Igniting the Real Robot Revolution Requires Closing the “Data Gap”

Ken Goldberg

Ambi Robotics and UC Berkeley

AI is rapidly advancing the way we think but we live in a material world. We still need to move things, make things, and maintain things. Imagine a future where AI-driven robots handle billions of items to support an aging population that doesn’t have enough human
workers. Several unicorn startups emerged in the past year to develop humanoid robots but to ignite the real robot revolution we need to close a 100,000x “Data Gap” between large vision-language models and current robot models. I propose stepping stones that will lead to general-purpose humanoid robots and review four options for generating robot data, including the most practical -- collecting data from real robots operating in real environments. I'll describe how Ambi Robotics has collected 200,000 hours of real robot data from their award-winning robot systems that have sorted 100 million real consumer packages. This data allows Ambi Robotics to close the data gap for a practical subclass of robot skills to enable a new generation of real industrial robots.

Bio:
Ken Goldberg is William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair of Engineering at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Ambi Robotics and Jacobi Robotics. He leads research in robotics and automation: grasping, manipulation, and learning for applications in industry, homes, agriculture, and robot-assisted surgery. Ken is President of the Robot Learning Foundation and Chair of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab Steering Committee.

http://goldberg.berkeley.edu