Physical Intelligence Sweeps Humanoid Olympics

More coming soon

Over the break the robotics company Physical Intelligence announced submissions to 11 of my Olympic Events.

There will be a more detailed post in the next few days from me, but for now you should go look at their videos.

https://www.pi.website/blog/olympics

I admit that I thought that many of these were more like 9-12 months off. Claiming so many of them only three and a half months after them being posted is wild. It is super impressive for PI and also a sign of how fast things are moving right now.

Also interesting: a lot of the tasks I added to highlight the limitations of ‘pinch-gripper-and-camera’ hardware setup are actually solvable without special hardware and don’t (like I thought when posting) require better touch sensing or more degrees of freedom in the fingers, (though I’m pretty sure I see a 6-dof force-torque sensor at the wrists.)

Jan EDIT: I was wrong, no force-torque sensing at all. Its all vision based. More details here:

It is interesting to contrast with Sunday Robotics’ approach where Sunday gets more dexterous training data with a 4 dof¹ hand (just because humans are better at wearing gloves than teleoperating) but that means they don’t have force-torque data available because you can’t cut someone’s hand off to put a force torque sensor between their hand and their wrist.²

Now go watch their videos!

(And you might as well subscribe to get my more detailed writeup and see future entries).

1. Degrees Of Freedom (Roughly the number of independent motors: a pinch gripper typically has 1 (open/close). Human hands have about 20 (we have more than one way to move each finger).

2. citation-needed