Technical Directions
Robotics coverage relating to robot policies.
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SmolVLA is a compact, efficient Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model designed for affordable robotics, trainable on a single GPU and deployable on consumer hardware. It matches the performance of larger VLAs through community-driven data, with a reference implementation and training instructions provided.
NASA showcased its robotic technologies and future space exploration vision at the 2025 FIRST Robotics World Championship, engaging over 55,000 students and 75,000 parents and mentors. The event featured interactive exhibits, including lunar rovers, robotic arms, and the Mars Perseverance Rover, with NASA centers highlighting innovations like automated assembly systems and surface manipulation technologies.
Sanctuary AI has demonstrated industry-leading sim-to-real transfer of dexterous manipulation policies using their high-degree-of-freedom hydraulic hands. The company leverages NVIDIA Isaac Lab, an open-source framework for robot learning, to simulate dexterity-focused training environments. This approach enables efficient training of autonomous robots, with the ability to train thousands of hands simultaneously and accelerate the learning process through online reinforcement learning.
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