“You can just show a robot what you want it to do. And I think language is actually one of the worst ways. If I were trying to teach someone to assemble an iPhone, words are not the best. I'm going to show you video, or I'll let you do it and I'll provide correction to you as you're doing it.”
sputnikintelligence.com
The host asked what AI changes about how an industrial robot learns a task. Beard says the most exciting change is teaching by demonstration, through teleoperation, gloves or handheld devices, instead of text instructions.
they say about startups? You get to work on whatever you want as long as it's 18 hours a day or something like that.
No joke. No joke. Well, we've had industrial robots now for quite a long time. And I'm wondering, can you kind of pick a task and sort of explain what AI changes about how the robot learns or performs it?
Yeah. So the big thing that's been happening over the last few years is it's, you know, all the advancements that are a lot of the ones that are in LLMs, transformer-based architectures and other things are now coming to the physical world. And so this, this happens in a couple of ways. One is you effectively can have like a cloud code for your robot program. And we've rolled that out. So now that's in our summer software release. So we've got customers previously, like we've tried to make it like an iPhone experience, but when you have Claude Code doing that, it's even easier. You know, it's like a whole bibe coding your robot. Exactly. No, that's what it is. You tell it what you want it to do and it and it like it builds out the whole thing for you. And so that's like one way. But then there's this other way, which is, and I think the other thing is even more exciting, which is you can just show a robot what you want it to do. And there's a lot of ways to show a robot. And like, I think language is actually one of the worst ways. Like if I were trying to teach you how to…
Or all of those? Yeah, or all,
yeah, or all those. But, but probably like reading reading text is not the best way. So it's, you want to provide, um, tell the robot how to do something either by demonstrating through teleoperation or we've got gloves you can do to demonstrate or like a handheld device. So it really depends on…
They generalize better than I do. In lots, you know, that's so wild. What kind of, what kind of, if you don't mind me asking, what, what types of models are you using? Like, I guess architectural-wise, are we dealing with world models, LLMs? Yeah,