[sashank_1509]

I follow this space closely and I never saw the 1950 teleoperation video which literally blows my mind that people had this working in 1950. Now you just need to connect that to a transformer / diffusion and it will be able to perform that task autonomously maybe 80% of the time with 200+ demonstrations and close to 100% of the time with 1000+ demonstrations.

Aloha was not new, but it’s still good work because robotics researchers were not focused on this form of data collection. The issue was most people went into the simulation rabbit hole where they had to solve sim-to-real.

Others went into the VR handset and hand tracking idea, where you never got super precise manipulations and so any robots trained on that always showed choppy movement.

Others including OpenAI decided to go full reinforcement learning foregoing human demonstrations which had some decent results but after 6 months of RL on an arm farm led by Google and Sergey Levine, the results were underwhelming to say the least.

So yes it’s not like Aloha invented teleoperation, they demonstrated that using this mode of teleoperation you could collect a lot of data that can train autonomous robot policies easily and beat other methods which I think is a great contribution!

[markisus]

I’m not sure you can say that imitation learning has been under-researched in the past. Imitation learning has been tried before alongside RL. But it did not generalize well until the advent of generative diffusion models.