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This robot cannot "do your laundry". It is the same toy as always in robotics. It works in very specific environments, with very specific laundry, as long as no

This robot cannot "do your laundry". It is the same toy as always in robotics. It works in very specific environments, with very specific laundry, as long as no one gets in the way and nothing bad ever happens, you've trained it to do your laundry, you never buy anything unusual, nothing gets tangled too much, etc. They have an extremely specific definition of the word "laundry". Three specific shirts of size M, L, and XL, and two pairs of shorts of size 28 and 36. Then they do a mobile task on three specific shirts of size M, M, and XL, and two shorts of size 32 and 31W. That's not "laundry" the way any lay person would understand. It's sad to see yet another group hype their work for money. What they did do, is invest a tremendous amount of engineering effort to scale things up, to collect data, and to see what changes models need to scale well in this space. That's nice and useful. It's something that as academics we generally cannot afford to do. And won't be able to afford any time soon because they don't share their data and none of their results are reproducible. PS: Where is this title from? "Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry " It's not in the article. It's very misleading.

imtringued 2y ago
Sure, what you said is somewhat true, but you have seemingly misunderstood one key aspect here. They simply do not have enough training data to fold all possible laundry. If there was a way to fine-tune the robot on your own clothes, then it would be able to do your laundry just fine. You're under the mistaken impression that this is just a scripted demo built around learning directly from teleoperation as was the case with mobile aloha. The VLA model here is capable of more generalization than you are willing to admit.
Terretta 2y ago
No intention to mislead, but to fit their gist into an informing title. I was originally linking to X, describing their tweet with laundry vid, then changed to point to their source blog post, where their title doesn't fully convey the content. So this title is firm name and blog post title, adding the "laundry" from their hero video under the title and featured video on their x.com post that links to this blog post, as well as the first featured/labeled "Laundry" task discussed in body (not to mention, answering HN commenters such as this, since "doing the laundry" is by now a meme): > I’m still waiting for a neural net that can do my laundry. -- sheeshkebab 11 hours ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098153 The response to this, portrayed in both blog post and x.com feature videos, is in the third sentence of the blog post: To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent “easy” problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived. To build AI systems that have the kind of physically situated versatility that people possess, we need a new approach — we need to make AI systems embodied so that they can acquire physical intelligence. The synthesis is, this is about “doing your laundry”. Finally, to take it out of air quotes, the article's first explicit and bold labeled text task description is: LAUNDRY. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity. They hold they have demonstrated this robot doing the laundry.
YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
Mwell, the robot picking out the "laundry" from a basket next to the table is slightly more than I've seen before so at least they managed to combine two tasks that would previously be considered distinct (although note the very lengthy attempt to pick a corner of a green shirt in the "3x video" further down the article, which I think is the most honest of the bunch). I agree this is still a tech demo showing a prototype robot solving a toy task. As usual we're supposed to think "if it can do that then it should be able to do this" but it never works that way in reality.

imtringued 2y ago

Sure, what you said is somewhat true, but you have seemingly misunderstood one key aspect here. They simply do not have enough training data to fold all possible laundry. If there was a way to fine-tune the robot on your own clothes, then it would be able to do your laundry just fine. You're under the mistaken impression that this is just a scripted demo built around learning directly from teleoperation as was the case with mobile aloha. The VLA model here is capable of more generalization than you are willing to admit.

Terretta 2y ago

No intention to mislead, but to fit their gist into an informing title. I was originally linking to X, describing their tweet with laundry vid, then changed to point to their source blog post, where their title doesn't fully convey the content. So this title is firm name and blog post title, adding the "laundry" from their hero video under the title and featured video on their x.com post that links to this blog post, as well as the first featured/labeled "Laundry" task discussed in body (not to mention, answering HN commenters such as this, since "doing the laundry" is by now a meme): > I’m still waiting for a neural net that can do my laundry. -- sheeshkebab 11 hours ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098153 The response to this, portrayed in both blog post and x.com feature videos, is in the third sentence of the blog post: To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent “easy” problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived. To build AI systems that have the kind of physically situated versatility that people possess, we need a new approach — we need to make AI systems embodied so that they can acquire physical intelligence. The synthesis is, this is about “doing your laundry”. Finally, to take it out of air quotes, the article's first explicit and bold labeled text task description is: LAUNDRY. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity. They hold they have demonstrated this robot doing the laundry.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago

Mwell, the robot picking out the "laundry" from a basket next to the table is slightly more than I've seen before so at least they managed to combine two tasks that would previously be considered distinct (although note the very lengthy attempt to pick a corner of a green shirt in the "3x video" further down the article, which I think is the most honest of the bunch). I agree this is still a tech demo showing a prototype robot solving a toy task. As usual we're supposed to think "if it can do that then it should be able to do this" but it never works that way in reality.