Ville🤖

gentleman scientist 🤖 @armnet_dev

building the world's largest open arm farm

🇫🇮🇬🇧

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

A month ago @pravsels and I set out to reproduce @physical_int’s RL Token paper. Today, I am sharing our research notes from the journey we’ve been on.

https://t.co/sdE7TicwEH

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

"RL Token" looks like a great and surprisingly simple post-training methodology for optimising robot models for dexterous tasks in the real world!

Over the next few weeks, me and @pravsels will be attempting to reproduce the results (& open source the code)

Stay tuned 👀

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@_joe_harris_ @c_voelcker 👀

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

fab vibes, we should integrate more robots during building construction

it does mean the robots need to be designed to last for ~10 years at least, I don't think anyone aside from UR & other established players makes robots that are this durable yet...

[RoboHub🤖 @XRoboHub]

While humanoid makers work to bring robots into our homes, Japan’s MW plans to sell homes with a housework robot hanging from the ceiling.

In MW’s design, MW bot travels along ceiling and wall rails, keeping its base off the floor. It uses two arms for chores, works alongside MW Cargo for transport and tucks away in a Nest when idle.

Before anyone moves in, MW can plan counter heights, laundry stations and travel routes around the robot’s reach. That can reduce the variation it has to handle.

MW demonstrated a prototype folding laundry in September, but it was teleoperated. The company is targeting an autonomous home demo in 2027 and sales of robot-equipped homes in 2028.

For new construction, this approach makes sense. The trade-off is the installation work and a working area defined by the rails.

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@Luckyballa 👀

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

I don't want the agent to answer my phone, I want it to have its own phone number I can fill in the enquiry form so the vendor calls the agent instead of me, then the agent having context to understand what it should ask

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

personal and company AI agent startups - ship your agent with its own personal phone number and ability to make and receive phone calls and I will pay you

most annoying thing in any business is having to call every vendor to enquire for details / price

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@AdhamGhazali @RemoRoo @Rawbots ENPIRE gripper spotted 🕵️‍♂️

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@Ed__Johns @DJiafei @creandum @usv one of my favourite episodes 🫶

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

Another world-class robotics lab coming out of stealth, exciting results in in-context learning!

Ed is one of the leading UK robotics researchers, I remember seeing him demo Instant Policy at a tiny room in his Imperial lab early last year, amazing to see the progress since!

[Edward Johns @Ed__Johns]

Today we’re out of stealth, and we’ve raised a $40m seed round co-led by @creandum and @usv, to bring Instant Robot Learning to life.

For the past few months, we‘ve been busy building a new company.

Machenta.

This follows results from a new kind of robot foundation model we’ve built, which I’m so excited to share with you today!

Usually, it takes hours/days of data collection and training to teach a robot.

We’ve built a model that learns tasks instantly: one demonstration, no further training.

A model trained entirely in simulation, without a single pixel of real-world data.

A model where teaching robots is so quick and easy, it feels like physical vibe coding.

A model for robots that learn like humans do, from someone like you.

Welcome to the era of Instant Robot Learning.

Thank you @Kathi_Wilhelm, @rebeccakaden, @hkanji, @jonno_evans and all of our angels for your support!

@Machenta_

Learn more: https://t.co/P1woKrXtjH

See below for what you can do with Instant Robot Learning!

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@jakobdiepen @jimbelosic 💪

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@pieterbecking and imo there's not enough US/EU hardware startups compared to the size of the opportunity, there's probably >100x more investment going into foundation models for robots than the robot bodies themselves

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@pieterbecking I also think more people in US/EU should make hardware components, hardware components that are ready to use are much much harder to replicate than software products, and make deploying robots easier

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@robot_xyz_rpy @liu_zhuoyang13 @Dantong_Niu @runyulu_x @guanzhi_wang I have a suspicion the common kind of robotics dataset used is wildly insufficient for training intelligent models and we are mostly bottlenecked by type of data used, not quantity of data

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

🤯🤯

[Andrew Seddon @seddonandrew]

PCBs made in America. Twice as fast as Shenzhen.

Today @CircuitHub is unveiling The Grid, our factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds circuit boards on demand.

No changeovers, no per-design setup. Prototypes and production batches, fully automated.

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

why does every pre-seed robotics startup's website read "the X layer for physical AI"

if we added them all together we'd have like 20 separate layers all trying to sell to each other instead of end customers 🫠

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

data from https://t.co/1uE8VUMq8B

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

US robotaxi deployments by state and provider

the deployment of AVs has barely started, and it's interesting how each of the big 3 lead at one or more states (Tesla in TX, Zoox in NV)

Physical AI will be far more geographically fragmented than digital AI or SaaS ever was

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

a single popular robot like the Microduck will generate demand for ~1m actuators

dear investors, why aren't you funding more startups in the robotics hardware layer?

[𝐀𝐆 @AGkorthos]

Pollen Robotics reportedly received 15,000 additional Microduck orders following GTC Berlin.

According to Korean reporting, it also signed an agreement with ROBOTIS covering demand for 750,000 actuators across 50,000 planned robots.

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@emily_yu Can you set up hot desks for us occasional visitors 🤞

[Ville🤖 @VilleKuosmanen]

@BharatJain @dreamlabs_ai Is the rover designed by you? Is it open source? Looks like a potentially interesting way to move the so-101 to new locations without needing clamps, even if you don’t use the mobility🤔 how stable is it when the arm moves?