Posts

In this post I talk about a few papers about non-standard robot embodiments I found a delight to learn about. If you’re a little fatigued by the current humanoid hype cycle like me and want a brief distraction then this is a read for you. Why the fatigue? There is a LOT of hype. So many startups that you can’t even comfortably fit all the companies on a map for China. Bank of America forecasts 3 billion clankers by 2060. We’re talking predictions of smartphone level of adoption. ...

The field of robotics is experiencing an algorithmic shift towards VLAs (Vision Language Action) models - teaching transformers to “speak” robot actions in the physical world. In this post, I’ll: Demystify robot actions - what do VLAs output to make robots move. Review how action representations have evolved over the past couple of years. I don’t have a robotics background so all of this is quite new to me, and I’ve always been perplexed by the bridging of what must happen between a model outputting tokens to an actual arm flipping a pancake. What do robot actions actually look like? ...