Humanoid robots showing improved agility

https://x.com/drjimfan/status/1886824152272920642?s=46

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We RL'ed humanoid robots to Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, and Kobe Byrant! These are neural nets running on real hardware at our GEAR lab. Most robot demos you see online speed videos up. We actually slow them down so you can enjoy the fluid motions.

I'm excited to announce "ASAP", a "real2sim2real" model that masters extremely smooth and dynamic motions for humanoid whole body control.

We pretrain the robot in simulation first, but there is a notorious "sim2real" gap: it's very difficult for hand-engineered physics equations to match real world dynamics.

Our fix is simple: just deploy a pretrained policy on real hardware, collect data, and replay the motion in sim. The replay will obviously have many errors, but that gives a rich signal to compensate for the physics discrepancy. Use another neural net to learn the delta. Basically, we "patch up" a traditional physics engine, so that the robot can experience almost the real world at scale in GPUs.

The future is hybrid simulation: combine the power of classical sim engines refined over decades and the uncanny ability of modern NNs to capture a messy world.

• Jim Fan