Astro Hacker News - Moravec's Paradox and the Robot Olympics

bglazer |next [-]

I genuinely did not expect to see a robot handling clothing like this within the next ten years at least. Insanely impressive

I do find it interesting that they state that each task is done with a fine tuned model. I wonder if that’s a limitation of the current data set their foundation model is trained on (which is what I think they’re suggesting in the post) or if it reflects something more fundamental about robotics tasks. It does remind me of a few years ago in LLMs when fine tuning was more prevalent. I don’t follow LLM training methodology closely but my impression was that the bulk of recent improvements have come from better RL post training and inference time reasoning.

Obviously they’re pursuing RL and I’m not sure spending more tokens at inference would even help for fine manipulation like this, notwithstanding the latency problems with that.

So, maybe the need for fine tuning goes away with a better foundation model like they’re suggesting? I hope this doesn’t point towards more fundamental limitations on robotics learning with the current VLA foundation model architectures

ACCount37 |root |parent |next [-]

There's a lot of indications that robotics AI is in a data-starved regime - which means that future models are likely to attain better 0-shot performance, solve more issues in-context, generalize better, require less task-specific training, and be more robust.

But it seems like a degree of "RL in real life" is nigh-inevitable - imitation learning only gets you this far. Kind of like RLVR is nigh-inevitable for high LLM performance on agentic tasks, and for many of the same reasons.

tim333 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Looks like we may actually have robot maids picking stuff up before too long!

Re. not expecting it for ten years at least, current progress is pretty much in line with Moravec's predictions from 35 years ago. (https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.htm)

I wonder if he still follows this stuff?

makeitdouble |root |parent |next [-]

> robot maids

What fascinates me is we could probably make self-folding clothes. We also already have non wrinkle clothes where folding is minimally needed. I wager we could go a lot further if we invested a tad more into the matter.

But the first image people seem to have of super advanced multi-thousand dollar robots is still folding the laundry.

tim333 |root |parent [-]

I think it's just one of the most obvious things that Rosey from the Jetsons could do but current robots can't.

tim333 |root |parent |previous [-]

Video of Moravec talking about intelligent robots for 2030: https://youtu.be/4eVv01xOoSo?t=65

daveguy |root |parent |previous [-]

To be clear, the video at the top of the article is 4x speed and the clothes folding section is full of cut scenes.

v9v |root |parent [-]

There are other videos of the laundry tasks within the article, and they do not seem to feature cuts if I'm not mistaken.

Animats |next |previous [-]

Those videos are very impressive. This is real progress on tasks at which robotics have been failing for fifty years.

Here are some of the same tasks being attempted as part of the DARPA ARM program in 2012.[1] Compare key-in-lock and door opening with the 2025 videos linked above. Huge improvement.

We just might be over the hump on manipulation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU

godelski |next |previous [-]

  > The gold-medal task is to hang an inside-out dress shirt, after turning it right-side-in, which we do not believe our current robot can do physically, because the gripper is too wide to fit inside the sleeve

You don't need to fit inside the sleeve to turn it inside out...

Think about a sock (same principle will apply, but easier to visualize). You scrunch up the sock so it's like a disk. Then you pull to invert.

This can be done with any piece of clothing. It's something I do frequently because it's often easier (I turn all my clothes inside out before washing).

Dylan16807 |root |parent [-]

With those grippers, though? There's a lot of difficulty in making it scrunch up a sock, and a sock does fit. Doing a long sleeve completely unanchored is probably physically possible with extreme care but I see why they mark the robot down as physically unable.

godelski |root |parent [-]

Definitely not trivial but I disagree "impossible". Better to just not use that word and say "too difficult given our grippers". By saying impossible it implies they are limiting their own thinking, not to mention that RL often comes up with pretty interesting solutions.

|root |parent |next [-]

Dylan16807 |root |parent |previous [-]

The spot where they said impossible should have been worded differently, I agree. The later phrasing isn't so bad.

DonHopkins |next |previous [-]

The Turing Institute in Glasgow hosted the First Robot Olympics on 27–28 September 1990 at the Sports Centre at the University of Strathclyde, featuring 68 robots from 12 countries.

Our robotic overlords have come a long way in 35 years!

Check out the cool retro robot photos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Robot_Olympics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute

My favorites:

Robug II disqualified for trying to mount Russian competitor during race.

Torchbearer NEL carrying flame to Olympic Venue from Greek Restaurant.

Walking pizza box Biped Walker, University of Wales. Paul Channon & Simon Hopkins.

The Seventh Incarnation of Dr Who (Sylvestor McCoy) opens the event with Sue Mowforth.

Richard 1st robot head commentator from The Turing Institute, Glasgow. (I use this as my Slack avatar!)

chrishare |next |previous [-]

Sergey Levine, one of the co-founders, sat for an excellent Dwarkesh podcast episode this year, which I thoroughly recommend.

sroussey |previous [-]

Robolympics.ai