How is AI helping robots to generalise their skills to unfamiliar environments? 🤖 🏠 In the latest episode, I chatted to Prof. Lerrel Pinto (@lerrelpinto.com) from New York University about #robot learning and decision making. Available wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/robottalkpod

We just released RUKA, a $1300 humanoid hand that is 3D-printable, strong, precise, and fully open sourced! The key technical breakthrough here is that we can control joints and fingertips of the robot **without joint encoders**. All we need here is self-supervised data collection and learning.

When life gives you lemons, you pick them up. (trained with robotutilitymodels.com)

What would you love to know about #robot learning and decision making? Later this season, I'll be chatting to Prof. Lerrel Pinto (@lerrelpinto.com) from NYU about using machine learning to train robots to adapt to new environments. Send me your questions for Lerrel: robottalk.org/ask-a-question/

Is there a word for the feeling when you want to cheer for the other team?

The robot behaviors shown below are trained without any teleop, sim2real, genai, or motion planning. Simply show the robot a few examples of doing the task yourself, and our new method, called Point Policy, spits out a robot-compatible policy!

This is important because the humble iPhone is one of the best accessories for embodied AI out there, if not actually the best. It's got a depth sensor, good camera, built-in internet, decent compute, and -- uniquely -- it has really good slam already built in.

We just released AnySense, an iPhone app for effortless data acquisition and streaming for robotics. We leverage Apple’s development frameworks to record and stream: 1. RGBD + Pose data 2. Audio from the mic or custom contact microphones 3. Seamless Bluetooth integration for external sensors

A useful “productivity” trick is to remind yourself that research should be fun and inspiring and if it’s not that something should change.

Just found a new winner for the most hype-baiting, unscientific plot I have seen. (From the recent Figure AI release)

One reason to be intolerant of misleading hype in tech and science is that tolerating the small lies and deception is how you get tolerance of big lies

Thank you to @sloanfoundation.bsky.social for this generous award to our lab. Hopefully this will bring us closer to building truly general-purpose robots!

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation@sloanfoundation.bsky.social · last yr.

🎉Congrats to the 126 early-career scientists who have been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship this year! These exceptional scholars are drawn from 51 institutions across the US and Canada, and represent the next generation of groundbreaking researchers. sloan.org/fellowships/...

A fun, clever idea from @upiter.bsky.social : treat code generation as a sequential editing problem -- this gives you loads of training data from synthetically editing existing code And it works! Higher performance on HumanEval, MBPP, and CodeContests across small LMs like Gemma-2, Phi-3, Llama 3.1

Ulyana Piterbarg@upiter.bsky.social · last yr.

Our paper showing that LMs benefit from human-like abstractions for code synthesis was accepted to ICLR! 🇸🇬 We show that order matters in code gen. -- casting code synthesis as a sequential edit problem by preprocessing examples in SFT data improves LM test-time scaling laws

We have been working a bunch on offline world models. Pre-trained features from DINOv2 seem really powerful for modeling. I hope this opens up a whole set of applications for decision making and robotics! Check out the thread from @gaoyuezhou.bsky.social for more details.

@gaoyuezhou.bsky.social · 2y ago

Can we extend the power of world models beyond just online model-based learning? Absolutely! We believe the true potential of world models lies in enabling agents to reason at test time. Introducing DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features for Zero-shot Planning.

If you’re in grad school, finding a therapist can be really helpful. The thing you’re doing is hard and it’s harder if you don’t have help managing imposter syndrome, stress, self esteem, and a whole bunch of other things.

omg a student somehow accidentally wrote an email addressed to a faculty-wide NYU listserv and my inbox is now a master class on who understands the difference between a listserv and an email chain

Humans vs Ants: Problem-solving Skills

At NYU Abu Dhabi today and in love how cat friendly the campus is!

This holiday season, take a moment to visit your local bookstore. It’s about more than finding a great book—it’s about supporting the small businesses that keep our communities thriving.

HOT 🔥 fastest, most precise, and most capable hand control setup ever... Less than $450 and fully open-source 🤯 by @huggingface, @therobotstudio, @NepYope This tendon-driven technology will disrupt robotics! Retweet to accelerate its democratization 🚀 A thread 🧵

Outstanding presentation, finally! DynaMo: In-Domain Dynamics Pretraining for Visuo-Motor Control @jeffacce.bsky.social @lerrelpinto.com

Love this approach. Reminds me of a more detailed version of an idea I had. Will definitely look deeper into this ironj.github.io/eleuther/

EleutherAI: Tool Use Idea

I created a working diagram of how a set of agent AI models could be used to answer math questions using tools. At the time I wrote this post, tool use wasn’t commonly understood, nor was agent AI bas...

ironj.github.io

New paper! We show that by using keypoint-based image representation, robot policies become robust to different object types and background changes. We call this method Prescriptive Point Priors for robot Policies or P3-PO in short. Full project is here: point-priors.github.io

Modern policy architectures are unnecessarily complex. In our #NeurIPS2024 project called BAKU, we focus on what really matters for good policy learning. BAKU is modular, language-conditioned, compatible with multiple sensor streams & action multi-modality, and importantly fully open-source!

Robot utility models are not just among the first learned models that work zero-shot on a mobile manipulator, but also provide a nuanced discussion on what works and what doesn't in data-driven robot learning.

Lerrel Pinto@lerrelpinto.com · 2y ago

Since we are nearing the end of the year, I'll revisit some of our work I'm most excited about from the last year and maybe a sneak peek of what we are up to next. To start of, Robot Utility Models, which enables zero-shot deployment. In the video below, the robot hasnt seen these doors before.

Since we are nearing the end of the year, I'll revisit some of our work I'm most excited about from the last year and maybe a sneak peek of what we are up to next. To start of, Robot Utility Models, which enables zero-shot deployment. In the video below, the robot hasnt seen these doors before.

I'd like to introduce what I've been working at @hellorobot.bsky.social: Stretch AI, a set of open-source tools for language-guided autonomy, exploration, navigation, and learning from demonstration. Check it out: github.com/hello-robot/... Thread ->

How to drive your research forward? “I tested the idea we discussed last time. Here are some results. It does not work. (… awkward silence)” Such conversations happen so many times when meetings with students. How do we move forward? You need …

Then "ten simple rules" series from plos might count? It is a little bit more about how science is done, but insofar as it aims to write down practical tips that are often just spread by word of mouth it could be a good inspiration: collections.plos.org/collection/t...

Ten Simple Rules - PLOS Collections

"Ten Simple Rules" provide a quick, concentrated guide for mastering some of the professional challenges research scientists face in their careers.

collections.plos.org

I think we need an AMA series for Robotics / Embodied AI with an optional anonymous setting. Will be both fun and informative to new community members to absorb folk knowledge.

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 2y ago

Does everyone in your community agree on some folk knowledge that isn’t published anywhere? Put it in a paper! It’s a pretty valuable contribution