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.
Two humanoid manipulation videos went around this week and both got labeled teleop by Chris Paxton (@chris_j_paxton).
The first came from Phil Trubey, who posted what he called live footage from a 3PL customer site, a third-party logistics warehouse. Three Ultra robots coordinate to build boxes, pack, tape, label and place items into the correct USPS and FedEx bins. Trubey said Ultra writes the back end software that integrates with the customer's order processing system plus the AI training for each application, and that under a RaaS contract (robots as a service, paid by subscription) payback time is zero, so customers save money immediately.
Paxton replied to the clip saying it was fun to imagine telling people four years ago that robots running end to end neural nets would be deployed and paying for themselves. Eric Rachlin (@eerac) then asked the direct question, whether the robots in the video were teleoped or running policies. Paxton first said his understanding was autonomy with teleop interventions for failures, and that he was not sure what was happening at any given moment. He later said flatly that this specific video is teleop, meaning a human controlling it remotely.
Digit too
On the same day Agility posted Digit rearranging a full room's worth of objects, dragging a couch and picking up chairs, and described it as the same generalized manipulation Digit uses for mixed loads and changing layouts on a real warehouse floor. Agility's post did not mention teleop. Paxton, calling it our policy, said a person is steering it.
Shown versus claimed
Neither post disclosed a human in the loop. Trubey framed the Ultra clip as real world AI robotics now, and Agility framed the Digit clip as generalized manipulation. Paxton's wider point in the thread was that end-to-end learned policies work for some things but usually look worse than the flashiest robot videos, which he said are basically always teleop or overfit.
The business claim and the autonomy claim are different claims. Robots that pay for themselves with a remote operator filling the gaps is still a real product. It is just not what the captions implied.
I’m a big fan of Ultra but they also leverage teleop pretty heavily.
This is an rl teleop policy (someone is steering it), but its not trivial to make a robot do such things
it usually looks lamer than the very best robot skills which are basically always teleop or overfit