Toyota Research claims breakthrough in teaching robots new behaviors
Having been a member of the robot learning community both in grad school and now in industry, I'd actually like to rightfully attribute something here since it seems that TRI is (deservedly so, I will agree wholeheartely) receiving most of the praise:<p>The core of these advancements are powered by Diffusion Policy [1], which Prof. Shuran Song's lab at Columbia (before she moved recently to Stanford) developed and pioneered. I'd suggest everyone to view the original project website [2], it has a ton of amazing real world challenging experiments.<p>It was a community favorite for the Best Paper Award at the R:SS conference [3], this year. I remember our lab (and all other learning labs in our robotics department), absolutely dissecting this paper. I know of people who've entirely pivoted away from their projects involving behavior cloning/imitation learning, to this approach, which deals with multi-modal action spaces much more naturally than the aforementioned approaches.<p>Prof. Song is an absolute rockstar in robotics right now, with several wonderful approaches that scale elegantly to the real world, including IRP [4] (which won Best Paper at R:SS 2022), FlingBot [5], Scaling Up Distilling Down [6] and much more. I recommend checking out her lab website too.<p>[1] - <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04137" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04137</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://diffusion-policy.cs.columbia.edu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://diffusion-policy.cs.columbia.edu/</a><p>[3] - <a href="https://roboticsconference.org/program/awards/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://roboticsconference.org/program/awards/</a><p>[4] - <a href="https://irp.cs.columbia.edu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://irp.cs.columbia.edu/</a><p>[5] - <a href="https://flingbot.cs.columbia.edu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://flingbot.cs.columbia.edu/</a><p>[6] - <a href="https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~huy/scalingup/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~huy/scalingup/</a>