Robotics Has Been Stuck for 70 Years — Deepak Pathak, Skild AI

Deepak Pathak argues that robotics has been stalled for 70 years due to treating it as a hardware problem instead of a general AI problem. He proposes Skild AI's 'omni-bodied' brain approach: a single model trained on scalable data (simulation, human video) and then fine-tuned with teleoperation data, followed by a deployment flywheel. This enables one model to control any robot for any task, as demonstrated by tasks like inserting AirPods, cooking omelets, and learning to walk with minimal robot-specific data. The talk highlights the inefficiency of current robot data collection methods and the potential of leveraging human video and simulation for pre-training.