Robotics

End-to-end robotics — learning perception, planning, and control in a single model — entered a new era with vision-language-action (VLA) models. Google's RT-2 (2023) showed that a web-pretrained VLM could directly output robot actions, and the open-source Open X-Embodiment dataset (2023) unified data from 22 robot types across 21 institutions. The key tension is generalization: lab demos on specific robots are plentiful, but a single policy that transfers across embodiments, tasks, and environments remains the holy grail, with π₀ (Physical Intelligence, 2024) and Google's RT-X pushing this frontier.