It is interesting to watch. The movements of the robot are robot-like. I mean, wtf, there were no robot playing tennis before, but I have an idea how a robot playing tennis would be like, and this video confirms my expectations. Sharp, unsure movements, a lot of hesitation, ...
Movies pictured robots like this long before this become possible, but how did producers guessed it?
Or maybe movies rendered different kinds of robots, but this video bring into my memory only those, that look like this. A kind of confirmation bias?
I agree that the movements look quite robotic (though not as much as you might expect), but I don't think any movies have depicted robots moving like that. A much more common depiction is moving only a single joint at a time.
> Sharp, unsure movements, a lot of hesitation, ...
I like these particular descriptors. Another I would add is holding poses unnaturally still. While waiting for the ball, the robot holds its racket extremely consistently relative to its body even while sharply turning.
We have just started ramping up practical use of imitation learning from human demonstrations in humanoids. A bigger development is that one or two projects are working on training foundational vision action language models based on large video datasets.
I think before the end of summer general purpose physical knowledge and capabilities will start to be demonstrated by one or more humanoid AI or robotics groups.
Maybe 18 months at the absolute latest.
I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you. By 2029 it should be quite affordable to get a humanoid on a short term rental.
Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic tasks?
That seems like quite an extrapolation and an extraordinary statement. This is a single task, in a lab setting. What your describing are extremely open-ended tasks in people’s homes.
This is so interesting. Especially since it's kinda weird to train a robot to mimicking human play. I wonder what a perfect robot what actually behave like.
It wouldn't need to split-step to activate muscles, the footwork would probably be minimal. I imagine a lot of different unusual looking swings to confuse human players, while still making perfect contact. It could make really late drop shots or even rotate the racket at the last moment for crazy angles.
Why can some Temu humanoid robot do this sort of impressive, coordinated, high-speed thing, but Tesla Optimus completely sucks at everything unless they’re moving at 0.02m/s (and even then they’re not great)? Like, train this thing on the latent space of folding my clothes out of the dryer and I will send you my money.
I’d be OK (and from a product perspective think it would be a win) if Optimus just mastered one high-value skill like clothes folding. Yet, here we are.
Movies pictured robots like this long before this become possible, but how did producers guessed it?
Or maybe movies rendered different kinds of robots, but this video bring into my memory only those, that look like this. A kind of confirmation bias?
> Sharp, unsure movements, a lot of hesitation, ...
I like these particular descriptors. Another I would add is holding poses unnaturally still. While waiting for the ball, the robot holds its racket extremely consistently relative to its body even while sharply turning.
I think before the end of summer general purpose physical knowledge and capabilities will start to be demonstrated by one or more humanoid AI or robotics groups.
Maybe 18 months at the absolute latest.
I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you. By 2029 it should be quite affordable to get a humanoid on a short term rental.
Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic tasks?
What is informing these timelines?
It wouldn't need to split-step to activate muscles, the footwork would probably be minimal. I imagine a lot of different unusual looking swings to confuse human players, while still making perfect contact. It could make really late drop shots or even rotate the racket at the last moment for crazy angles.
Would love to watch this.
The robot and ball pose is estimated by high speed mocap cameras, and is fed to the policy.
I imagine estimating that with onboard cameras - how humans do it - is much harder.
Almost all of closed loop robotics is a state estimation problem. Control is “solved” if you can estimate state well enough.