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.

Unitree founder Wang Xingxing: In robotics, locomotion and basic motion is mostly solved. But grasping and manipulation—anything related to haptics—hasn’t been solved. That’s the key bottleneck preventing them from being deployed at scale in factories and homes. He says that simulation is much faster for training but for manipulation... show more

Kyle Chan

48,219 subscribers

67,761 views • 3 months ago •via X (Twitter)

Science & Technology

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

0 Comments

No comments available

Comments from the original post will appear here

Related Videos

What if we're approaching robotic manipulation all wrong? Ilya Sutskever makes a fascinating point here: Current approaches throw massive amounts of data at the problem — millions of simulation steps, huge compute. And still, robots can't match human dexterity. Real-world learning of new skills? "Very out of reach." Meanwhile, humans pick up manipulation tasks almost instantly. Our dexterity is unmatched. And we do it with remarkable robustness — no reward shaping, no curriculum design, no training instability. Why the gap? Evolution. 500M years of optimisation for locomotion, vision, and manipulation. For these ancient sensorimotor tasks, maybe brute-force data isn't the answer. Maybe we should be copying the biological algorithms that already solved it. CC: Dwarkesh Patel

What if we're approaching robotic manipulation all wrong? Ilya Sutskever makes a fascinating point here: Current approaches throw massive amounts of data at the problem — millions of simulation steps, huge compute. And still, robots can't match human dexterity. Real-world learning of new skills? "Very out of reach." Meanwhile, humans pick up manipulation tasks almost instantly. Our dexterity is unmatched. And we do it with remarkable robustness — no reward shaping, no curriculum design, no training instability. Why the gap? Evolution. 500M years of optimisation for locomotion, vision, and manipulation. For these ancient sensorimotor tasks, maybe brute-force data isn't the answer. Maybe we should be copying the biological algorithms that already solved it. CC: Dwarkesh Patel

Jack 🤖

31,262 views • 8 months ago

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

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

Chris Paxton

20,486 views • 1 year ago

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

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

a16z

68,566 views • 9 days ago

Real-world robot data is expensive and slow to collect, creating a major challenge for humanoid development. 🤖 The NVIDIA GR00T N1.6 open vision language action model is pre-trained on a diverse mix of data, including thousands of hours of Stanford Vision and Learning Lab’s BEHAVIOR simulation data, which covers long-horizon everyday manipulation tasks. This diverse training is the key to robust cross-embodiment performance and real-world adaptability. 🌍 Read the blog 🔗

Real-world robot data is expensive and slow to collect, creating a major challenge for humanoid development. 🤖 The NVIDIA GR00T N1.6 open vision language action model is pre-trained on a diverse mix of data, including thousands of hours of Stanford Vision and Learning Lab’s BEHAVIOR simulation data, which covers long-horizon everyday manipulation tasks. This diverse training is the key to robust cross-embodiment performance and real-world adaptability. 🌍 Read the blog 🔗

NVIDIA Robotics

13,456 views • 6 months ago

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

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

RoboPapers

30,767 views • 6 months ago

Can my robot cook my food, rearrange my dresser, tidy my messy table and do so much more without ANY demos or real-world training data? Introducing ManipGen: A generalist agent for manipulation that can solve long-horizon robotics tasks entirely zero shot, from text input! 1/N

Can my robot cook my food, rearrange my dresser, tidy my messy table and do so much more without ANY demos or real-world training data? Introducing ManipGen: A generalist agent for manipulation that can solve long-horizon robotics tasks entirely zero shot, from text input! 1/N

Murtaza Dalal

149,060 views • 1 year ago

The founder of China's biggest robotics company Unitree is 35 year old Wang Xingxing, He says humanoid robots are at the developmental level of a ten year old child. In only 3 to 10 years, these robots can be used in all major areas of people's lives. But for what else?

The founder of China's biggest robotics company Unitree is 35 year old Wang Xingxing, He says humanoid robots are at the developmental level of a ten year old child. In only 3 to 10 years, these robots can be used in all major areas of people's lives. But for what else?

Chay Bowes

21,890 views • 5 months ago

Yann LeCun says that within a year to 18 months, we'll have a general method for training hierarchical world models These models would learn from video and real-world data, then help plan actions in robotics, healthcare, and other areas "then scale them toward a universal world model"

Yann LeCun says that within a year to 18 months, we'll have a general method for training hierarchical world models These models would learn from video and real-world data, then help plan actions in robotics, healthcare, and other areas "then scale them toward a universal world model"

Haider.

201,090 views • 2 months ago

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

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

The Humanoid Hub

106,447 views • 10 months ago

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

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

Pascal Bornet

186,223 views • 4 months ago

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

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

Abhishek Gupta

13,350 views • 1 year ago

Robots still fail at the simplest job: picking stuff up. 🫴🏼 Robots are good at repetition, but most still fail at grasping varied objects. In warehouses and grocery fulfillment, that’s the bottleneck: items aren’t uniform, and rigid grippers break or drop them. Nexera-Robotics built NeuraGrasp to address this. The system combines a compliant surface that mimics human fingertips with an AI controller that adjusts grip in real time. It doesn’t need reprogramming for each SKU and can handle fragile, irregular items as well as standard packages. This matters because if grasping is solved, robots stop being limited to narrow workflows. They can finally automate the “last meter” of logistics and retail, where most of the labor costs remain today. It's oddly satisfying to see a gripper that can pick up (almost) anything! 🫶🏼

Robots still fail at the simplest job: picking stuff up. 🫴🏼 Robots are good at repetition, but most still fail at grasping varied objects. In warehouses and grocery fulfillment, that’s the bottleneck: items aren’t uniform, and rigid grippers break or drop them. Nexera-Robotics built NeuraGrasp to address this. The system combines a compliant surface that mimics human fingertips with an AI controller that adjusts grip in real time. It doesn’t need reprogramming for each SKU and can handle fragile, irregular items as well as standard packages. This matters because if grasping is solved, robots stop being limited to narrow workflows. They can finally automate the “last meter” of logistics and retail, where most of the labor costs remain today. It's oddly satisfying to see a gripper that can pick up (almost) anything! 🫶🏼

Lukas Ziegler

24,055 views • 11 months ago

Chinese humanoid robotics company LimX Dynamics has unveiled COSA (Cognitive Operating System of Agents). COSA is described as a unified "brain-body" architecture that allows the robot to think and act simultaneously in the real world. It integrates: - high-level cognition (reasoning, planning, adaptation) - and whole-body motion control (low-latency dynamic locomotion, manipulation) It enables the Oli robot to act on natural language instructions and perform tasks that involve both walking and manipulation while being adaptive to interruptions.

Chinese humanoid robotics company LimX Dynamics has unveiled COSA (Cognitive Operating System of Agents). COSA is described as a unified "brain-body" architecture that allows the robot to think and act simultaneously in the real world. It integrates: - high-level cognition (reasoning, planning, adaptation) - and whole-body motion control (low-latency dynamic locomotion, manipulation) It enables the Oli robot to act on natural language instructions and perform tasks that involve both walking and manipulation while being adaptive to interruptions.

The Humanoid Hub

71,168 views • 6 months ago

We talked to Ritvik Singh about how you can train sim-to-real dexterous manipulation policies using NVIDIA Isaac. This robot is grasping objects using pure RGB stereo: take in images from a camera pair and predict what to do, all without training in the real world.

We talked to Ritvik Singh about how you can train sim-to-real dexterous manipulation policies using NVIDIA Isaac. This robot is grasping objects using pure RGB stereo: take in images from a camera pair and predict what to do, all without training in the real world.

Chris Paxton

20,067 views • 11 months ago

Today, we publicly released RoboCasa365, a large-scale simulation benchmark for training and systematically evaluating generalist robot models. Built upon our original RoboCasa framework, it offers: • 2,500 realistic kitchen environments; • 365 everyday tasks (basic skills + long-horizon mobile manipulation); • Over 3,200 objects with many articulated fixtures/appliances. All are designed for fully controlled, reproducible benchmarking of robotic policies. Progress in robotic foundation models is real. But it’s still hard to answer basic questions like: How close are we to general-purpose autonomy? What factors drive generalization? What are the model/data scaling curves like? Real-world eval is slow and noisy, and existing sims (like LIBERO, which we built 3 years ago) often lack sufficient task and scene diversity. This benchmark comes with 2,200+ hours of demonstrations and 500K+ trajectories to support studies of multi-task training, pretraining, and continual learning at scale. Check it out at

Today, we publicly released RoboCasa365, a large-scale simulation benchmark for training and systematically evaluating generalist robot models. Built upon our original RoboCasa framework, it offers: • 2,500 realistic kitchen environments; • 365 everyday tasks (basic skills + long-horizon mobile manipulation); • Over 3,200 objects with many articulated fixtures/appliances. All are designed for fully controlled, reproducible benchmarking of robotic policies. Progress in robotic foundation models is real. But it’s still hard to answer basic questions like: How close are we to general-purpose autonomy? What factors drive generalization? What are the model/data scaling curves like? Real-world eval is slow and noisy, and existing sims (like LIBERO, which we built 3 years ago) often lack sufficient task and scene diversity. This benchmark comes with 2,200+ hours of demonstrations and 500K+ trajectories to support studies of multi-task training, pretraining, and continual learning at scale. Check it out at

Yuke Zhu

24,027 views • 5 months ago

Today, we're joined by Nikita Rudin, co-founder and CEO of Flexion to discuss the gap between current robotic capabilities and what’s required to deploy fully autonomous robots in the real world. Nikita explains how reinforcement learning and simulation have driven rapid progress in robot locomotion—and why locomotion is still far from “solved.” We dig into the sim2real gap, and how adding visual inputs introduces noise and significantly complicates sim-to-real transfer. We also explore the debate between end-to-end models and modular approaches, and why separating locomotion, planning, and semantics remains a pragmatic approach today. Nikita also introduces the concept of "real-to-sim", which uses real-world data to refine simulation parameters for higher fidelity training, discusses how reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and teleoperation data are combined to train robust policies for both quadruped and humanoid robots, and introduces Flexion's hierarchical approach that utilizes pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for high-level task orchestration with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and low-level whole-body trackers. Finally, Nikita shares the behind-the-scenes in humanoid robot demos, his take on reinforcement learning in simulation versus the real world, the nuances of reward tuning, and offers practical advice for researchers and practitioners looking to get started in robotics today. 🗒️ For the full list of resources for this episode, visit the show notes page: 📖 CHAPTERS =============================== 00:00 - Introduction 04:07 - Is robot locomotion solved? 06:04 - Sim-to-real gap 08:58 - Adding semantics to policies 09:42 - Modular vs end-to-end architectures 10:29 - Planner model 12:21 - Adapting RL techniques from quadrupeds to humanoids 15:39 - Behind robot demos 18:09 - Humanoid robots in home environments 22:03 - Training approach 23:56 - VLA models 27:59 - Closing the sim-to-real gap 32:55 - Task orchestration using VLMs 36:38 - Tool use 38:10 - Model hierarchy 43:37 - Simulator versus simulation environment 44:57 - Combining imitation learning and reinforcement learning 46:42 - RL in real world versus RL in simulation 52:58 - Reward tuning and value functions in robotics 56:38 - Predictions 1:00:10 - Humanoids, quadropeds, and wheeled platforms 1:02:45 - Advice, recommended robot kits, and community pla

Today, we're joined by Nikita Rudin, co-founder and CEO of Flexion to discuss the gap between current robotic capabilities and what’s required to deploy fully autonomous robots in the real world. Nikita explains how reinforcement learning and simulation have driven rapid progress in robot locomotion—and why locomotion is still far from “solved.” We dig into the sim2real gap, and how adding visual inputs introduces noise and significantly complicates sim-to-real transfer. We also explore the debate between end-to-end models and modular approaches, and why separating locomotion, planning, and semantics remains a pragmatic approach today. Nikita also introduces the concept of "real-to-sim", which uses real-world data to refine simulation parameters for higher fidelity training, discusses how reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and teleoperation data are combined to train robust policies for both quadruped and humanoid robots, and introduces Flexion's hierarchical approach that utilizes pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for high-level task orchestration with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and low-level whole-body trackers. Finally, Nikita shares the behind-the-scenes in humanoid robot demos, his take on reinforcement learning in simulation versus the real world, the nuances of reward tuning, and offers practical advice for researchers and practitioners looking to get started in robotics today. 🗒️ For the full list of resources for this episode, visit the show notes page: 📖 CHAPTERS =============================== 00:00 - Introduction 04:07 - Is robot locomotion solved? 06:04 - Sim-to-real gap 08:58 - Adding semantics to policies 09:42 - Modular vs end-to-end architectures 10:29 - Planner model 12:21 - Adapting RL techniques from quadrupeds to humanoids 15:39 - Behind robot demos 18:09 - Humanoid robots in home environments 22:03 - Training approach 23:56 - VLA models 27:59 - Closing the sim-to-real gap 32:55 - Task orchestration using VLMs 36:38 - Tool use 38:10 - Model hierarchy 43:37 - Simulator versus simulation environment 44:57 - Combining imitation learning and reinforcement learning 46:42 - RL in real world versus RL in simulation 52:58 - Reward tuning and value functions in robotics 56:38 - Predictions 1:00:10 - Humanoids, quadropeds, and wheeled platforms 1:02:45 - Advice, recommended robot kits, and community pla

The TWIML AI Podcast

22,592 views • 6 months ago

As robotics teams scale, collecting real-world data can quickly become slow and expensive. 📉 Lightwheel is changing that with a simulation-first platform built on our technology, helping customers generate a 100:1 simulated-to-real data ratio for training autonomous systems. Together, we’re turning synthetic and real data into more capable, more reliable robots. Read the full success story 🔗

As robotics teams scale, collecting real-world data can quickly become slow and expensive. 📉 Lightwheel is changing that with a simulation-first platform built on our technology, helping customers generate a 100:1 simulated-to-real data ratio for training autonomous systems. Together, we’re turning synthetic and real data into more capable, more reliable robots. Read the full success story 🔗

NVIDIA Robotics

10,840 views • 3 months ago

Axis is officially LIVE on Base. 🔵 Axis is scaling Physical AI for the real world, contributed by everyone. You can control robots in a virtual world, generate training data at scale, and help build the brain behind tomorrow's robots. All from browser. No hardware needed. Start building robotics intelligence today:

Axis is officially LIVE on Base. 🔵 Axis is scaling Physical AI for the real world, contributed by everyone. You can control robots in a virtual world, generate training data at scale, and help build the brain behind tomorrow's robots. All from browser. No hardware needed. Start building robotics intelligence today:

Axis Robotics

290,855 views • 4 months ago