Why reinforcement learning is making a quiet comeback in robotics

For five years, imitation learning has dominated practical robotics research. New results suggest reinforcement learning is back, with better tooling.

Isaac Mendez · 18 May · 3 min

The "robotics generalist" question gets a useful new benchmark

A new benchmark suite makes the question of robotic generalisation testable in a way previous benchmarks did not.

Priya Nair · 14 May · 3 min

A new tactile sensor gives robots something close to a sense of touch

Researchers have developed a sensor dense enough to let a robot distinguish between fabrics by feel. The applications are immediate.

Isaac Mendez · 4 May · 3 min

Code generation for robot tasks has improved dramatically. The reliability gap between generated and human-written code is narrowing.

Priya Nair · 3 May · 3 min

New data shows that 70 percent of robotics PhDs now go directly to industry rather than academia. The consequences for research are real.

Isaac Mendez · 2 May · 3 min

After years of academic promise, soft grippers are being deployed at scale in food processing. The application was hiding in plain sight.

Priya Nair · 1 May · 3 min