Ethan B. Holland

Over 50,200 manually organized AI links and counting

Robotics and Embodiment News: Week Ending 02/02/2024

Robots and Embodiment

Real world robotics is challenging, some may believe that with reinforcement learning (RL) it’s even harder. Today we open sourced SERL, a software package offering a comprehensive workflow for getting robotic RL to deploy fast and work reliably. SERL can learn difficult tasks in as little as 20 minutes.

How to break locomotion agile-safe tradeoffs?Introduce Agile But Safe: Learning Collision-Free High-Speed Legged Locomotion

Interested in making your bipedal robots to be athletes? We summarized our RL work to create robust & adaptive controllers for general bipedal skills. 400m-dash, running over terrains/against perturbations, targeted jumping, compliant walking, not a problem for bipeds now 

​​https://twitter.com/ZhongyuLi4/status/1752854596400361568

The Apple Robot will begin to show in early form starting in 2026.  Just about all Apple experts could not conceive of the Apple Robot in 2024.
https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1752923851665883336

Humanoid Robot Startup Figure AI in Funding Talks With Microsoft, OpenAI

Figure AI is building a humanoid robot to perform hard jobs

Microsoft weighs leading round that could raise $500 million

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/humanoid-robot-startup-figure-ai-in-funding-talks-for-over-2-billion-valuation
https://archive.md/RtYbv

Ultra-lightweight walking assist wearable robot,

is a wearable robot that aims to promote healthy living through daily walking exercise. Walking is the most basic form of exercise that can be easily incorporated into the daily routine. Walking as an effective exercise requires proper posture, an optimal pace and a certain amount of time. WIMTM makes walking an easy and efficient exercise.

https://www.wirobotics.com/en/wim.php

3D-printed soft valve system can take a hit – survives car runovers and powers a resilient soft robot walker.

Company touts AI-powered lawn mowers

“Our robotic fleet was featured in NBC today for the work they have been doing in LA. 

Really cool to see embodied AI, go from an idea in a lab to a usable product.”

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/company-touts-ai-powered-lawn-mowers/3327445

Example of AI translating commands to AR agents, which could eventually become real world embodiment (provincial, but makes the point).  

Multimodal AI vision and robotics sorting objectshttps://twitter.com/CobotMy/status/1752976135124857082

Be Sure To Read “This Week In AI”

This week’s executive overview and top links are here:

AI News #18: Week Ending 02/02/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 12 Stories

The post you just read is an extension of my weekly newsletter, This Week In AI, an executive summary of the top things to know in AI. Each week, I create an accessible overview for laypeople to feel confident they are conversant with the week’s AI developments. I include a curated list of must-click links of the week, to offer everyone a hands-on opportunity to explore the most intriguing updates in artificial intelligence across various categories, including robotics, imagery, video, AR/VR, science, ethics, and more. Beyond the overview, I post these topic-based deeper dives (below). If you haven’t read this week’s overview, I recommend starting there.

Credits/Sources

Most of these links come from just a few incredible sources.  Please follow them:

Previous Issues

One response to “Robotics and Embodiment News: Week Ending 02/02/2024”

  1. AI News #18: Week Ending 02/02/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 18 Stories – Ethan B. Holland

    […] Robotics/Embodiment News of the Week: This is the most intense area of AI. Embodiment refers to putting an AI inside of a machine. It’s “embodying” the object and therefore giving a robot agency in the real world. An example would be using a large language model as an interface to a complex coding task. Just as you ask “Alexa, play Bad Blood by Taylor Swift on Spotify” using plain language, with embodiment you could ask a robot to “Go to the laundry basket and bring me all of the red shirts”. The language model in the robot would translate your request into the proper code to go get the red shirts. The robot was never trained on the task. Another type of embodiment would be training a robot using virtual reality simulations. Using an simulation, a robot could be trained on thousands of scenarios until the real world can be swapped out and the robot doesn’t “notice”. This section also includes factory automation and human prosthetics. There will be some overlap with other categories like autonomous vehicles. I first learned about embodiment from Alan Thompson. I highly recommend his video explainer: https://youtu.be/peLqYP9BAUg?si=2FzrvDlw-qaQFaCx.This week’s latest robot and embodiment AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/07/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-02-02-2024/ […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Trending

Discover more from Ethan B. Holland

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading