>> State-of-the-art performance on R2R-CE To be clear, R2R-CE is a benchmark consisting of simulated environments. So what this means is that beating this ben

>> State-of-the-art performance on R2R-CE To be clear, R2R-CE is a benchmark consisting of simulated environments. So what this means is that beating this benchmark is about as useful as getting a robot to play Minecraft, or some other video game. Great, but a robot must run in the real world, in physical reality: not in a digital environment. Unfortunately it's extremely hard to evaluate the performance of robotic systems in physical reality. First of all because if they don't do well you need lots of spare robots to complete the evaluation. The article above does include the obligatory video of a physical robot navigating a virtually empty, uncluttered "office" environment with nice, smooth surfaces, at 2x speed; virtually a trademark of the entire research field by now. Brownie points for having three guys shuffle carefully across the robot's path towards the end of the video (they're shuffling at 2x speed so they're going reeeaaaally carefully in real life, probably ready to jump out of the way if say a heavy metallic object hurtles towards them randomly). But, this is like all the fanfare and hype about Aloha a couple of years ago: great stuff if you want your team to be bought by one of the large tech corps, or to get more funds to play with your cool tech (I mean who doesn't?). Not so great for anyone who's expecting this to be a step forward (or ahem a roll forward) on the way to having robot maids/butlers going 'round your house or office. Sorry guys.