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The hardest bits would be unstable transitions (one foot landing on an inclined plane is basically a hard inverted pendulum problem) but if it’s in a human-validated mocap sequence, you’d only need to solve it for a fraction of a second to transition to next maneuver.
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If this is what they’ve done, it’s extremely impressive. Though known in the literature, these are hardly routine techniques like PID and LQG (which mostly won’t work here due to nonlinearity). Much more sophisticated. Still, not defensible.
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A general “tell” of control strategies is beauty. The more elegant it looks, the more symmetry there is to the behavior. Which means many variables are being reduced to a few via symmetry-exploiting maneuvers.
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Contrast with the awkward flailing of trying to learn *any* workable functional behavior. Babies and injured pets often learn weird looking maneuvers this way. But more elegant looking ones are either strong attractors everybody will stumble into, or explicitly trained.
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Hardware — solved Basic control — solved Maneuver control — solved Localized deep learning: 2022 Deep learning entire behavior envelope from humans: 2024 Doing it without human training examples: 2026 Learning the unstable/high-risk bits in simulation: 2028 Akira entity: 2030
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My predictions regarding robotics advance is roughly similar timeline. Do you think independent self-funded research with cheap bots (spot knockoff, robotic arms) could be a valid alternative to big labs and academic path?
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that's what we're doing with the yak rover project... a bunch of us just building rovers with low-cost self-funded research. I've spend about $1000 in parts and tooling for mine so far...
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I'm at fork in the road so to speak. Leverage money from a well paying job towards funding this type of experiments. Or go for a research masters in germany, then figure things out by getting into their lab. I would really appreciate your thoughts here if any.
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My grad school experience is almost 20y ago, and conditions have changed, but there's still a lot of value to being around others in a campus environment with lots of serendipity. Online open collaboration is good in a complementary way. They're not substitutes really.
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Thanks! Value of serendipity in such spaces was precisely the question that was eating me up. I always knew it was big in back of my head. The either/or comes from full job +online/free-time robotics might be better because the money might help more towards the goal.
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