[jefft255]

As a roboticist, it's really clear to me that this sort of transfer in controlled environment is hard but doable. I think it's already been demonstrated many times and I'm not that convinced that there is anything new in there except more GPU + fancier robot.

I'll be impressed by RL is a) they manage to do sim2real in open environments, think Doom -> office building or b) they manage to get data efficient enough that sim2real is still necessary but you don't have to do real data collection with 10 parallel robots for days on end.

As someone in mobile robotics as opposed to pure manipulation, I read these papers and I'm like: "How the hell am I supposed to get this to work on a robot moving in the real world???". I don't see anyone being close to this right now.

[ilaksh]

As a roboticist what do you think of my theory that what's missing is more biomimetic artificial muscles with greater power-to-weight ratio?

[jefft255]

Honestly I don’t know; you’re out of my area here I’m really into perception/slam/planning. Greater power to weight ratio is always good. I never really cared about biomimetism for the sake of it. If the way to get better power to weight ratio is biomimetism then great but if you can get it without trying to imitate nature then it’s great too.

[lucidrains]

https://youtu.be/aTDkYFZFWug

[jefft255]

While this is a real mobile robot, this does not really address my concerns: 1) It is not navigating in a open environment, rather a constrained workspace just like other manipulation demos. 2) They're not using any visual information for task planning and reasoning, rather doing low level control for locomotion.

Of course, I cannot emphasize enough that this is a good research paper! We're just really really far away mobile robots trained end-to-end with RL for doing any kind of tasks in open environments. And that's fine. It means more cool research to do for me.

[lucidrains]

They are going commercial soon, so we shall see how well they stand up to different open world environments.