How many rabbits is your robot? And interesting robotics research
The course of robot funding never runs straight. Especially if you're an angle investor.
Sigh. I wanted a picture of a cute robot cat to illustrate the follow up from last week’s robot pets article! But if I lead with Rodney Brooks’ skepticism on generative AI, then this picture kind of makes sense. (substack generated prompt ‘cute robot cat’ - 1. where’s the robot? 2. why only one front leg? 3. how many faces? 4. weird forward/backwards ears etc. etc. but it is CUTE)
MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI - TechCrunch
Good description of how Robust.ai gets better results for pragmatic work purposes from a stream of warehouse data rather than LLMs, and also a restating of Moravec’s paradox, (which the ‘fails to cite sources’ Steven Pinker reworded as "the main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard").
Brooks also delivers a takedown of exponential thinking, ie Moore’s law is some form of inviolable unending technological fact.
After showcasing Maah and Qoobo last week, I tried to find out what had happened to some of the other innovative soft robotic pets that crowdfunded in the last couple of years. Does anyone know what happened to FlatCat from JetPack Cognition Labs? Their website says they are still looking for preseed funding and ‘angle investors’.
And what about Moflin from Vanguard Industries?
ps. We still use our Qoobo for fun, comfort and too annoy the cats if they sleep on it.
pss. Brian, was that an Imperial Rabbit or a Metric Rabbit for scale?
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Kuka Medical Robotics Challenge 2.0
The KUKA Innovation Award 2025 primarily targets the interaction of robotic systems with humans in the medical environment and robots being part of future medical applications. Participants from academia, research and industry are encouraged to present system concepts that can lead to, or are already on the edge to, commercialization. Deadline for application June 28
2024 Los Angeles IEEE RO-MAN Design Challenge
The goal of the robot design competition of the 33rd RO-MAN is to provide a platform for researchers and students from a diverse background to demonstrate their vision of interactive robotics, and inspire their peers on how human-centered intelligence could augment human-robot interaction. Each team’s initial submission should be a 2-4 page pictorial, following the call template open format. Deadline extended to June 27
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Latest in Robotics Research
SPIN: Simultaneous Perception, Interaction and Navigation (CVPR 2024)
Shagun Uppal Ananye Agarwal Haoyu Xiong Kenneth Shaw Deepak Pathak
Abstract: While there has been remarkable progress recently in the fields of manipulation and locomotion, mobile manipulation remains a long-standing challenge. Compared to locomotion or static manipulation, a mobile system must make a diverse range of long-horizon tasks feasible in unstructured and dynamic environments. While the applications are broad and interesting, there are a plethora of challenges in developing these systems such as coordination between the base and arm, reliance on onboard perception for perceiving and interacting with the environment and most importantly, simultaneously integrating all these parts together. Prior works approach the problem using disentangled modular skills for mobility and manipulation that are trivially tied together. This causes several limitations such as compounding errors, delays in decision-making and no whole-body coordination. In this work, we present a reactive mobile manipulation framework that uses an active visual system to consciously perceive and react to its environment. Similar to how humans leverage whole-body and hand-eye coordination, we develop a mobile manipulator that exploits its ability to move and see, more specifically -- to move in order to see and to see in order to move. This allows it to not only move around and interact with its environment but also, choose when to perceive what using an active visual system. We observe that such an agent learns to navigate around complex cluttered scenarios while displaying agile whole-body coordination using only ego-vision without needing to create environment maps.
HumanPlus: Humanoid Shadowing and Imitation from Humans
Zipeng Fu* Qingqing Zhao* Qi Wu* Gordon Wetzstein Chelsea Finn
ABSTRACT: One of the key arguments for building robots that have similar form factors to human beings is that we can leverage the massive human data for training. Yet, doing so has remained challenging in practice due to the complexities in humanoid perception and control, lingering physical gaps between humanoids and humans in morphologies and actuation, and lack of a data pipeline for humanoids to learn autonomous skills from egocentric vision. In this paper, we introduce a full-stack system for humanoids to learn motion and autonomous skills from human data. We first train a low-level policy in simulation via reinforcement learning using existing 40-hour human motion datasets. This policy transfers to the real world and allows humanoid robots to follow human body and hand motion in real time using only a RGB camera, i.e. shadowing. Through shadowing, human operators can teleoperate humanoids to collect whole-body data for learning different tasks in the real world. Using the data collected, we then perform supervised behavior cloning to train skill policies using egocentric vision, allowing humanoids to complete different tasks autonomously by imitating human skills. We demonstrate the system on our customized 33-DoF 180cm humanoid, autonomously completing tasks such as wearing a shoe to stand up and walk, unloading objects from warehouse racks, folding a sweatshirt, rearranging objects, typing, and greeting another robot with 60-100% success rates using up to 40 demonstrations.
Latest in AI research
Also from Luiza Jarovsky…
🚨 Excellent AI paper alert: Woodrow Hartzog publishes "Two AI Truths and a Lie," and it's a must-read for everyone in AI. Important quotes:
"The two AI truths and a lie are also part of a bigger story about technology and corporate greed. There are several different accounts of this story. Kate Crawford explains AI’s extractive nature by reference to the capitalist-colonial logics of classification that underpin it. Shoshana Zuboff sees digital extraction as the inevitable endgame of late capitalism. Julie Cohen sees digital platform extraction and manipulation as a way to remake social and political institutions to legitimize their financial gain. AI is just the latest tool to succumb to what Cory Doctorow has called the “enshittification” of digital platforms. Doctorow describes the inevitable degradation cycle of platforms as “first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” Under this theory, companies deploying AI are going to try to avoid the four forces that discipline companies: competition, regulation, self-help, and workers. Any holistic regulatory response to AI and the broader story of technology and corporate greed must embolden these forces, or otherwise the cycle will continue"
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"One of the most robust defaults lawmakers should consider is presumptive prohibitions absent justifications and demonstrably safe use. This could take the form of licensing regimes, pre-clearance regimes, and other legal frameworks deployed in contexts like healthcare devices and pharmaceuticals. Gianclaudio Malgieri and Frank Pasquale have proposed a system of “unlawfulness by default” for AI systems, which would be “an ex-ante model where some AI developers have the burden of proof to demonstrate that their technology is not discriminatory, not manipulative, not unfair, not inaccurate, and not illegitimate in its legal bases and purposes.” (...)"
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"There’s much we don’t know about how AI systems will work to change our world. But there are a few things that lawmakers should count on. Companies will take everything they can for their own benefit, and we will get used it. People can benefit from AI systems and still be individually and collectively worse off overall. Unless lawmakers create rules to respond to extraction, normalization, and selfdealing, companies will use AI systems to permanently impoverish our lives."
Robot News
Agility’s humanoid robots are going to handle your Spanx - TechCrunch
Beware the smiling robot with the living skin - TechCrunch
Robotics investments are gaining speed postpandemic slowdown - TechCrunch
Persona’s founders are certain the world needs another humanoid robot - TechCrunch
Canadian government backs 2024 space accelerator in California - SpaceNews
NATO targets AI, robotics and space tech in $2B fund - Reuters
Why not give robots foot eyes? - IEEE Spectrum
Elon Musk Says Tesla’s Optimus Robot Could Drive Company To $25 Trillion Valuation - Here’s What Experts Think - Forbes
Robots steal jobs from unions - study shows decline in unionizations - Phys Org *correlation not causation!
Germany’s robotics centers establish RIG, the Robotics Institute Germany - The Robot Report
Robotics Australia Group is building a sustainable robotics industry - The Robot Report
Realtime Robotics Optimization system for workcell motion planning wins IERA recognition - The Robot Report
Endiatx plans pivotal trial through Mayo Clinic: watch TED talk - The Robot Report
Kara Walker Is No One’s Robot - New York Times
Robot Events
I’m also going to…
SF Deep Tech Week - starts Saturday June 22
Defense Industrial Base Hackathon - June 28
SVR Startup Accelerator: Protect your IP AND practice your pitch
Speakers on IP and manufacturing/scaling robot production
10.30am - 12.30pm Tuesday July 2nd
Circuit Launch and online
SEMICON West + FLEX is just around the corner! Join thousands of attendees from July 9-11, 2024 at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA.
Don't miss one of the industry's most anticipated event where visionary leaders, insightful programs, groundbreaking technologies, and unparalleled networking opportunities await.Advance Rates End June 30—Save Up to $140 Today
And some more robotics conferences:
AIM 2024 Boston MA 14 July - 18 July
RSS Delft NL July 15-19
EMBC Orlando FL July 15-19
Humanoid Robotics Festival Lima Peru Aug 14-15-16
CASE 2024 Puglia Italy 28 Aug - 1 Sep 2024
BioRob Heidelberg DE 1 Sep-Sep 4
Commercial UAV Expo : Sep 03 - Sep 05, 2024 . Las Vegas, United States of America
CLAWAR 2024 Kaiserslauten DE Sep 4 - Sep 6
Actuate Summit : Sep 18, 2024 . San Francisco, United States of America
ICRA@40 Rotterdam NL 23 Sep - 26 Sep
ANTS (Swarm robotics) 2024 : Oct 09 - Oct 11, 2024 . Konstanz, Germany
IROS 2024 AbuDhabi 14 Oct - 18 Oct
FabTech Orlando 15 Oct -17 Oct
ROSCon Odense DK 21 Oct - 23 Oct
CORL Munich DE 6 Nov - 9 Nov
IEEE Future of Telepresence Pasadena CA 16 Nov - 17 Nov
Humanoids 2024 Nancy FR 26 Nov - 28 Nov
ProMat : Mar 17 - Mar 20, 2025 . Chicago, United States of America
ICRA 2025 Atlanta Georgia 17 May - 23 May 2025