Manu Raveendran

On a sabbatical — doing 2ⁿᵈ batchelor's in math
Cofounder & CEO @vipasyincare

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

Grateful to let you know that my research paper got published in the Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics today. ✨

https://t.co/scM3um1u9m

[Jasmine @aagrabakijasmin]

Extremely proud to be part of this project in a small way!! ❤️

Indian stories and innovation have such a long way to go!

A story on male contraceptive!

[Jasmine @aagrabakijasmin]

Started reading this book and gonna list out all the amazing books mentioned here!

Absolutely enjoying the range from philosophy to science fiction!

Books :
- Ender’s game by Orson Scott Card
- The Chess Computer Handbook by David Levy

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

Amazing to be part this discussion on forcevla2, and the general dynamics of contact rich manipulation involving parametrizing force modalities.

Thank you @aryanmadhaverma for organizing this, and thank you @itsarnavb & @_lagrangepoint for offering the space created with such beauty & intent. 🫶

[amv @aryanmadhaverma]

session went well, was fun to whiteboard with people again after a while. thanks @itsarnavb and @_lagrangepoint for hosting us, and everyone who joined. you’re og

quick summary of what we talked about:

started by sketching a crude version of how we’d integrate force as a modality ourselves. image tokenised through ViT, proprio, and text encoded into a pretrained VLM, latent flowing into an action head in the same policy. also talked about action chunking on the decoder helping with inference latency and temporal coherence within a chunk, though long chunks risk drifting from the world

then started picking apart the paper. the action head is actually a separate altered transformer that ingests numerical force as input and outputs (delta_p, f), directly fed into the robot’s impedance controller which converts to motor torque and makes the arm respond to feedback. different from the usual IK-based position controller logic

discussed that the improvement over pi0 might have come from the model being steered to produce a force vector as output, not the MoE in the action head. paper doesn’t show with/without MoE ablations so can’t say

also briefly touched on interrupts for robots. training time we feed deliberately bad demos and recover. inference time we use DAgger and add a human intervention label and retrain. model has no internal knowledge of whether data came from human intervention or general teleop

some questions that branched off from our discussion:

- apart from force, what other modalities of input and feedback would make action policies more aware and accurate?

- slow and fast moving policies and how they get baked together at high frequency of operation?

- flow inpainting as an inference time optimisation for cloud based vlas? (under explored)

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@aryanmadhaverma I'm in @aryanmadhaverma

[Rohit Awasthi @rohitawasthi]

Jaan log at Knowhere. @NikitaKurup @iRahulJadhav @aagrabakijasmin @0fx121

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@VishakhRanotra @vip

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

Couldn't get enough of @skelegrow 's radiant smile! Left us all craving for more. ✨ w/ @vaibhaw_vipul @nileshtrivedi @niketansrane

[Vipul Vaibhaw @vaibhaw_vipul]

Successful Math meetup!

I love Bengaluru! ❤️

We discussed ideas around modular forms, upper complex plane, elliptical curves and hyperbolic functions.

Next one will be more hacker-space like.

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@vaibhaw_vipul @aagrabakijasmin Same here @vaibhaw_vipul ! 🫶

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@aagrabakijasmin @vaibhaw_vipul Thank youu @vaibhaw_vipul ~ 'Remembrance is the sweet perfume of the soul.' 🫶🏼

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

Took a lecture on entrepreneurship at Jindal Global Business School @JGBSofficial . The class was part of Prof. Sahana V Rajan's course work. I really loved Prof. Sahana's approach to teaching and course work — a beautiful blend of technicality, inter-disciplinarity, business, philosophy, humour, inclusiveness, and empathy. And I'm really grateful that I got the opportunity to teach; such a meaningful thing to do.

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

So honored to sit in a class by Prof. Alladi Sitaram — a giant from India in harmonic analysis & representation theory! Something beautifully chill and fun about old retired mathematicians. ❤ Sir is 78.

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

Woohoo! ❤

[Vipul Vaibhaw @vaibhaw_vipul]

Wrote a lorenz attractor simulator (Butterfly effect from chaos theory).

Play with it - https://t.co/DwP5F1vaAB

written in python. Easy to interact with.

Teach yourself fundamental idea of Chaos Theory.

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@vaibhaw_vipul @doesdatmaksense Oh looks awesome! With amazing potential. I'll properly check this out! ✨

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@aagrabakijasmin @iRahulJadhav Really inspiring @iRahulJadhav ❤ God bless. ✨

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@DudeWhoCode @aagrabakijasmin Oh yes! 🤭 Please do send me. 🫶

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@aagrabakijasmin @PPuzhu @PPuzhu Amazing! 😍

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@aagrabakijasmin @DudeWhoCode @DudeWhoCode 😍

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

@ajeetbharath Agree. 🤭

[Manu Raveendran @0fx0000]

Congratulations @ajeetbharath @radhikagandhi & @cradlewise to receive such beautiful words of acknowledgement! So proud. ✨

Fondly remembering how extraordinarily brilliant Bharath was in college itself! ❣️

[Sam Altman @sama]

we bought a lot of silly baby things that we haven't needed

but definitely i recommend a cradlewise crib and a lot more burp rags than you think you could possibly need