Smash Notes

Back to Inside the Robot Data Factory: Mecka's Josh Gao on Sensorizing Humans to Train Robots, with Josh Gao.

Why Put Sensors on People to Train Robots?

Josh Gao says Mecka puts sensors on people because a robot has to learn how hard to squeeze, and video does not capture that force. Sonya Huang asks why manipulation needs force when self-driving mostly does not. A door handle and an egg are the cases she gives.

A wrist camera can show when a hand touches an object. That view is a rough substitute. It does not measure how many newtons it takes to pull a chair open or twist a bottle cap. Closing the gap means new hardware. Mecka is building gloves people wear so a recording includes how much force a daily task takes.

He calls the broader category sensorizing humans. A phone mounted on someone for the day was only the first pilot, not the whole method.

Transcript

Inside the Robot Data Factory: Mecka's Josh Gao on Sensorizing Humans to Train Robots ·

Training Data

More from this episode

  1. What Does Teaching Robots About Carbon Life Mean?Josh Gao says teaching robots about carbon life means showing them what organic life is made of, once robots can do the tasks people do.
  2. What Is Egocentric Data for Training Robots?Josh Gao says egocentric data is video of humans demonstrating and doing tasks from a first person point of view.
  3. What Does It Take to Run a Robot Data Factory?Josh Gao says running a robot data factory is more painful than a camera and a signup form, because much of the hardware sent into the world did not exist…
  4. Why Is Robot Data Still Far Behind Tesla's Driving Data?Josh Gao says robot training data is still many orders of magnitude behind the video Tesla collected for driving.
  5. What Will the First Robot Tasks Look Like?Josh Gao says the first robot tasks will be much more constrained and goal-oriented, jobs a team can hill-climb because a standard operating procedure already…
  6. Can Useful Robots Already Be Deployed Today?Josh Gao says useful robots can already be deployed today, and people underestimate how diverse robotics already is.
  7. How Many Hours of Human Data Do Robots Need?Josh Gao says the robot-training recipe coming together looks like a million hours of human data across egocentric capture and other modalities, tens of…

People

More answers like this

The other side

More with Sonya Huang

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.