C3.ai DTI cybersecurity P.I. Sergey Levine of UC Berkeley co-authored an article in IEEE Spectrum describing how robots from around the world are sharing data on object manipulation to help work towards a general purpose robotic brain.

“In 2023, our labs at Google and the University of California, Berkeley came together with 32 other robotics laboratories in North America, Europe, and Asia to undertake the RT-X project, with the goal of assembling data, resources, and code to make general-purpose robots a reality,” authors write.

“As more labs engage in cross-embodiment research,” they conclude, “we hope to further push the frontier on what is possible with a single neural network that can control many robots. These advances might include adding diverse simulated data from generated environments, handling robots with different numbers of arms or fingers, using different sensor suites (such as depth cameras and tactile sensing), and even combining manipulation and locomotion behaviors. RT-X has opened the door for such work, but the most exciting technical developments are still ahead.”

Read it here.