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RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent
- robocat 3y agoI too am a self-improving agent - but I wouldn’t call myself a robot.
- kendalf89 3y agoYour user name says otherwise.
- ooterness 3y agoOh dear, robocat has escaped the lab and it's self aware. Pull the plug now!
- peddling-brink 3y agoThe fast takeoff we’ve all been waiting for.
- FeepingCreature 3y agoI'm sorry, Manfred.
- rhn_mk1 3y agoThe robot says it's not a robot. I'd say it's lacking self awareness.
- bheadmaster 3y agoWow, I'm really excited about new autonomous mechanical beasts! What could possibly go wrong?
- JimtheCoder 3y agoWas I the only one expecting a robotic cat? I am a little disappointed...
- ivankirigin 3y ago"We demonstrate shredded furniture RoboCat had never previously seen"
- dtgriscom 3y agoOur device successfully snubbed a broad range of comestibles.
- RajT88 3y agoNext up: Teach it to be a fruit ninja.
- neilv 3y agoHow much is a real cat is wired a priori vs. learned? And is some of the learning from observing other cats?
- rhogar 3y agoPerformance on so few examples is impressive, paired with generalizability across broader tasks, and multiple embodiments + environments (and from just visual goals rather than complex verbal instructions) is quite a jump from where we saw Gato at last spring. If representative, seems a strong step toward meaningful autonomous skill acquisition/transference in realistic settings.
- aliljet 3y agoI really really really want to play with robotics at home, but I've discovered it's super expensive to get things like robotic arms at home. Are there robotics platforms that are DIY ready? I really just want to teach a robotic arm to make my coffee in the morning. And I'll apply my life's effort to achieving this only if the cost of the robotics platform is stupid low. Yes. I know that's absurd. :)
- tomp 3y agoIt’s just normally expensive, not really really expensive. You can get a robot arm for as cheap as 4k (comparable to 2 MacBooks or 1 GPU)
- juliangoldsmith 3y ago"...as cheap as..." doesn't really fit with an item that costs almost the 2020 median salary in the US.
- 3y ago
- itissid 3y agoWhat more would it take for google to succeed at something like: "robot can plant, water and harvest food that only poor laborers from other countries did, replacing whole job categories in agro business along with other things like making blue collar immigration moot"?
- tomp 3y agoRobots becoming 100x cheaper, or humans becoming 100x more expensive.
- loandbehold 3y agoUnitree sells robot similar to Boston Dynamics Spot for $2700. If you add robotic gripper to it can do things like picking strawberries cheaper than minimum wage worker. Say if robot costs $3500 and minimum wage is $10/hour then robot needs to only complete 43 8-hour shifts over it's lifetime to displace human worker.
- breakds 3y agoThat is the basic version. The EDU version which opens more API/interface to the user cost much more. Also training a whole-body (quadruped + robotic arm with gripper) to do something like picking strawberries remains challenging today.
- loandbehold 3y agoIt's challenging but looks like Boston dynamics is able to do that kind of tasks. For instance they have a build in feature for spot with robotic hand that can open a door by turning door handle. And apparently it works with most doors.
- coryrc 3y agoThat won't work with rain or likely dirt or dust either. They do have a B1 which is shown forging water but it's $100k. EDIT: page says that's not the real price, but https://www.ground.ghostysky.com/en/product/unitree-b1/ https://www.ground.ghostysky.com/en/product/unitree-b1/ claims 70k€ so who knows.
- itissid 3y agoI had a more general noobish version of it in my head how all this plays out. Now that AI based task planning can learn from so few examples and can do extremely general tasks like say the instruction: "Summarize my gmail twice a day at 7:00 AM and 5:00 PM filtering spam and stuff I don't read" would spawn an agent with a plan to do exactly what you want. And if it could not you could show it once like "recording" a super smart "macro" only this time with AI agents instead of Selenium. This would be an "inversion" of API way to do things. Pretty soon people are writing tons of these "bots" and multiple cases land in the some(supreme?) court over what is a bot and what is personal property.
- itissid 3y agoI mean I am not blind, there are plenty of no code platforms that work on B2B space. But nothing in the B2C for general purpose domain that do this in a privacy safe manner, at least not one that will shake up the tech companies.
- imachine1980_ 3y agothis will probably be b2b where you are the product, like social media
- rajansaini 3y agoA successor to OpenLLaMA could make this possible. Imagine being able to deploy your own LLM.
- codelion 3y agoYou can do that today with https://meraGPT.com https://meraGPT.com
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt could, but I bet it won't. The UI is not the limiting factor - the SaaS providers are. Automation like this should be easy with regular APIs and code (or no-code tools). It isn't, because service providers don't want you to do it. A skilled dev can get their way with Selenium or some other way of browser automation - this is tolerated, because approximately no one actually does it. If anyone could easily get an LLM to automate this, you can bet service providers will scramble to find ways to defeat it (justifying it with some bullshit reason like "security", so it's not blatantly obvious they're artificially constraining their product, to prevent you walking around their most profitable toll booths). In general, it doesn't matter what new technology is promising in the abstract - if anything, it's just marketing noise. The technology will deliver only the things its wielders can make money on, and will not deliver things that don't have a good business case. It's the standard tech industry bait-and-switch. Want proof that this is more than just cynical rambling? Take a look at IFTTT, Zapier, et al. See what you can actually do with them. Notice that it's entirely limited by what the integrated services expose to those automation services. See how carefully those integrations are crafted, so that you can't exactly do much with them. If you want anything non-trivial, you'd better be a business, because individuals aren't supposed to empower themselves with technology. And if you're a business, well, anything is possible if you're willing to pay enough. The few of us who know how to operate advanced automation tools, and whose frustration outweighs the cost of micromanaging brittle DIY hacks, can beat SaaS tools into submission. Sometimes. But only as long as it stays below the noise floor of vendors' financial metrics.
- startupsfail 3y ago* After observing 1000 human-controlled demonstrations, collected in just hours, RoboCat could direct this new arm dexterously enough to pick up gears successfully 86% of the time. * Interesting, but this doesn’t sound like something that can be useful. For practical industry applications, you need high success rates. Assume you are running operations where dropping/flips/damages to the items that a robot handles are costly and not acceptable. Its only for a hobbyist pick-and-place, dropping a Lego block or wasting some components is not a big deal.
- traverseda 3y ago> Assume you are running operations where dropping/flips/damages to the items that a robot handles are costly and not acceptable. Alright, let's assume we're not too though, just for completeness sake. Plenty of industrial applications where an 86% success rate is fine, especially if you can try more than once.
- nomel 3y agoDo you have any obvious examples in mind?
- digdugdirk 3y agoPlenty of manufacturing environments that involve heavy items. Even with a lift assist, they'll still need 2-3 people to help lift or guide something to the next cell or next place in the line. Lift assists are still expensive, and if that could be replaced with a robotic arm and cut out 2-3 employees at the same time? There's going to be a big market for this. Certainly big enough to keep a company afloat while they continue to refine the product and reduce costs.
- nomel 3y agoI would assume bridge cranes handles the majority of the cases to replace human effort. It seems that "successfully 86% of the time" and "heavy items" usually means "destruction". Some secondary system to verify grip would be required.
- smoll 3y agoWhen the operator was demonstrating "perturbations", they were reaching into the scene while the robot was very close to grabbing objects they had their fingers near - isn't this dangerous? What if the robot clamped down on their fingers?
- thelastparadise 3y ago> What if the robot clamped down on their fingers? Sometimes risk needs to be taken.
- reaperman 3y agoIt’s easy to use tongs or other manipulators to interact with scene objects from a safe distance. This isn’t demonstrating good robot safety, someone will get hurt, and likely already has been, at least to minor degrees.
- typon 3y agoThis looks like a cobot (Collaborative robot). They are meant to work alongside humans - chance of injury is low because their speed/maximum force exerted is limited.
- gradstudent 3y agoNo discussion of related work in search-based motion planning. Did the last 30 years of research not happen, Deepmind?
- ChatGTP 3y ago"Robots are quickly becoming part of our everyday lives" Are they really? This capability will help accelerate robotics research, as it reduces the need for human-supervised training, and is an important step towards creating a general-purpose robot. The future people are striving to build just seems so fucking creepy to me. I don't really understand the enthusiasm for it. Maybe I would if I saw said future and maybe it would be awesome and I'd regret saying this, but right now, I just don't get it.
- andsoitis 3y agoDuplicate the cat let each flourish explore new territory and then they rejoin bits and bytes entertwined making a new kind
- logdap 3y ago[dead]
- sashank_1509 3y agoI have a very opinionated opposing view of this research. A lot of research in this direction is working on raising the floor. Basically they just want the robot to handle a large variety of simple tasks and environments. Fair enough most industrial robots can't handle the smallest changes. But many times they implicitly make the assumption that raising the floor will also raise the ceiling. They assume, if it can generalize at 90%, it might also be able to do far more dextrous tasks that humans can. I think this is completely false, at best if we could do dextrous tasks in 1 environment this can transfer them to other environments with a presumably lower efficiency. On the other hand, I think a more promising direction is to raise the ceiling of robot arm manipulation sky high. OpenAI kind of did this with Dactyl but I would like to see more of it. Can we get robotic arms to tie a shoelace, knit, perform pottery etc (with an arm like morphology, no special mechanisms). I think this can actually then lead to large scale generalization, kind of what we are seeing happening with NERF's now. I would like a robot arm NERF, overfit to one hard task but reproduces it with human like precision and dexterity. Deepminds approach to me (with GATO, robocat) seems like a red herring, they will never reach the kind of results we want from our arms.
- SongofEarth 3y agoDeepmind is google, and google suffers from chronical dabbling and never shipping products, I'd be surprised if they even care much about generalizing to useful tasks. And about floor vs ceiling, what's really important is robustness, only robust robots can be deployed in the wild, at this time Dactyl with all its fingers is still too difficult to control, RoboCat got the grippers right, the problem really is they are again doing cute things with large models instead of raising robustness.
- d4rkp4ttern 3y agoWhy say “self-improving” when “learning” would suffice? Or is there a nuance I am missing? I’ve heard people even use the term “self-learning” and wonder why !
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- FrustratedMonky 3y agoEveryone seems to dismiss the 'Terminator' scenario in AI. Mainly because robots are lagging, or not having as remarkable break throughs as GPT, (even Boston Dynamics, is great, but watch their 'behind the scene' on all the trial and error). This seems like a step in direction. Hook up some of this, some self-driving car tech, some GPT-4, starting to look a lot more like 'Terminator' is doable, or at least not a complete fantasy.