Loading video...

Video Failed to Load

There was a problem loading this video. This could be due to a temporary network issue or the video might be unavailable.

Robots has a data problem, in that robotics data is rare. While human video is quite common, it’s not usually directly usable for robots for a variety of reasons, most significantly that it’s missing explicit, accurate robot actions. Instead, Jeremy Collins proposes that we predict keypoint trajectories — basically,... show more

RoboPapers

5,559 subscribers

88,996 views • 7 months ago •via X (Twitter)

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

0 Comments

No comments available

Comments from the original post will appear here

Related Videos

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

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

RoboPapers

27,249 views • 1 month ago

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

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

RoboPapers

27,537 views • 4 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

26,290 views • 10 months ago

We’ve all seen videos of humanoid robots performing single tasks that are very impressive, like dancing or karate. But training humanoid robots to perform a wide range of complex motions is difficult. GMT is a general-purpose policy which can learn a wide range of robot motions. Watch Episode #32 of RoboPapers, with Zixuan Chen , co-hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton , to learn more.

We’ve all seen videos of humanoid robots performing single tasks that are very impressive, like dancing or karate. But training humanoid robots to perform a wide range of complex motions is difficult. GMT is a general-purpose policy which can learn a wide range of robot motions. Watch Episode #32 of RoboPapers, with Zixuan Chen , co-hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton , to learn more.

RoboPapers

16,605 views • 9 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

46,190 views • 27 days ago

How can we build robotic hands with truly superhuman dexterity? Daxo Robotics is developing a unique tendon-driven soft robot hand, which aims to be tougher and more capable than a traditional humanoid hand. Each finger consists of many different tendons, which act in concert to move or manipulate. This is a special episode of RoboPapers where, instead of talking about a scientific paper, we talk to Tom Zhang, founder of Daxo Robotics, in order to learn both about his background and about how this one-of-a-kind robot hand design works. Watch Episode #40 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

How can we build robotic hands with truly superhuman dexterity? Daxo Robotics is developing a unique tendon-driven soft robot hand, which aims to be tougher and more capable than a traditional humanoid hand. Each finger consists of many different tendons, which act in concert to move or manipulate. This is a special episode of RoboPapers where, instead of talking about a scientific paper, we talk to Tom Zhang, founder of Daxo Robotics, in order to learn both about his background and about how this one-of-a-kind robot hand design works. Watch Episode #40 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

RoboPapers

15,804 views • 7 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

20,434 views • 5 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

15,045 views • 6 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

33,766 views • 12 days ago

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

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

RoboPapers

23,976 views • 1 month ago

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

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

RoboPapers

15,056 views • 8 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

24,286 views • 5 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

24,757 views • 2 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

17,822 views • 6 months 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!

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

18,541 views • 5 months ago

Co-training has become a key part of the recipe for training large robotics models; it means that you mix some proportion of real robot data with other data sources, like simulation or egocentric human video data. This is especially important because robotics data tends to lack diversity which can be somewhat compensated for by the inclusion of these other modalities. And yet there has not been a sizable study on what constitute good practices for cotraining until now! We talk to Fanqi Lin and Jose Barreiros about their new work, a massive study which evaluated 89 policies over thousands of rollouts to tell us which forms of co-training were most useful for robotics. Watch episode 70 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho and Chris Paxton, now!

Co-training has become a key part of the recipe for training large robotics models; it means that you mix some proportion of real robot data with other data sources, like simulation or egocentric human video data. This is especially important because robotics data tends to lack diversity which can be somewhat compensated for by the inclusion of these other modalities. And yet there has not been a sizable study on what constitute good practices for cotraining until now! We talk to Fanqi Lin and Jose Barreiros about their new work, a massive study which evaluated 89 policies over thousands of rollouts to tell us which forms of co-training were most useful for robotics. Watch episode 70 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho and Chris Paxton, now!

RoboPapers

19,152 views • 2 months ago

Teleoperating a robot is hard. This means that when performing a robot task via teleoperation — say, to collect examples for training a robot policy — it’s almost unavoidably slower than you would like, below either the capabilities of the human expert on their own or the robot performing the task. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to fix this? Unfortunately, it’s harder than it looks. You can’t just execute faster, as this alters the distribution of environment states the policy will encounter. Nadun Ranawaka Arachchige and Zhenyang Chen propose Speed-Adaptive Imitation Learning (SAIL), which adds error-adaptive guidance, adapts execution speed according to task structure, predicts controller-invariant action targets to ensure robustness across execution speeds, and explicitly models delays from, for example, sensor latency. Watch episode #59 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

Teleoperating a robot is hard. This means that when performing a robot task via teleoperation — say, to collect examples for training a robot policy — it’s almost unavoidably slower than you would like, below either the capabilities of the human expert on their own or the robot performing the task. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to fix this? Unfortunately, it’s harder than it looks. You can’t just execute faster, as this alters the distribution of environment states the policy will encounter. Nadun Ranawaka Arachchige and Zhenyang Chen propose Speed-Adaptive Imitation Learning (SAIL), which adds error-adaptive guidance, adapts execution speed according to task structure, predicts controller-invariant action targets to ensure robustness across execution speeds, and explicitly models delays from, for example, sensor latency. Watch episode #59 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

RoboPapers

27,970 views • 4 months ago

Reasoning over long horizons would allow robots to generalize better to unseen environments and settings zero-shot. One mechanism for this kind of reasoning would be world models, but traditional video world models still tend to struggle with long horizons, and are very data intensive to train. But what if instead of predicting images about the future, we predicted just the symbolic information necessary for reasoning? Nishanth Kumar tells us about Pixels to Predicates, a method for symbol grounding which allows a VLM to plan sequences of robot skills to achieve unseen goals in previously unseen settings. To find out more, watch episode #44 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

Reasoning over long horizons would allow robots to generalize better to unseen environments and settings zero-shot. One mechanism for this kind of reasoning would be world models, but traditional video world models still tend to struggle with long horizons, and are very data intensive to train. But what if instead of predicting images about the future, we predicted just the symbolic information necessary for reasoning? Nishanth Kumar tells us about Pixels to Predicates, a method for symbol grounding which allows a VLM to plan sequences of robot skills to achieve unseen goals in previously unseen settings. To find out more, watch episode #44 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

RoboPapers

19,613 views • 6 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

23,905 views • 3 months ago

The holy grail of robotics is to be able to perform previously-unseen, out-of-distribution manipulation tasks “zero shot” in a new environment. NovaFlow proposes an approach which (1) generates a video, (2) computes predicted flow — how points move through the scene — and (3) uses this flow as an objective to generate a motion. Using this procedure, NovaFlow generates motions in unseen scenes, for unseen tasks, and can transfer across embodiments. To learn more, we are joined by Hongyu Li and Jiahui Fu from RAI. Watch Episode #63 of RoboPapers with Chris Paxton and Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc now to learn more!

The holy grail of robotics is to be able to perform previously-unseen, out-of-distribution manipulation tasks “zero shot” in a new environment. NovaFlow proposes an approach which (1) generates a video, (2) computes predicted flow — how points move through the scene — and (3) uses this flow as an objective to generate a motion. Using this procedure, NovaFlow generates motions in unseen scenes, for unseen tasks, and can transfer across embodiments. To learn more, we are joined by Hongyu Li and Jiahui Fu from RAI. Watch Episode #63 of RoboPapers with Chris Paxton and Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc now to learn more!

RoboPapers

21,161 views • 3 months ago