Tedrake details Walden's longest factory deployment at CoRL
The keynote covered deployment data plus large-scale pretraining, but no numbers on how long or how many sites.
Russ Tedrake gave a CoRL keynote called "Learning in the factories" and used it to walk through Walden's longest-running deployment to date.
I'm excited to keep sharing more of Walden's story as we go. Things are moving very fast!
The other two threads of the talk, in his own summary, were the value of coupling deployment data with large-scale pretraining, and what he has learned as he has broadened his focus from AI and robotics to include large-scale manufacturing. Walden Robotics says the talk is the work behind LBM 2.0 Sage, and the company pointed to a recording of the keynote and a blog post with more technical detail.
What was actually said
This is the part worth being precise about. Neither post gives a deployment length, a number of sites, a customer name, or a task. "Longest-running deployment to date" is a relative claim with nothing to measure it against yet, so the scale behind it is unknown unless the blog or the recording fills it in. Nobody in the sources has put a number on it.
The interesting bit is the framing rather than the metric. Tedrake is arguing that data coming off real factory deployments is worth more when it sits alongside large-scale pretraining, which is the standard case for large behavior models but made from the position of someone running robots in a plant rather than a lab. That is also why the manufacturing comment matters. He describes his own focus widening from AI and robotics into large-scale manufacturing, which is a different set of problems than policy learning.
Why people were watching
Walden has been quiet about specifics, and a keynote is the most detail the company has volunteered in one place. Tedrake says he plans to keep going.
For now, the honest read is that a researcher with a long track record in manipulation says the deployment data loop is working, and the public evidence for it is a talk and a blog post rather than a reported success rate.
what we’re learning from deploying robots in factories
Sound like you were at the demo
One email a day. Under three minutes. The demos, the deployments and the part the press release left out.