Recorded on March 1st, 2024
HOSTS
AB – Andrew Ballard
Spatial AI Specialist at Leidos.
Robotics & AI defence research.
Creator of SPAITIAL
Helena Merschdorf
Geospatial Marketing/Branding at Tales Consulting.
Undertaking her PhD in Geoinformatics & GIScience.
Mirek Burkon
CEO at Phantom Cybernetics.
Creator of Augmented Robotality AR-OS.
Violet Whitney
Adj. Prof. at U.Mich
Spatial AI insights on Medium.
Co-founder of Spatial Pixel.
William Martin
Director of AI at Consensys
Adj. Prof. at Columbia.
Co-founder of Spatial Pixel.
From William:
NVIDIA GEAR – Building Generally Capable Agents in Many Worlds, Virtual and Real
GEAR: Generalist Embodied Agent Research
At GEAR, our mission is to build foundation models for embodied agents in virtual and physical worlds. Our research agenda encompasses:
- Multimodal foundation models: LLMs for planning and reasoning, vision-language models, and world models trained on Internet-scale data sources;
- General-purpose robots: robotic models and systems that enable robust locomotion and dexterous manipulation in complex environments;
- Foundation agents in virtual worlds: large action models that autonomously explore and continuously bootstrap their capabilities across different games and simulations;
- Simulation and synthetic data: simulation infrastructure and synthetic data pipelines for large-scale learning.
https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/
From Violet:
Punyo is Toyota’s prototype soft-body robot… pretty cute, too
“Toyota Research Institute is developing robotic capabilities that amplify, rather than replace, people. We’re on a mission to help with everyday tasks that require more than just our hands and fingertips. Our research platform, Punyo, embodies this mission. The Punyo team is focused on bulky object manipulation using the arms and chest to complement TRI’s other efforts in fine robot hand- and gripper-based dexterity. We are developing hardware and algorithms that enable truly capable robots to help with large, heavy, and unwieldy items.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY-MD4gteeE
From AB:
Two VR-based immersive training companies, making a splash
MoonHub – https://themoonhub.com/ – a UK-based VR training company that just received another round of funding – still early stage – to make training ‘stick’, by putting the trainee in the scenario, and scoring them on more than ‘knowledge’, but also reaction times, spatial accuracy, spatial awareness and initiative.
BlueRoomVR – https://www.blueroomxr.com/ – a “semi-lo-fi” medical training room for medics within the military – the single dummy patient can be configured to have any number of ailments in any number of dangerous scenarios, and the two medics together problem solve the scenario while wearing headsets. All the ailments are overlaid on the training dummy, but the feel is real, often with real blood veins to find.
“Semi-lo-fi” in that ‘lo-fi’ is usually the term for very simple cardboard-based mockups – maybe some fake switches – onto which you overlay your complex interfaces/controls in VR. This gives the user some surfaces to use for tactile feedback, but only minimal. By ‘semi’, BlueRoom is going a little above and beyond ‘cardboard technology’, using a state-of-the-art medical training dummy to give a positive feedback cycle into the VR scenario, all in real time.
From Mirek:
Stretch 3 Brings Us Closer to Realistic Home Robots
Today, Hello Robot is announcing Stretch 3, which provides a suite of upgrades to what they (quite accurately) call “the world’s only lightweight, capable, developer-friendly mobile manipulator.” And impressively, they’ve managed to do it without forgetting about that whole “affordable” part.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/hello-robot-stretch-3
To absent friends.
