I’m increasingly convinced that we can build robots that are low-cost, useful, and safe in-home assistants. See our recent work on the HomeRobot, where we looked at a challenge called Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation, in which a robot must move any object from any start receptacle to a goal receptacle, all of which are given as language (e.g., “move the cup from the sofa to the kitchen table”).

We’ve seen a substantial amount of progress on this kind of work, including in work like Go To Anything and Ok, Robot.

I’ve always felt that this is an important problem to work on, and that we should be trying to scale and deploy robots into homes to help people out and improve quality of life.

A Personal Update

So on that note, some personal news: I’m excited to be joining Hello Robot, to lead their Embodied AI effort!

For years now, I’ve been a passionate supporter of their vision of affordable, useful robots that can help people out with their day-to-day lives. I’ve previously worked at FAIR, part of Meta, and at NVIDIA, in both cases leading research on robot learning and planning for manipulation, with a particular focus on generalization, so that robot skills will work outside of the specific context they were trained on.

My focus on these problems has always been motivated by my belief that we can make robots into the exact sort of useful, general-purpose assistants that Hello Robot envisions. Now seems like the time to make that a reality. Excited for what the next year will bring!

For more information, you can always find me on Twitter/X or LinkedIn, where I post much more frequent updates.

(One final acknowledgement: I used this guide for embedding YouTube videos in GitHub pages, which was very helpful! It’s on GitHub here as well.)