Large language models for robotics
Using LLMs to generate robot control commands and end-effector poses directly. Every Robotics Weekly story on Large language models for robotics, newest first. 9 stories since September 2026.
- 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.
- FANUC cobot takes spoken commands, trained before the arm existed
Lukas Ziegler says the team built the policy against a digital twin because the physical hardware was not available yet.
- 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.
- 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.
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- 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.
- 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.
- Astra drove a robot arm from one human video, Xiao says
A first-pass success on one task, a self-written real2sim pipeline, and a benchmark post that says the gap is still ten times.
- 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.
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