Updates from CoRL and IEEE Humanoids

Plus more stories from the 'making real robots' frontier, and all the latest news in robots and startups.

Nov 25, 2024

Best Papers from CoRL or the Conference on Robot Learning

"Outstanding Paper Award" Winners for CoRL 2024

PoliFormer: Scaling On-Policy RL with Transformers Results in Masterful Navigators

Kuo-Hao Zeng, Kiana Ehsani, Rose Hendrix, Jordi Salvador, Zichen Zhang, Alvaro Herrasti, Ross Girshick, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Luca Weihs

One Model to Drift Them All

Franck Djeumou, Thomas Jonathan Lew, Nan Ding, Michael Thompson, Makoto Suminaka, Marcus Greiff, John Subosits

"Outstanding Paper Award" Finalists for CoRL 2024

ReMix: Optimizing Data Mixtures for Large Scale Imitation Learning

Joey Hejna, Chethan Anand Bhateja, Yichen Jiang, Karl Pertsch, Dorsa Sadigh

Equivariant Diffusion Policy

Dian Wang, Stephen Hart, David Surovik, Tarik Kelestemur, Haojie Huang, Haibo Zhao, Mark Yeatman, Jiuguang Wang, Robin Walters, Robert Platt

HumanPlus: Humanoid Shadowing and Imitation from Humans

Zipeng Fu, Qingqing Zhao, Qi Wu, Gordon Wetzstein, Chelsea Finn

OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model

Moo Jin Kim, Karl Pertsch, Siddharth Karamcheti, Ted Xiao, Ashwin Balakrishna, Suraj Nair, Rafael Rafailov, Ethan P Foster, Pannag R Sanketi, Quan Vuong, Thomas Kollar, Benjamin Burchfiel, Russ Tedrake, Dorsa Sadigh, Sergey Levine, Percy Liang, Chelsea Finn

IEEE Humanoids: Awards and Overview

This was the largest IEEE Humanoids conference to date with over 700 registrants and more than 30 exhibitors. The Humanoids competition also leads into the first euROBIN Coopetition, with drones, quadrupeds, mobile manipulators and, of course, humanoids, showcasing skills in service, industrial and outdoor robotics.

Humanoids was in many ways a ‘mini-ICRA’ without the overloaded schedule but with social events in beautiful buildings and food that enhanced France’s reputation for fine cuisine. It not only looked beautiful but tasted delicious too. (And sustainably sourced and packaged.)

Plenaries:

Luis Sentis, The Point of Humanoid Robots
Kento Kawaharazuka, History and Future of Tendon-driven Musculoskeletal Humanoids
Michael Yu Wang, Rapid Rise of Humanoid Robots in China
Jan Peters, Inductive Biases for Learning of Anthropomorphic Robots
Justin Carpentier, Towards Fully Differentiable Control Architecture for Robotics: Simpler, Nimbler, Faster, Stronger
Agnieszka Wykowska, The role of humanoid robots in cognitive neuroscience

Awards:

Finally, see you in Seoul Korea for CoRL and Humanoids 2025 from Sept 27 to Oct 2, then Hangzhou in China for iROS from October 19 to 25!

No, startups shouldn’t always take the highest valuation, seed VCs say - Elizabeth Yin in TechCrunch

The single biggest reason why startups succeed - Bill Gross - Being Guru

Some Thoughts on Robotics Startups

Michael Ferguson at Robot & Chisel, 10/01/2024

Robotics Startups of the Past and Present

Over the past year or two, I’ve had a number of conversations that were basically “why is it so much harder to get funding for robotics stuff these days?”. While you could blame macroeconomics, lack of LP liquidity, and higher interest rates, I think this actually largely comes down to the fact that there haven’t been all that many really big exits in robotics. Robotics founders tend to be very good at building cool tech solutions, but not so good at actually selling and monetizing that technology.

When Kiva Systems sold to Amazon in 2012 for $775M, there weren’t all that many robotics companies out there - so it looked like maybe this was a space that would generate great returns. Now, a little over 10 years later, there have been a handful of exits in the several-hundred-million-USD range (Universal Robots, 6Rivers, MIR, Fetch Robotics, Clearpath Robotics / Otto), but most of those raised significantly more capital than Kiva Systems did and all of them exited for a lower price than Kiva. None of them exited at the same kind of crazy valuation that Google bought Nest for in 2014 ($3.2B - this was another “hardware” exit that drove interest in robotics around that time).

Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots (MIR) are setup more like traditional robot manufacturers - they build robots, sell them at relatively low margins, and use an extensive network of integrators who actually install and program the robots. Notably, both companies come out of the EU - I feel that most US-based investors who do seed/A rounds would not fund this sort of company today.

What those US-based investors do fund looks a bit different. These companies are largely founded by robotics experts. They are vertically integrated, often manufacturing their own robots in-house, building their own mapping, localization, navigation, and cloud-based fleet management, and often setting up their own direct sales channels. Many of those direct sales channels focus on “recurring revenue” by offering robots as a service. There are numerous examples.

One outlier to this model though would be Locus Robotics. They weren’t founded by robotics experts - they were founded by domain experts in third party logistics (3PL). These domain experts were also a built-in customer - as an early customer of Kiva Systems, they had a real need for a new robotics solution after the Kiva acquisition And hey, guess what, Locus is doing pretty well.

Robotics is not SAAS

What surprises me is there are still investment firms trying this same playbook today. They go out and fund a robotics company founded entirely by roboticsists (and for some reason, many seem to think there are bonus points if every one of the founders is a Robotics PhD and has never held a job outside of academia)……..

From Prototype to Product

A half day workshop on manufacturing for robotics and deep tech startups from IEEE RAS and Entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley Robotics and Circuit Launch, at the new Circuit Launch location in Mountain View, 599 Fairchild Drive.

Humanoids Summit - MC'd by Evan Ackerman and Andra Keay

Silicon Valley Robotics is proud to be the strategic advisor for the first Humanoids Summit, Dec 11th and 12th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

The first speakers to be announced include Jonathan Hurst from Agility Robotics. You’ll also meed 1X, Apptronik, Kind Humanoids, Engineered Arts, Enchanted Tools and Hanson Robotics, with MCs Evan Ackerman and Andra Keay. And we’re just getting started.

The Summit has expanded to three tracks in order to accommodate more stellar speakers and exhibitors, and if you’re a Silicon Valley Robotics member you get a great discount on exhibiting and attending.

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Meet Proxie - Cobot

Looks like Proxie from Brad Porter’s Cobot is bringing out the competition to Robust’s Grace and Carter.

Robot News

Cobot’s Proxie and Video Friday on IEEE Spectrum

The man behind Amazon’s robot army wants everyone to have an AI-powered helper - Wired

A revolution in how robots learn - New Yorker

San Francisco’s newest robotaxis hit the streets … looking like toasters - Underscore_SF

US deploys first-ever autonomous robotic cameras in stratosphere nationwide - Interesting Engineering

Robots Struggle to Match Warehouse Workers on ‘Really Hard’ Jobs - NYTimes

Humanoids robotics will transform manufacturing and the global economy - Amir Husain - Forbes

How hard should construction robots be allowed to hit human workers - Construction Briefing

Will robots replace herbicides - Seed World

Packaging and Robots: How AI and sustainability are transforming the journey from click to delivery at Amazon - IEEE Spectrum

China’s EV maker XPENG unveils Iron robot with 60 joints to mimic human movements - Interesting Engineering

Large Behavior Models Surpass Large Language Models To Create AI That Walks and Talks - Lance Eliot - Forbes

Robots help unlock mystery of human sense of self - Neuroscience News

Anduril Industries Awarded $200 Million Contract to Develop Counter Unmanned Aerial System (CUAS) for the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) - SUAS News

Robots and AI are rebuilding the supply chain from the ground up - PYMNTS

China surpasses Germany and Japan in industrial robotics adoption density: Report - South China Morning Post

More than 10% of South Korea’s workforce is now robotic, survey finds - FoxBusiness

Snake robot from Carnegie Mellon tackles urban rescue missions - MSN

Built in four days, this $120 robot arm cleans a spill with help from GPT-4o - TechCrunch

The AI Energy Wars Will Get Worse - Air Street Capital