Digit's IROS demo ran on 500 teleop demos
The Agility Digit demo everyone liked at IROS turns out to rest on about 500 real teleoperated demonstrations and a sim-trained controller, hitting roughly 80 to 90 percent in a booth full of crowds and bad lighting. The person who built it says it is still research, not production.
Shown this week
The numbers behind Digit's IROS demo: 500 demos, 80-90% success
Jonathan Stephens got the recipe for Agility's Digit tote-picking demo out of Chris Paxton, who built it: about 500 real-world teleoperated demonstrations (a human controlling it remotely) for the manipulation policy, plus a whole-body controller trained in simulation.
Chris was also very clear that this is still research, not something currently running in production.
EyeRobot 2.0 drops wrist cameras for an actively aiming stereo head
Justin Kerr and @kushtimusprime released EyeRobot 2.0, which replaces the wrist cameras on a bimanual robot with active gaze from a single ego stereo camera. Kerr's argument: wrist cameras are on almost every bimanual robot and are critical for performance, but they add bulk, cost and complexity. The work was picked up by researchers including Chris Paxton and Ken Goldberg.
They add bulk, cost, and complexity, but are critical for performance. Are they really needed?
Tesla Cybercab drives itself through heavy Austin rain, two Tesla people confirm
A clip of a Cybercab driving through heavy rain in Austin got picked up by Ashok Elluswamy, who said the weather does not bother the cabs. Julian Ibarz called it fully autonomous and described the approach as an end-to-end neural net, photons in and controls out, trained on fleet data and sharpened with reinforcement learning.
Brutally hard to make reliable. Unstoppable once you do.