Jiafei Duan
Every Robotics Weekly story that cites Jiafei Duan (@DJiafei), newest first. 12 stories since September 2026.
On X: Assistant Professor at @NUScomputing | Robotics & AI PhD @uwcse | Host of @RoboPapers | Ex-@allen_ai robotics lead, @NVIDIA | Magician | my opinion is my alone.
- Reflex lets a Unitree G1 catch boxes people throw at it
The headline 85.7% catch rate is in simulation. On hardware, the robot caught 8 of 20 throws aimed to the side.
- Reality Check launches with 14,400 real robot rollouts
A public leaderboard for robot manipulation, run on real hardware rather than in simulation.
- 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.
- Grounded Action Model beats pi-0.5 when the target changes
A robot policy built on a frozen 3D grounding backbone posts 61% average success on LIBERO-PRO, and the authors still call grounding errors an open problem.
- Grounded ships an API that turns everyday video into robot data
The company claims state of the art hand tracking under 1 cm, and Lerrel Pinto says the hard part is still turning human data into robots.
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- 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.
- LIT trains robots to act first, then use vision
A two-stage recipe that keeps the action expert from latching onto backgrounds and camera angles.
- 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.
- Unitree says its humanoids now fight fully autonomously
The claim is Unitree's own, and nobody in the sources has checked it yet.
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