Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc

I ❤️ robots, cheap hardware, steam engines, XGBoost, Liverpool FC & SG 🇸🇬 | Plane crash survivor | Building @BitRobotNetwork @frodobots

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

Super psyched for this competition!

While folding origami is not "economically valuable task" which many commercial labs care about outright, I love this challenge b/c:

1. Origami, at the highest level, is IMO one of the most complicated dexterous task human hands are capable of.

2. I reckon even for fairly simple origami designs, you'd need more than 2 fingers. So this is a task that really showcase the use of 5-fingered hands.

3. Folding origami involves lots of occlusion. In fact, I've seen an origami master fold a crane more or less completely based on touch. This means tactile and even force sensing would be required for complicated origami designs.

4. Origami is an art form with long cultural history in Japan. It's not just the physical manipulation techniques involved, there's also a creative aspect that I think will be a frontier goal for Embodied AI to shoot for.

5. We're co-organizing this challenge with the Nippon Origami Association, who are basically the human experts. This means we'll have human expert benchmark against what embodied AI can do.

I reckon this is such a difficult task that this competition will last for years before embodied AI (both model and hardware improvements) can catch up to human performance.

I'm also very confident that on the path of solving robotic origami we'd have also unlocked some fundamental manipulation capabilities that'd be useful in lots of other real-world dexterous tasks.

Grateful to be able to do this with my buddies @DJiafei @chris_j_paxton as well as strong partners from @SharpaRobotics @LightwheelAI @BitRobotNetwork as well as friends from academia.

[RoboPapers @RoboPapers]

3 of us @micoolcho @chris_j_paxton @DJiafei are super excited to help organize the Robotic Origami Competition at IROS (Sept 2026), along with @BitRobotNetwork @SharpaRobotics @LightwheelAI @hq_fang @sanatem @Noriaki_Hirose @gao_young

Calling for teams!

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

@abhay @helium All the best, Abhay! Amazing to watch you & the Helium team cook over the yrs. Inspiring stuff!

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

@martinpeticco @wuji_global No worries Martin! I was more rough than u with the hands after u left 😅

Impressive hardware!

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

Impressive dexterity from @wuji_global v2 hands; folks were just torturing the fingers but they just keep going #icra2026

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

@Sentdex And then I saw a robotic hand with lidar in the palm area

They r sticking cameras/sensors wherever they can fit them 😅

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

@Sentdex I literally saw a humanoid today where they have a camera near the groin area 😅 (supposedly to help tackle rough ground terrain)

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

@GalbotRobotics fetching drinks #icra2026

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

This little bugger nearly knocked my phone off 😅

#icra2026 @boosterobotics

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

Mind blown 🤯

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

Possibly the coolest thing ive seen at #icra2026

From @DirectDriveTech

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

@Vikashplus @RoboPapers @chris_j_paxton @DJiafei @BitRobotNetwork @SharpaRobotics @LightwheelAI @hq_fang @sanatem @Noriaki_Hirose @gao_young @shaneguML Am glad u like the challenge Vikash, Shane!

Ping me if u guys have bandwidth and wanna get involved to help co-organize with us 😅

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

@wenlong_huang @DJiafei Feeling FOMO 😅

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

@FlexionRobotics implementation on Unitree G1 #icra2026

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

Non-trivial what happened within this short 18s clip! Incredible dexterity from @SharpaRobotics

Giving out flyers for our origami competition no less!

[Noriaki Hirose @Noriaki_Hirose]

I am excited to help organization of Origami competition in IROS 2027. We are releasing the certain amount of episodes for the origami airplane and the simulator to train and evaluate the policy.

If you are interested in this competition, please join us!!

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

Best robotic dancing yet! At this point most of general public would have seen Unitree G1s by now, even if they dunno it by the model name. Robotic entertainment is gonna go even more mainstream going forward.

https://t.co/xJNFNv8Qos

[Chris Paxton @chris_j_paxton]

The bottleneck to on-robot reinforcement learning is good, scalable reward prediction. Robometer is a massive step in that direction, and the authors have been wonderfully open as well, releasing a large dataset and continuing to improve their model post release.

Thanks to @aliangdw @yigitkkorkmaz and @Jesse_Y_Zhang for joining me and @DJiafei!

[RoboPapers @RoboPapers]

Learning robust, general-purpose reward functions for robotics unlocks many potential applications, like on-robot reinforcement learning or dataset validation. However, there’s a question of how to actually train such reward functions. Training success/failure prediction leads to ambiguous signals partway through a demonstration — it’s hard to measure progress — making the method unsuitable for reinforcement learning, among other things. Predicting progress, on the other hand, does not give a good way of using failure data.

So why not do both? Robometer combines both progress and preference supervision, resulting in a stable, scalable, and highly general reward learning approach. @aliangdw @yigitkkorkmaz
and @Jesse_Y_Zhang join us to tell us more.

Watch Episode #84 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan today!

[Sharpa @SharpaRobotics]

The Robotic Origami Challenge is coming to IROS 2026 (Sept 26) and it's one of the most creative dexterous manipulation benchmarks we've seen.

The task: train a policy to fold a traditional Japanese paper airplane.

The judge: an Origami Grand Master from the Nippon Origami Association.

You got #SharpaWave robot hands? Good!
You don't? We will be providing real-world eval support remotely.

Excited to see what you will come up with, along with the organizers @chris_j_paxton @micoolcho @DJiafei

More info: https://t.co/QubvM5dmaA

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

Love these real world autonomous roll-outs (from Spirit AI); some failed cases here and there but this is the true test for physical AI. #icra2026

[Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc @micoolcho]

Doctor octopus needs these #icra2026