| HN Mirror

No, the above is absolutely exactly true. Robots folding clothes and tying shoelaces etc is nothing but a tech demo at this point.

It's difficult to grok this because if you watch a human folding a t-shirt, you can reliably predict that the same human will fold a different t-shirt just as well, and in fact be perfectly capable of folding a wide variety of other clothes items as well. Not so for robots. With robots, what you see is precisely what you get. If you see a robot folding a t-shirt, all that means is that that particular robot can fold that particular t-shirt. The state of the art today is that the same robot cannot be expected to be able to fold a different t-shirt.

For example, see this article about Mobile ALOHA at Google. There's a passage where the visiting, awe-struck, journalist asks whether the robot he's just seen tying up a pair of shoelaces can tie up his own shoe.

“If I gave it my shoe,” I ventured, “would it just totally fail?”

“We could try,” Tompson said. I removed my right sneaker, with apologies to anyone forced to handle it. Tompson gamely placed it on the table, while Driess reloaded the policy.

“To set expectations,” Driess said, “this is a task that is thought of as being impossible.”

Tompson eyed his new experimental subject with some trepidation. “Very short shoelaces,” he said.

The policy booted up, and the claws set to work. This time, they poked at the shoelace without getting a grip. “Do you give consent for your shoe to be destroyed?” Driess joked, as the hands grabbed at the tongue. Tompson let them try for a few more seconds before hitting the Failure pedal.

https://archive.ph/CiJJG#selection-1887.0-1915.291

(Original: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/02/a-revolution-i...)

As to ACT-2 which basically uses the same techniques as ALOHA (imitation learning) far as I can tell, that's a commercial product and the information they give on their site is difficult to parse. E.g. they say they have 99.1% ±0.3 success rate, 778 successful folds and 9 garment types which is low enough to engender some trust they're not trying to inflate their numbers, but they don't say whether they trained on the garments used in evaluation or not. Chances are they did, because that's the current limit of the technology, i.e. if the garment being folded is unseen (as opposed to the environment, which they tout) then performance is basically random. So either ACT-2 have a major breakthrough that is a few leaps and bounds away from the current state of the art, or you've just watched a tech demo.

The fact that they only advertise "9 garment types" though is a big hint: they have the same problem with generalisation as everybody else at this point in time.