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Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

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11–20 of 92 posts

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#11
post #8

What sort of hardware does the SDK runs on, can it run on a modern Raspberry Pi ?

According to the blog post, it requires an NVIDIA Jetson Orin with at least 8GB RAM, and they've optimized for Jetson AGX Orin (64GB) and Orin NX (16GB) modules.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if they are battery powered?

Usually I put master disconnect switches on my robots just to make working on them safe. I use cheap toggle switches though I'm too cheap for the big red spiny ones.

[Robot learns to superglue the switch open]

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#13
post #8

What sort of hardware does the SDK runs on, can it run on a modern Raspberry Pi ?

According to the blog post, it requires an NVIDIA Jetson Orin with at least 8GB RAM, and they've optimized for Jetson AGX Orin (64GB) and Orin NX (16GB) modules.

Could you quote where in the blog post they claim that? CTRL+F "Jetson" gave no results in TFA.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#14
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually I put master disconnect switches on my robots just to make working on them safe. I use cheap toggle switches though I'm too cheap for the big red spiny ones.

[Robot learns to superglue the switch open]

It's only going to do that if you RL it with episodes that include people shutting it down for safety. The RL I've done with my models are all simulations that don't even simulate the switch.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#16

I wonder what kind of guardrails (like Three Laws of Robotics) there are to prevent the robots going crazy while executing the prompts

The generally accepted term for the research around this in robotics is Constitutional AI (https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073) and has been cited/experimented with in several robotics VLAs.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#17
I've spent the last few months looking into VLAs and I'm convinced that they're gonna be a big deal, ie they very well might be the "chatgpt moment for robotics" that everyone's been anticipating. Multimodal LLMs already have a ton of built-in understanding of images and text, so VLAs are just regular MMLLMs that are fine-tuned to output a specific sequence of instructions that can be fed to a robot.

OpenVLA, which came out last year, is a Llama2 fine tune with extra image encoding that outputs a 7-tuple of integers. The integers are rotation and translation inputs for a robot arm. If you give a vision llama2 a picture of a an apple and a bowl and say "put the apple in the bowl", it already understands apples, bowls, knows the end state should apple in bowl etc. What missing is a series of tuples that will correctly manipulate the arm to do that, and the way they did it is through a large number of short instruction videos.

The neat part is that although everyone is focusing on robot arms manipulating objects at the moment, there's no reason this method can't be applied to any task. Want a smart lawnmower? It already understands "lawn" "mow", "don't destroy toy in path" etc, just needs a finetune on how to corectly operate a lawnmower. Sam Altman made some comments about having self-driving technology recently and I'm certain it's a chat-gpt based VLA. After all, if you give chatgpt a picture of a street, it knows what's a car, pedestrian, etc. It doesn't know how to output the correct turn/go/stop commands, and it does need a great deal of diverse data, but there's no reason why it can't do it. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1le7iq4/sa...

Anyway, super exciting stuff. If I had time, I'd rig a snowblower with a remote control setup, record a bunch of runs and get a VLA to clean my driveway while I sleep.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#18
I’m optimistic about humanoid robotics, but I’m curious about the reliability issue. Biological limbs and hands are quite miraculous when you consider that they are able to constantly interact with the world, which entails some natural wear and tear, but then constantly heal themselves.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#19

I've spent the last few months looking into VLAs and I'm convinced that they're gonna be a big deal, ie they very well might be the "chatgpt moment for robotics" that everyone's been anticipating. Multimodal LLMs already have a ton of built-in understanding of images and text, so VLAs are just regular MMLLMs that are fine-tuned to output a specific sequence of instructions that can be fed to a robot. OpenVLA, which c…

VLA = Vision-language-action model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision-language-action_model

Not https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/VLA/ :(

For completeness, MMLLM = Multimodal Large language model.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#20
post #8

What sort of hardware does the SDK runs on, can it run on a modern Raspberry Pi ?

You can think of these as essentially multi-modal LLMs, which is to say you can have very small/fast ones (SmolVLA - 0.5B params) that are good at specific tasks, and larger/slower more general ones (OpenVLA - a finetuned llama2 7B). So a rpi could be used for some very specific tasks, but even the more general ones could run on beefy consumer hardware.
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