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Training robot foundation models faces two key hurdles: how to get enough data to train an effective model, and how to make sure that new skills can be acquired quickly. The team at Rhoda AI believes that the answer is training Direct Video Action models from web data. Web...

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

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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!
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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!

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24,802 views • 3 months ago

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

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24,286 views • 7 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 @mimicrobotic. 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!
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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 @mimicrobotic. 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!

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48,343 views • 2 months ago

With enough data, robots and AI can learn “world models” that let them predict the results of their actions. These models are a way to learn how embodied AI agents can perform a wide variety of useful tasks — but they require a huge amount of data. The team at General Intuition General Intuition has a solution: use data from video games! Games teach movement, problem solving, and complex spatial reasoning, and they come in a staggering diversity of forms, covering a wide variety of problems. What’s more, the captured data is high-quality, without the noise or annotation error that can come from We sat down with Pim de Witte and Adam Jelley from the General Intuition team to learn more about their history, their plans, and their philosophy.
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With enough data, robots and AI can learn “world models” that let them predict the results of their actions. These models are a way to learn how embodied AI agents can perform a wide variety of useful tasks — but they require a huge amount of data. The team at General Intuition General Intuition has a solution: use data from video games! Games teach movement, problem solving, and complex spatial reasoning, and they come in a staggering diversity of forms, covering a wide variety of problems. What’s more, the captured data is high-quality, without the noise or annotation error that can come from We sat down with Pim de Witte and Adam Jelley from the General Intuition team to learn more about their history, their plans, and their philosophy.

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85,927 views • 8 months ago

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

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89,011 views • 9 months ago

Robotics has changed dramatically over the last eight years. Ted Xiao has been involved in the cutting edge of robot learning through this period, spending those eight years at Google Brain/Google Deepmind. And he’s identified three eras of robot learning. These eras are: - The Era of Existence Proofs - trying different methods like QT-Opt, on-robot RL - The Era of Foundation Models - transitioning to data collection and clean objectives (i.e. supervised learning) - The Era of Scaling - orders of magnitude more data and larger models, enabling reasoning, long-horizon actions, and cross-embodiment transfer Watch Episode 78 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Jiafei Duan to learn more!
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Robotics has changed dramatically over the last eight years. Ted Xiao has been involved in the cutting edge of robot learning through this period, spending those eight years at Google Brain/Google Deepmind. And he’s identified three eras of robot learning. These eras are: - The Era of Existence Proofs - trying different methods like QT-Opt, on-robot RL - The Era of Foundation Models - transitioning to data collection and clean objectives (i.e. supervised learning) - The Era of Scaling - orders of magnitude more data and larger models, enabling reasoning, long-horizon actions, and cross-embodiment transfer Watch Episode 78 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Jiafei Duan to learn more!

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36,732 views • 3 months ago

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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!

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27,567 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!
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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!

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23,905 views • 5 months ago

Spatial understanding is important to moving around in complex environments and is a huge part of the challenge of generalizing to new scenes. Most world models, however, largely ignore this spatial dimension, focusing on 2D images. Not PointWorld, though. PointWorld is a 3D world model trained from real and simulated data which can perform a wide variety of manipulation tasks on a real robot, including grasping or handling articulated objects, all without any additional fine tuning. Wenlong Huang joins us to tell us more about what makes this work and how it’s different from other world models. Watch Episode #83 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!
1:22:44

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

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16,197 views • 2 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!
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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!

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19,152 views • 4 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.
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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.

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16,605 views • 10 months ago

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

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27,344 views • 3 months ago

Proud to share what I’ve been working on with my colleagues at Rhoda AI: Direct Video-Action Models (DVA). TL;DR: - We pre-train causal video models from scratch to control robots - They handle complex production tasks for hours without intervention - Only use ~10 hours of robot data How? 🧵👇
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Proud to share what I’ve been working on with my colleagues at Rhoda AI: Direct Video-Action Models (DVA). TL;DR: - We pre-train causal video models from scratch to control robots - They handle complex production tasks for hours without intervention - Only use ~10 hours of robot data How? 🧵👇

Tongzhou Mu 🤖🦾🦿

19,257 views • 5 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
58:42

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

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26,344 views • 1 year 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

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

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!
1:01:08

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

15,092 views • 8 months ago

Amjad Masad says true AGI means an AI that can enter new situations and quickly learn how to achieve goals Even the latest models still struggle with tasks outside their training data. The real breakthrough will come when AI can train itself -- like AlphaGo playing billions of games against itself
1:50

Amjad Masad says true AGI means an AI that can enter new situations and quickly learn how to achieve goals Even the latest models still struggle with tasks outside their training data. The real breakthrough will come when AI can train itself -- like AlphaGo playing billions of games against itself

Haider.

163,410 views • 1 year ago

Sports like tennis are great examples of the sort of dynamic whole-body interaction that’s possible with humanoid robots. But capturing examples of fast, dynamic interactions from humans is really difficult. Enter LATENT, which uses lower-quality human data plus reinforcement learning to teach a robot to play tennis, able to complete back-and-forth volleys at a human level. LATENT has three steps: (1) collecting imperfect human data like a backswing, (2) using these to learn a latent action space, and (3) they train a high-level policy in simulation which can compose these actions and execute tennis skills on a robot. Haofei Lu and Yunrui Lian join us to tell us about their method. Watch Episode #80 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, now to learn more!
55:30

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

RoboPapers

29,975 views • 2 months ago