robotics

Every now and then you come across some incredible engineering that you just have to share.

This is one of those videos. Strap in and enjoy.

It’s certaintly a fascinating time for robotics. I am generally pessimistic of the current state, and likely fates, of much of the current landscape of the robotics industry, but it is undeniable we are rapidly unlocking new capabilities and research is flying forward.

This talk acts as an excellent high level overview of the key innovations to our approach of utilizing reinforcement learning for better performance of robots with our VLMs / VLAs for a more general audience.

If you want a slightly deeper dive (though admittingly out of date with the pace the field has moved) checkout my overview of LLM research aligned with robotics from 2023, and my thesis work of using LLMs to utilize heuristic knowledge to understand context of requests and environments. If I were to do a similar project today, I would certainly take a more agentic route. I certainly wish I had written arkaine prior to that project - it would have avoided so many headaches.

I’ve seen dozens and dozens of open source robotic arm projects; probably because of my own addiction to mechanical automatons paired with my unending desire (despite a lack of need) for a robotic arm of my own.

This one caught my eye however as it has a particularly clever accessory method without the need to of a complex end effector tool changer. If they can route power/data control signals out to the accessories next I rather like the idea.

I wonder if perhaps a more direct approach should be utilized and the base end effector / finger gripper should be simply an accessory itself.