Chris Paxton
Every Robotics Weekly story that cites Chris Paxton (@chris_j_paxton), newest first. 34 stories since September 2026.
On X: Mostly posting about robots. currently AI @agilityrobotics prev embodied AI @AIatMeta, @NVIDIAAI. All views my own.
- Adcock says Figure lifts well over 50 lbs
Brett Adcock disputes Chris Paxton's claim that Figure and Optimus are too weak for most human work, after a typo briefly made him agree.
- Spider-like welding robot climbs shipyard walls
Diden Robotics built a legged welder for the inside of ships, and almost nothing about its autonomy is public.
- Researchers pick apart Atlas's new 13-DOF hands
Chris Paxton says the fingers are bigger than a human's and there is one fewer of them, and Yifan Hou says you could not puppet these moves by hand.
- Digit ran 12 hours of autonomous tote picking at IROS
Chris Paxton says the Agility Robotics humanoid worked a previously unseen booth at 1x speed, with roughly 500 teleoperated demos behind the policy.
- Paxton says model-based control has no future
A question about what RL adds over inverse kinematics turned into a call to drop online optimization altogether.
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- Digit ran mobile manipulation for 12 hours at IROS
Chris Paxton says the end-to-end whole body demo on an Agility Robotics Digit was 1x speed, autonomous, and in a room the robot had never seen.
- Paxton says Mind-1's fast videos look like UMI, not teleop
One researcher's read on a humanoid video that MindOn has not explained.
- Dyna put Taku to work in a live server room
An employee account with raw phone photos, no success rates.
- Chestnut pairs an 18-DOF hand with a matching capture rig
The wearable exoskeleton logs per-joint angles to 0.1 degrees, so human data lands in the same action space as the robot hand.
- Adcock maps four stages of humanoids, Goldberg asks if data is dead
Two of the loudest voices in the field put opposite bets on the table in the same week.
- Duan runs Astra, Opus, Grok and MolmoAct2 head to head, unedited
Four models, one task, real time, and Chris Paxton is not impressed with how long the Astra rollout takes.
- Paxton says end-to-end mobile manipulation ran first try on Digit v4
Two clips from the conference floor, no success rate and no task list.
- Do as I Do turns plain video into robot hand data
A retargeting algorithm aimed at the part of dexterity data that usually breaks, physical validity.
- Unitree G1 dribbles a soccer ball using only onboard LiDAR
No motion capture, no external tracking, and a safety tether that Hong says stays slack.
- Flex-pi world action model predicts 3D, not just video
A 6 billion parameter model adds geometry and object semantics to video prediction, and the authors say it needs far fewer demos.
- Figure's 237 of 420 success rate turns into a fight
Tony Zhao says failing half the time is not useful work, and two other researchers say publishing the number at all deserves credit.
- OM-1 unplugs an Ethernet cable, and the video is 1x speed
Reward AI's new foundation model drew praise from Chris Paxton for a task most robots fumble.
- X Square's dual-arm robot is sorting parcels for Lululemon
The QUANTA X1 Pro is on a live logistics line in Wuhan, though X Square has not said how many robots or how much they move.
- Developer says his Astra harness cut a robot task to under a minute
@calixo888 posted a cup-in-cup run he says dropped from about an hour to under 60 seconds after two days of side projects.
- Malik asks if Astra is plagiarizing the papers it learned from
A junior researcher's blog post on credit assignment pulled in Jitendra Malik, Chris Paxton and Chen Tessler within hours.
- Astra 35%, Fable 15%, human teleop 100% on Pandroid robots
A controlled real-hardware benchmark put two general models on robot control, and Chris Paxton says robotics labs should be asking why it was not their models.
- Chris Paxton says Astra's spot at the top is gone
Three short posts in one day from the roboticist, and the only hard detail is who did the displacing.
- RoboDojo tests GPT-6 Astra, finds a physics gap
Chris Paxton calls it an incredibly good robotics model, Chen Tessler says it has no business doing short-horizon execution.
- Agility's Digit 5 drops the bird legs, claims 22.7 kg lifts
New legs, a two-finger gripper and a safety controller that can cut motor power, all of it company spec for now.
- Pi robot runs box assembly at Dandelion Chocolate
Chelsea Finn says the hard part was not the dexterous box folding, it was putting the finished boxes on the pile without knocking it over.
- Lerrel Pinto sees "deep despair" as Astra zero-shots benchmarks
Chris Paxton started it, then walked part of it back within minutes.
- Astra demos hit a reproducibility wall
Three well known researchers say the viral clips look great and nobody outside the posters can repeat them.
- Pathak verified Skild's $100M ARR in person, Scott says
The number is contract-based recurring revenue, not units shipped, and it landed the same week Agility's SPAC filing showed $1.8M in revenue.
- UBTECH opens 10,000-unit Walker S factory in Liuzhou
The plant is built for robots building robots, and Chris Paxton says the robots are doing the easy part.
- GPT-6 Astra beats MolmoAct2 46% to 12%, thread says
The first head-to-head number against a named robotics VLA, and the field's first reaction was to argue about the baseline.
- Chris Paxton calls Ultra and Digit clips teleop
Two impressive manipulation videos landed the same day, and a researcher who works on one of the policies said a human was steering.
- GPT-6 Astra hits 95% on a robot arm task, Chooi says
The model wrote end-effector poses directly, with no VLA in the loop, and researchers are already arguing about whether that is the cheap way to do it.
- Malik dares LLM robotics fans to control a legged robot
A public challenge over whether a token-generating model belongs anywhere near a robot's control loop.
- Lightwheel drops 100,000 hours of first-person video
Two bets on the robot data shortage landed in the same week, one open and one paid.
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