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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I am planning to replicate current research and build upon questions here but aligning towards some real world use. youtu.be/l9pwlXXsi7Q
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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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I am seeing open communities like eleuther.ai that do scales dl research. Which makes me wonder if independent collabration via internet towards advances in robotics makes real sense. Rather than a impoverished PhD student route.
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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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If not directly relevant work but with online only collab isn't really a sustitute for campus environment (due to serendipity, collabration potential), I guess ms + online collab makes 💯 %more sense.
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Where are you located now? A hack might be to simply live in a major university town and go to all the free public talks, get to know faculty etc. Freeloading basically.
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I'm in India, Chennai. Though theres some research going on in IIT M. Not the university town energy that you speak of, For sure.
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Yeah too big a metro, and frankly, nowhere in India has the right energy. Closest is probably the IISc campus in Bangalore and the defense labs around there (I did my UG internship at CAIR there). Pune is probably second. The IITs are... not great as research environments.
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