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mplappert

HN member
Joined
Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC
HN karma
181
Public activity
38 items

About mplappert

Matthias Plappert. Robotics & ML. Previously OpenAI (robot hand that solved a Rubik's Cube; Codex) and GitHub (Copilot). Now running dfdx labs, an independent R&D research company.

https://matthiasplappert.com

Recent public activity

  1. comment
    Comment #48998701

    “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” (or carelessness in this case)

  2. comment
    Comment #48786422

    Seems like a hallucination to me; note that the context contains “unmarkBlock” as the function name, which invites a connection to Minecraft. Still shouldn’t happen of course. The …

  3. comment
    Comment #48710965

    I agree with this. I recently went back to writing more code by hand again for this reason: the amount of effort / mental toll it takes me to steer the LLM is sometime just not wor…

  4. comment
    Comment #48660513

    There’s a lot of confusion here: - There is no double taxation if you just pay yourself a salary (since it’s a normal business expense). If you want to take money out of the compan…

  5. comment
    Comment #48608220

    Yeah I tried to use ROS / Gazebo about 10 years ago (it was still ROS 1) and getting it set up was an immense pain. I remember that creating new modules required writing CMake file…

  6. comment
    Comment #48608116

    I’d recommend looking at the SO-101 then. Much much cheaper. And hardware is very fun! It’s also very frustrating. But to me worth it.

  7. comment
    Comment #48608102

    This all makes a lot sense, thanks for sharing! For depth I agree on the VLA route but for ACT / DP-style imitation learning from scratch it seems more feasible (since you’re not f…

  8. comment
    Comment #48607058

    Did you ever a late RGB vs RGB-D? I haven’t seen that much in the literature. Also any thoughts on action space representation? Seems to me people are settling on flow matching mos…

  9. comment
    Comment #48606711

    Yeah I can see that. Especially the rotation part is pretty awkward (hence why I currently do the axis parallel to table surface trick and only use the yaw angle to rotate the grip…

  10. comment
    Comment #48597984

    This seems indeed useful. I haven't seen this for robotics but I'm sure people need this for larger deployments (either for a distributed fleet or for an "arm farm"-like setup wher…

  11. comment
    Comment #48597671

    Wow very cool project and thanks for the Ariel pointer! Added to my reading list. And yes, having a nice robot makes life so much easier. Very happy with my choice so far!

  12. comment
    Comment #48596629

    Oh very cool! Looks a bit like the TRLC-DK1 (I was looking at this one for a bit). I think pushing the sota is quite hard to do solo but we'll see. Mostly I want to get back up to …

  13. comment
    Comment #48596552

    I timestamp everything twice: once with the hardware clock (if available, like for the realsense camera) and once within my robot stack once it gets read from the device (using `ti…

  14. comment
    Comment #48595597

    I'm only starting down this road but my sense is that ACT and Diffusion Policy both make it pretty feasible to start on real data only. LeRobot also makes it easier to train these.…

  15. comment
    Comment #48595585

    Cool video! What made you stop if I can ask? And yeah I feel you re humanoid. I worked on the Rubik's cube project at OpenAI, which used a humanoid hand, and it was insanely painfu…

  16. comment
    Comment #48595502

    Very cool! Have you seen the recent nvidia thing? They do this at scale for robotics manipulation: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/enpire/

  17. comment
    Comment #48595493

    Great points and I very much appreciate the input! Right now the static camera is probably really bad: It's mounted on my desk, so its very easy to bump into it and move it. So yea…

  18. comment
    Comment #48595384

    That was my take 8 years ago glad to hear it’s still that

  19. comment
    Comment #48595239

    For understanding: I think the level is much deeper if I wrote the code vs reading someone else’s. Same applies to coding agents of course which is why I wrote most of it myself an…

  20. comment
    Comment #48595157

    Glad you like it! Re your questions: - The driver situation turned out totally fine; I intentionally picked HW with good python sdk support so that was very painless. - The static …

  21. comment
    Comment #48595121

    Thanks Tim and fun seeing you here :)

  22. comment
    Comment #48595114

    Looks very cool! I’m not a huge discord user but how about you shoot me an email and we can figure out how to share notes? (I don’t want to post it directly here but it’s easy to f…

  23. comment
    Comment #48595074

    It’s partially my fault I currently clip the max speed _and_ I only input soft control changes when teleoperating to avoid crashing into things. The robot itself could definitely m…

  24. comment
  25. story
    Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk

    Quick framing, since the post is long: I did robotic manipulation research at OpenAI from 2017–2020, and the tabletop setup back then cost roughly 10x this one and took a team to r…