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.)
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).