What Limits Hour-long Robot Jobs?

Jason Ma says the bottleneck for doing an hour-long full job on any task is data and hardware. A laundry demo takes one hour to finish the whole loop, and the longest duration a robot can do a full job is already in the hour range.

For some tasks, such as setting up a space, a robot might need more than a parallel jaw gripper, something dexterous like a human hand. Training a model on a hand is then bottlenecked by hardware stability. The best dexterous hands today are still not durable enough and overheat pretty quickly. A hardware limit slows everything, because knowing whether progress is real on any task eventually has to happen on the hardware. Without eval that is spontaneous and fast, research progress is limited, including how to collect the right data for an extremely complex job like setting up a studio. Most data today is vision-based: video streams and some encoding of hand motion where the robot joints are.