It's implied, and I'm hoping it's true, that this is a map-less navigation. Which is impressive. This kind of task is much easier if you have a pre-captured map of the environment, but if they are doing this without a map it's great. Historically you were always faced with "The Kidnapped Robot" problem where robots that didn't know where they were couldn't navigate even a little bit. Here the robot appears to be able to follow directions as long as they are interpretable from its current vision (or via dead reckoning).

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duchenne 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am working in Mistral robotics team. I confirm this is map-less. The only inputs are the text prompt and the front camera rgb image.

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vga1 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Please oh please try to make Kärcher adopt your stuff. Even their latest premium cleaning bots are hopeless when they don't know where they are, even when I tell them where they are.

Or, I don't know, make your own vacuums.

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moffkalast an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

So, it has to rely on exact situational step by step commands? I'm wondering how one could conceivably deploy this in a useful way. Usually you'd need to mark areas on the map and then the robot knows where to go, A* is trivial around obstacles once you have that and a lidar. And lidars are an order of magnitude cheaper than something that can run an 8B VLA.

One could maybe autogenerate these text planning commands, but it would require a map and the robot's current location, so it doesn't really solve that, unless it can find a specific thing completely on its own. How much of a planning horizon does it have?

	▲	mike_hearn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You probably don't need a geometric map. Just have someone wander around with a mobile app and feed the video into a more powerful model once, asking it to produce descriptions of the different areas of the office or building and how they connect. Now you have a "text adventure game" map you can use it with a small LLM to produce instructions for the robot to follow, assuming it knows where it currently is. The advantage over traditional approaches is presumably flexibility. LIDAR isn't going to solve an instruction like "find the man with the pink shirt".

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ainch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wouldn't modern SLAM or VSLAM address that problem?