Robot vs five-year-old: the gap is still clear
A team put MolmoAct2 up against a five-year-old in a dexterity challenge at CoRL and came away saying robotics is far from solved. Elsewhere: a robot that feels its way into a tight fit, and Walden's longest factory deployment yet.
Shown this week
MolmoAct2 faced a five-year-old in a dexterity challenge, and lost ground
Jiafei Duan says his team entered MolmoAct2 in Jitendra Malik's five-year-old versus robot dexterity challenge at the SPIN workshop, and the gap was clear. Separately, Nicolas Keller released what he calls the largest systematic evaluation campaign of agentic robots, testing them on real robots as tool users rather than as tools. Both land the same week CoRL wrapped.
we’re making progress, but robotics is far from solved
A robot feels its way into a tight busbar fit on a Foxconn line
Lukas Ziegler describes a booth system at Foxconn days in Taiwan doing busbar assembly, inserting rigid metal conductors into tight fits without jamming or scratching the part. NVIDIA Robotics' FoundationPose estimates the busbar's position and orientation in 3D, then torque feedback tracks contact forces in real time so the robot eases off when something binds.
Vision gets the gripper to the right spot, but the last millimeters of a tight fit are a contact problem, and that’s where the force sensing earns its place.
Out in the world
Russ Tedrake talks Walden's longest factory deployment at CoRL
Russ Tedrake used his CoRL keynote, called "Learning in the factories", to cover Walden's longest-running deployment to date and the value of coupling deployment data with large-scale pretraining. Walden says the talk is the work behind LBM 2.0: Sage, with more detail in a blog post. Tedrake says he will keep sharing Walden's story as it goes.