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bouloslast Wednesday at 5:00 AM1 replyview on HN

I dunno. The folks at Physical Intelligence are showing remarkable progress for being such a small team and relying on Gemma as their base model.

https://www.pi.website/blog/pistar06 has some reasonable footage of making espresso drinks, folding cardboard boxes, etc.


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Animatslast Wednesday at 6:10 AM

That's what I was thinking, but could not find the link. Here is it working on some standard tasks.[1] Grasping the padlock and inserting the key is impressive. I've seen key-in-lock before, done painfully slowly. Finally, it's working.

That system, coupled to one of the humanoids for mobility, could be quite useful. A near term use case might be in CNC machining centers. CNC machine tools now work well enough on their own that some shops run them all night. They use replaceable cutting tools which are held in standard tool holders. Someone has to regularly replace the cutting tools with fresh ones, which limits how long you can run unattended. So a robot able to change tool holders during the night would be useful in production plants.

See [2], which is a US-based company that makes molds for injection molding, something the US supposedly doesn't do any more. They have people on day shift, but the machines run all night and on weekends. To do that, they have to have refrigerator-sized units with tools on turntables, and conveyors and stackers for workplace pallets. A humanoid robot might be simpler than all the support machinery required to feed the CNC machines for unattended operation.

[1] https://www.pi.website/blog/olympics

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suVhnA1c7vE

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