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Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
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Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#102Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#103It's implied, and I'm hoping it's true, that this is a map-less navigation. Which is impressive. This kind of task is much easier if you have a pre-captured map of the environment, but if they are doing this without a map it's great. Historically you were always faced with "The Kidnapped Robot" problem where robots that didn't know where they were couldn't navigate even a little bit. Here the robot appears to be able…
Can you explain how it is much easier if you have a pre-captured map given what they are doing without using any sensors, all you have is perhaps these recent feed forward tokens not actual Geometry.
Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#104Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#105Mistral naming a robotics model Robostral is the most French thing since calling a high-speed train TGV. next up: Baguettestral for the baking automation division.
Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#106Mistral naming a robotics model Robostral is the most French thing since calling a high-speed train TGV. next up: Baguettestral for the baking automation division.
> Baguettestral for the baking automation division.
It would be a bit more general, for general cooking and be called Cookstral
Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#107It's implied, and I'm hoping it's true, that this is a map-less navigation. Which is impressive. This kind of task is much easier if you have a pre-captured map of the environment, but if they are doing this without a map it's great. Historically you were always faced with "The Kidnapped Robot" problem where robots that didn't know where they were couldn't navigate even a little bit. Here the robot appears to be able…
Would be extremely interesting to build an "Exploration" node of sorts. Solve a sort of Semantic SLAM problem as you go. So if you can give it an instruction to "Find the elevator on this floor", could it walk around and build a map as it goes so it starts doing what a human would do to find the elevator. As of now, the way these navigation models are setup, it assumes the instruction writer was intimately aware of u…
Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#108Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The General Models' business-model is also looking more weak every iteration. Costs of simple tasks grow extensively: OCR with "Mistral OCR" at $4 per 1000 pages vs OCR with Opus 4.8 at sometimes¹ $1 per "page". Or just the immense costs when burning tokens in an unoptimized agentic coding environment costing tens of dollars for a few simple classes or functions versus a highly optimized "autocomplete" model costing…
the counter point is that building or selecting the specialized model may cost as much as the lifetime inference costs of the task with the specialized model. If I need to pay someone 300k to make the model and infrastructure... then I would need to process many documents to recoup my OCR costs compared to asking claude code nicely. Perhaps the model zoo is becoming good enough that the cost to find a specialized mod…
> If I need to pay someone 300k to make the model and infrastructure
I was arguing for the existing AI-companies that already make and offer niche models. Like Mistral. But AFAICS, all AI companies have and offer such models.
So all you need to do, is use the existing models. And, yes, select it.
Which, ironically, I would highly value as a niche model myself. I spend way too much time following the breakneck race of the various companies just to pick the right models for my tasks at hand. "Just pick the latest" often yields worse results, or is magnitudes more expensive, or significantly slower, or all of it. "Just pick the most popular" can prove expensive, inefficient for some task etc. This investment, also ironically, has proven something of a "moat" for me. I know very well what Mistral and Anthropic offer. So I won't even bother with OpenAI, Google, X, Tencent etc etc etc models. I just don't have the time to keep researching the latest offers for their pros and cons.
A model that acts as "decision maker" and as proxy, as a conductor, that directs and transforms my questions and sends them off to the right model, right tools, right MCP etc, would be very welcome for me. So that I can just pick that one, and have the highly dynamic world of LLMs and other models shift like undercurrent beneath the surface of this One Model To Rule Them all.
Re: Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
#110>> State-of-the-art performance on R2R-CE
To be clear, R2R-CE is a benchmark consisting of simulated environments.
So what this means is that beating this benchmark is about as useful as getting a robot to play Minecraft, or some other video game. Great, but a robot must run in the real world, in physical reality: not in a digital environment.
Unfortunately it's extremely hard to evaluate the performance of robotic systems in physical reality. First of all because if they don't do well you need lots of spare robots to complete the evaluation.
The article above does include the obligatory video of a physical robot navigating a virtually empty, uncluttered "office" environment with nice, smooth surfaces, at 2x speed; virtually a trademark of the entire research field by now. Brownie points for having three guys shuffle carefully across the robot's path towards the end of the video (they're shuffling at 2x speed so they're going reeeaaaally carefully in real life, probably ready to jump out of the way if say a heavy metallic object hurtles towards them randomly).
But, this is like all the fanfare and hype about Aloha a couple of years ago: great stuff if you want your team to be bought by one of the large tech corps, or to get more funds to play with your cool tech (I mean who doesn't?). Not so great for anyone who's expecting this to be a step forward (or ahem a roll forward) on the way to having robot maids/butlers going 'round your house or office.
Sorry guys.