MIT Robotics Seminar: Ken Goldberg

"Igniting the Real Robot Revolution Requires Closing the “Data Gap”

AI is rapidly advancing the way we think, but we live in a material world.  We still need to move things, make things, and maintain things. Imagine a future where AI-driven robots handle billions of items to support an aging population that doesn’t have enough human workers.  Several unicorn startups emerged in the past year to develop humanoid robots but to ignite the real robot revolution we need to close a 100,000x “Data Gap” between large vision-language models and current robot models.  I propose stepping stones that will lead to general-purpose humanoid robots and review four options for generating robot data, including the most practical -- collecting data from real robots operating in real environments.  I'll describe how Ambi Robotics has collected 200,000 hours of real robot data from their award-winning robot systems that have sorted 100 million real consumer packages.  This data allows Ambi Robotics to close the data gap for a practical subclass of robot skills to enable a new generation of real industrial robots.

Ken Goldberg has been interested in robots, rockets, and rebels since he was a kid. He’s skeptical about claims that humans are on the verge of being replaced by Superintelligent machines yet optimistic about the potential of technology to improve the human condition. Ken developed the first provably complete algorithm for part feeding and the first robot on the Internet. In 1995 he was awarded the Presidential Faculty Fellowship and in 2005 was elected IEEE Fellow: "For contributions to networked telerobotics and geometric algorithms for automation." Ken founded UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture public lecture series in 1997 serves on the Advisory Board of the RoboGlobal Exchange Traded Fund. Ken is Chief Scientist at Ambidextrous Robotics and on the Editorial Board of the journal Science Robotics. He served as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department and co-founded the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. Short documentary films he co-wrote were selected for Sundance and one was nominated for an Emmy Award. He lives in the Bay Area and is madly in love with his wife, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, and their two daughters.

Sponsors: A big shoutout to our sponsors, which are making this semester’s robotics seminars possible! We are pleased to have three amazing sponsors supporting the MIT Robotics Seminars this semester: Skydio, Symbotic, and Amazon. Skydio (https://www.skydio.com/) is a leader in vision-based autonomous navigation (and more!) for drones. Symbotic (https://www.symbotic.com/) is redesigning the future of warehouse automation with mobile robots (just a few miles from MIT!). Amazon (https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics) is building new kinds of GenAI for robotics as they grow towards 1M deployed warehouse robots.