Robotics

open-source-ai

currently most excited about:
- Deep RL / RL in general
- World Models & training policies in sim 
- end-to-end learning 
- sim2real
- training diffusion / AC / PPO policies for robotics purposes

There's a sort of transition / implicit conflict going on around robotics: it's between the "old guard" hard-coding robotics systems (control, planning, perception etc) where you want to limit your problem space, and hard code a FSM into it vs "new wave" of AI/ML folks that are going the end-to-end route. The end-to-end new wave is like LeRobot - just RL learn everything team, zero-shot learning take it sim2real lmao lfg

Also historically the ML folks would do projects, and it wouldn't work, and we'd revert to more hardcoding things. Also perception didn't work that great previously, and now it does really well (generally speaking - the bottleneck is still great data) also sensors are getting cheaper (i feel like I keep saying this each year, but holy guacamole lidar is great, and a good chunk of why co's like Unitree succeeding)

Also benjie talks about it in his blog a little bit

There's a sort of transition / implicit conflict going on around robotics: it's between the "old guard" hard-coding robotics systems (control, planning, perception etc) where you want to limit your problem space, and hard code a FSM into it vs "new wave" of AI/ML folks that are going the end-to-end route. The end-to-end new wave is like LeRobot - just RL learn everything team, zero-shot learning take it sim2real lmao lfg

Also historically the ML folks would do projects, and it wouldn't work, and we'd revert to more hardcoding things. Also perception didn't work that great previously, and now it does really well (generally speaking - the bottleneck is still great data) also sensors are getting cheaper (i feel like I keep saying this each year, but holy guacamole lidar is great, and a good chunk of why co's like Unitree succeeding)

Also benjie talks about it in his blog a little bit

https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/ml-for-robots-hybrid-learned-vs-end

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building roc.camera, writings: july.rocks

relatedly, what's your take on waymo vs tesla fsd?