Every model prices probability in a second and hands it to you for free. Nothing on the screen tells you how much of your account to put behind the number, or what to do after the number was right and you lost anyway. Free on YouTube, produced by a newspaper, filmed at a real table with real hands. The maths is public. The sizing is the job. 1 table. 4 traders. It is in the video.

the lich

62,424 views • 23 days ago