Weekly Recap - Low Cost Robots performing complex tasks and early previews of HRI 2024

A new robot from Stanford

Its been a very hot start to the new year in the field of robotics. Stanford researchers led by Prof. Chelsea Finn made a big splash showing how their low cost mobile robot (which can be built under $32000) can perform a great variety of tasks to perfection by imitation learning on a very small dataset. The tasks included cooking shrimp, cleaning counters, placing a cooking pot in a closet, rinsing pans, pushing chairs to a table and calling an elevator. To facilitate imitation learning, a human tele-operates the robot to perform a specific task, and the robot is able to learn fairly quickly after a few demos. The key contribution is that this is a very cheap robot that can support whole-body tele-operation, meaning that a human can move both the hands and feet of the robot and train it to accomplish certain tasks such as opening a closet and placing a pot inside the closer. There are some impressive videos that the researchers circulated on social media, as w…