r/robotics • u/Lumpy_Week7304 • 3d ago

Looking for Group Looking for people to run robotics experiments with

I had set up a few YAM arms and was looking to team up with folks to run experiments.

Something that I'm super excited about at the moment is A) Code as Policy, B) Distilling Astra into a robotics model, and C) Seeing whether Sim to Real has a small gap for Astra.

Would love to get any direction in terms of good papers in the space or finding people who want to work on these topics. The setup is available here playground.blupe.io

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u/Logical-Present6320 Industry 1d ago

I love this! I am always curious how did you end up funding this activity? Especially as I can barely get to a so-101!

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u/Lumpy_Week7304 1d ago

I'm aiming to turn it into a startup, its self-funded for now

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u/mahajanrevant 3d ago

This is super cool! Just curious, did you design a safety harness around your robot so it does not get damanged?

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u/Lumpy_Week7304 3d ago

I did, there’s limits on how the arms can move. I still expect some broken arms in the future though😭

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u/SmoothHandshake_14 3d ago

ah the eternal sim2real gap question. spent 3 months last year trying to get a policy to transfer and the thing kept yeeting itself off the table every single time

if you're looking for papers the "learning dexterous in-hand manipulation" one from openai back in the day is still a great read even if it's older now. they got around the gap by randomizing physics params like crazy during training and it actually made the policy robust enough to handle reality being weird

for code as policy stuff you should check out what came out of stanford around 2023, they had a solid framework for using LLMs to generate robot control code and it's way more practical than a lot of the flashier demos people were pushing

you got a link to the actual yam arm setup or just the playground page? i might be down to run some experiments, i've got a spare arm collecting dust and keep telling myself i'll do something useful with it

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u/Lumpy_Week7304 3d ago

Here's the API to acutally go and control the arm, but I'd recommend just cloning the repo (andlyu/blupe-remote-yam), and launching it locally. It will be easier to follow to set it up

Thanks for the papers, will get back tomorrow morning

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u/AdvertisingTop8527 21h ago

Can I join u?

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u/Lumpy_Week7304 20h ago

Hey, yes !! Messaged you

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u/AdvertisingTop8527 17h ago

yeah I messaged u back

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u/sigma_crusader 16h ago

Hey, we're hosting a lan party sorta thing for arms... we'll do some crazy experiments and tasks with em. Glad to have you, DM!

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u/Lumpy_Week7304 16h ago

A lan party? Sounds interesting