unexpected brickage from jokic ruining the third, true, and only MPJ we ever needed

and w/o touch

I'm generally a believer that we'll eventually do everything with vision, but I also believe that we'll need touch to get policies running closer to real-time/humans. My advisor loves to bring up these videos from a study of trying to strike a matchbox w/ and w/o feeling in their fingers:

going forward, i'm thinking about how we can scale good data collection with force control and improved physical models & reasoning. as of now you cannot convince me that we do not still need huge amounts of real robot data for robust contact-rich manipulation. and we are quite a ways off...

so interesting where the field has coalesced and where it has diverged. some of it is a necessary byproduct of manipulation, some of it seems like open areas for research. anyway, here's a fun and unreadable plot: these 25 papers evaluate 64 (59 models) significantly different contact-rich tasks

for my area exam last month i reviewed 25 touch-based IL works from 2024/5, taxonomized across tasks, sensor type, model architecture, and more (up now at arxiv.org/abs/2504.11827). here's a perhaps intuitive plot of policy action space--the in-figure citations are clickable in the pdf/html!

taking name suggestions…

how i'm feeling now

pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to setup rerun data viz for both my RLDS dataset and its raw data