Xiaomi-Robotics-1

https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html

by ilreb • 3 days ago

520 310 3 days ago

robotics.xiaomi.com

ThePowerOfFuet• 3 days ago

Perhaps what impressed me even more is how functional the page was without JS enabled!

mil22• 3 days ago

How well do models like these generalize to robot embodiments they weren't trained on?

Joel_Mckay• 3 days ago

Why cross-entropy follows a curve is fairly trivial to understand:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlYgs6v2YfU

In general, motion planning multi-axis systems is NP-Hard. Have a great day =3

navigate8310• 3 days ago

How are these models compared to world models by Waymo and Tesla, assuming their models are trained for recognising objects that can be further generalized for everyday chores?

ACCount373• 3 days ago

Compared how? Architecturally? In training methods? In performance?

The remarkable thing about this modern "full VLA" approach is that it doesn't train for an explicit "world model" at all. There's no factored world state, no pool of trajectory rollouts being sampled from. Instead, everything is rolled into the same VLA stack that does all of it internally.

The world model exists, but it's implicit - the VLA learns one, but only because it helps its training objectives. Trajectories are planned ahead sometimes, also implicitly, for the same reasons.

It's a very "bitter lesson" way of doing things.

As far as I know, Tesla's stack is somewhat similar architecturally - a highly integrated end to end model - but the training process for FSD does include factored "world modeling" side objectives to force the stack to develop driving-relevant internal world representations. So it's in a middle ground between a classic "world model" system and this flavor of VLA - albeit surprisingly close to the latter.

Whether the world modeling side objectives are principled and justified or a leftover from the days of insufficient scale is unclear.

m00dy• 3 days ago

it looks like the robots are not just autonomous but also they do cooperate with each other.

ideasarecool• 3 days ago

It makes me think of why couldnt they just automate ironing and folding. I can stick stuff in the suitcase myself.

Mashimo• 3 days ago

You could get wrinkle free shirts and a plastic folding board / helper, and you are 90% there for 1% of the price ;-)

SXX• 3 days ago

Automated ironing sounds like massive fire hazard even for showing off video.

fragmede10• 3 days ago

Hand held steamer > ironing

michaelhoney• 3 days ago

Watching the two-handed robot has me thinking that a third hand, perhaps with a different set of capabilities (like a tentacle grip) might make many tasks easier. I realise that more limbs = more problems, but even so, having additional ways to hold and turn things would be a big help.

snovv_crash• 3 days ago

Anybody who worked on a car knows an extra hand would always be helpful.

mghackerlady4• 2 days ago

I feel like there'll soon be a market for AI controlled enhancements like limbs. Neural interfaces seem to be a long shot, at least for now, so some kind of AI that senses the environment and intelligently react to it seems like the next best thing

xnickb• 3 days ago

My thoughts exactly, but to train it you'd need a lot of data with someone manually operating it. With just two hands it's enough to have a lot of footage of humans doing it. Maybe down the line the robots will be able to self-improve or someone will come up with ways to optimize this..

amelius• 3 days ago

Yeah, folding sheets requires 4 hands. With a large distance between each pair.

XorNot5• 3 days ago

Or just two to four robots working as a team.

_carbyau_• 3 days ago

SciFi novel "The Mote in God's Eye." has aliens with three hands.

One "gripping hand" kinda coming out the gut, and two dextrous hands for detail work. Led to abuse of English language with: On the one hand... On the other hand... On the gripping hand...

IIsi50MHz2• 2 days ago

Which is reall just a patch for the problem of "On one hand… On the other hand… …On the OTHER hand…".

It's worth noting that the one-other-gripping pattern seems meant to convey two considerations and end with the strongest of three.

The English one-other pattern doesn't necessarily require the second consideration to dominate. They could be equal, or they might merely introduce concerns that haven't been evaluated to conclusion yet.

Alas, one-other-gripping doesn't seem to generalise to more than three concerns.

sharno• 2 days ago

We need Amdahl's law for limbs

NamlchakKhandro• 2 days ago

tentacle grip.... giggidy giggigdy gooooo

bahmboo• 2 days ago

aka Rocky (this is a reference to Project Hail Mary). Great descriptions in the book about how the fictional creature can use the arms together or differently and on multiple tasks at the same time.

tmzt• 23 hours ago

A prehensile-tailed monkey? Watch them perform simple tasks with three useful appendages. (Really five)

SillyUsername• 3 days ago

Does this require a given hardware platform, or for example, could I run this model with a cheap mini robot with a single camera (i.e. good enough without depth), tracked treads, and an arm?

Havoc• 3 days ago

I’d imagine the training is hardware specific

michaelt2• 3 days ago

When the page says "embodiment-free (UMI)" it means they've used a standardised gripper and camera arrangement [1], while aiming to be agnostic to the type of robot arm that gripper is attached to.

[1] https://umi-gripper.github.io/

isusmelj• 3 days ago

I think this is the most satisfying video I’ve seen of a robot doing laundry. Not sure if it’s the camera angle, the 3× speed, or the music.

giamma2• 3 days ago

I watched it on mute and was still satisfying, so I guess it's not the music.

adrian_b4• 3 days ago

The uncut movie is at 2X speed.

You can easily save it on your computer, and then play it at 0.5X speed, to see it like in real life.

It was still satisfying.

zwaps• 3 days ago

Coining the term: Slopfold

When you Robot folds your clothes but it's kinda wrinkly and sloppy but you accept it anyway because it's easier than precisely folded and pressed clothes.

broodbucket• 3 days ago

I have been slopfolding since before it was cool

Cthulhu_5• 3 days ago

Like outsourcing my thinking to the internet, I too did these things before it was cool.

whereistejas4• 3 days ago

I've been slopfolding since back when it was just called "dumping it in the wardrobe".

rkuodys• 3 days ago

Isn't that the story of <any> technology? When the coffee machines first came to be, Barista was definitely a better option. However, through the evolution, in many cases today machine does better job than barista.

thrdbndndn• 3 days ago

Better analogy would be that even though the coffee machine is still worse, we choose it because it's more convenient (at least I think that's the case).

spiderfarmer• 3 days ago

How privileged was your upbringing?

prodigycorp• 3 days ago

I don't know why you would assume privilege from a comment like that. If anything, it's the unprivileged kids who would know that you'd get your hand slapped for folding clothes like that.

defrost• 3 days ago

That comment could easily have been made by an orphan from the poorest part of the US who signed up for military service.

____mr____• 3 days ago

saw the way it folded the clothes and thought "better than me" :/

Cthulhu_5• 3 days ago

I'm not sure what the :/ implies, but if you're disappointed by your own folding techniques, spend a bit of time on it, look up some guides, and fold clothes with purpose. or something.

(Rise up against the machines! Folding your own clothes is an act of resistance!)

threethirtytwo3• 3 days ago

When AI is a the forefront of scientific breakthroughs and all human endeavor is painfully minuscule compared to AI, we'll still be calling it slop as we all hypocritically generate more and more slop.

XorNot5• 3 days ago

God this whole comment section is weird.

It's like all the people who are so proud they don't use dishwashers.

squidbeak• 3 days ago

I suspect you might be jumbling up your smalls with your origami.

jhanschoo• 3 days ago

Folding clothes is already a compromise between leaving them unfolded and hanging them

cassianoleal• 3 days ago

Funny how hanging them is also a compromise between leaving them unfolded and folding them.

jiehong• 3 days ago

Pretty cool!

Only 10B parameters if I correctly understand some of those histograms, which is tiny in LLM world! It bodes well for the future.

The training videos seem to show human hands using the robot grippers to execute the tasks, which must have been a fun but tedious process.

ACCount373• 3 days ago

Yes, it's truly remarkable how small modern VLAs are.

Even Tesla's FSD AI stack is small by modern LLM standards. Once the hardware is there to enable real time 100B inference on endpoint SBCs? We'd see gains in AI robotics from that alone.

giamma2• 3 days ago

Cool video but it forgot to pack underwear in the bag!

resiros2• 3 days ago

The video cuts to a new shot every couple of second instead of one continuous shot like all robotics research. This makes it hard to trust it. The robot probably failed a million team and they stitched the video from 100 experiments.

wadim• 3 days ago

The uncut video is at the bottom of the page.

shellfishgene• 3 days ago

And it shows the robot getting into something of a loop when trying to fold the white shorts. I wonder if someone pushed a button to get it out of that.

nitin72• 3 days ago

The video also tells you that there is an uncut video at the bottom of the page. Did you take a look at that?

resiros2• 2 days ago

Nope did not notice. Updating my comment

karolist4• 3 days ago

Of all the tasks I do, folding clothes takes a ridiculously small slice of my time. Is this and all the other robotics videos aimed at H&M staff?

_diyar• 3 days ago

I think its a ubiquitous task which requires some amount of precision dexterity, so its an easy to digest example.

surfmike• 3 days ago

Sorting and folding laundry is one of the most tedious chores in our household. Do you have kids?

ileonichwiesz• 3 days ago

If I did have kids, I probably wouldn’t want them to run around a big heavy robot with very little spatial awareness.

karolist4• 3 days ago

FYI I do have 3 kids, no, it doesn't take that long (we share this with the wife), in a few years the kids will be able to help us with this task so it's gonna be even less time. Doing household chores is good for the kids. I wouldn't wan't this robot driving around my household when I have small children anyway...

cynicalsecurity2• 3 days ago

It's meant for war. Today it folds your clothes, tomorrow it plants mines and shoots at you on a battlefield.

Joker_vD2• 3 days ago

So is a pasta factory. Today it rolls and forms macaroni, tomorrow it makes bullets. Have you ever wondered why rigatoni are so wide? That's why.

dudisubekti3• 3 days ago

What?

There's already a better system today: mine launchers (remote minelaying system)

Cthulhu_5• 3 days ago

Seems overly complicated for that task (planting mines / shooting) when kamikaze drones are cheap and mass produced.

infofarmer• 3 days ago

A lot of smaller chores look trivial when considered in isolation, but have disproportionate time and mental cost because of how they fit in the flow of life. Sometimes the effect is similar to interrupting an engineer for a couple of minutes.

michaelt2• 3 days ago

They're trying to show their investors a butler robot that can do all types of household chores.

Folding fabric has traditionally been very hard to solve with robots; the ideal places to grab the fabric might be hidden, the fabric patterns are repetitive, and the material flops around, tangles in the grippers, and brings other pieces of laundry with it.

Successfully sorting and folding a basket of laundry shows they've got a control system capable of performing some quite difficult tasks.

mk892• 3 days ago

All you need to do to understand what task is more complex (for a robot to solve) is just to ask a 6-8 years old child to do it. It takes days before they "understand".

So it cannot be that simple (for the reasons you mentioned).

karolist4• 3 days ago

They also use a large ring attached to the first zipper to help the robot grab it. This is not a realistic zipper, but I do appreciate them being honest and showing that grabbing small objects is still not perfect

f6v• 3 days ago

I have a pile of washed clothes that moves from the bed to the chair for a good week before it finally goes into the closet.

darkwater8• 3 days ago

Come back when you have a family and you run a washing machine full of clothes per day.

Philip-J-Fry• 3 days ago

Don't you just throw all the washing into the washing machine, wait for it to actually do the work, and then hang it all up afterwards? It's like a 15 minute job max.

karolist4• 3 days ago

I replied to another comment, but I do have 3 kids.

throwa3562622• 3 days ago

Funny you mentioned H&M. They are boycotted on China due to their public stance against slave labour:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57691415

It is important to remember that China is not only about open weight LLMs, fastest cars and flying taxis. There is still a lot of very serious human right abuse going on in this country.

dannyw• 3 days ago

I'm not super sure how relevant this is to the overall topic and thread, tbh. There's plenty of cheap yet real rebuttals, whether it's all the things with ICE (and not just the top-of-mind stuff; but effective deprivation of due process for suspects; etc), or even war crimes.

I don't think it serves much purpose tbh -- it's not going to change anyone's mind.

adrian_b4• 3 days ago

When the last day's news were about other people shot dead by ICE without a plausible reason, it is hard to take seriously discussions about human rights abuse coming from USA. It is hard to imagine a more serious abuse than being randomly killed on the street, while walking or driving during your normal daily routine.

Unfortunately, there are very few, if any, countries remaining where human rights abuses are not frequent, so mentioning them in unrelated technology discussions has become non-relevant.

hasyimibhar• 3 days ago

As a parent with 3 kids and both my wife and I working, folding clothes is the most tedious household chore. It's physically and mentally exhausting (unlike doing the dishes, which is only physically exhausting as I can wash piles of dishes while zoning out). And not to mention take so much time, a week's worth of unfolded pile of clothes for our entire household can take me 1-2 hours to fold uninterrupted (2-3 hours if I do it while watching Netflix or something).

ygouzerh2• 3 days ago

Small sharing tips, in case it can help: have the maximum of hangers possible. It take a bit more space, but the time saved is huge + it remove iron time for low wrinkle sensitive clothes (e.g cotton polo)

wfwerwerwe• 3 days ago

Yep.. and with 3 kids so many of the time-consuming "tasks" are not open to automation because a human doing it is the point.. eg. bedtime books, bathing the kids, helping them make their lunch/breakfast, etc.

schnitzelstoat2• 3 days ago

It's one of the most annoying.

I have a dishwasher so I do minimal washing up. I don't have a dryer as I air-dry my laundry but I could get one if I wanted to. I have a Roborock although I don't use it much since having a toddler.

But folding laundry is the one chore which still can't be automated. Even cooking itself has become much easier with air fryers etc.

culi• 3 days ago

WAIC has been wild this year. We got Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 announced. We got robots boxing and open-sourced robotics foundation models. And we got the announcement of WAICO.

At what point are we gonna start seeing American firms attending WAIC?

FooBarWidget• 3 days ago

I'd like to see a serious HN discussion thread about WAIC first.

agys3• 3 days ago

Designing a non humanoid robot is the way to go. The design of new tools and appliances for hybrid human/robot use will eventually follow: the zip line for the shoe bag required way too much precision work.

fedeb95• 3 days ago

I can't believe someone shares my point of view. We have already many non humanoid robots to do boring stuff (underwater maintenance, stuff like that). For some reasons people tend to think that for robots to do stuff close to humans, we need human like robots.

We do not. I want a swarm of insects-like robots to fight mosquitos. A snake one that fixes my pipe. A spider-like robot that cleans surfaces. Etc.

fragmede10• 3 days ago

the cube shaped one that I put my dishes in.

ygouzerh2• 3 days ago

I will suggest mix of both: some everyday tools are already built for being used with hands and legs (e.g opening a door). But indeed adding some different grip types, additional arms, etc, could be helpful.

vishnuharidas• 3 days ago

Exactly what I came here to say. A robot doesn't have to look like a human. Just a few arms that does the job neatly is more than enough.

dbspin2• 3 days ago

I think this perspective is now demonstrably false. It was basically the defacto position of most roboticists until a few months back. But we've already seen the cost of humanoid robots fall precipitously (even without the kind of mass production that genuinely useful home and real world intelligence would bring).

Which seems more likely, that cheap humanoids will continue to improve in dexterity, battery life, strength etc. Leveraging the vast investment in research into real world task training. Or - that we'll redesign millions of everyday objects to fit the limitations of current task specific robots?

If you answer the latter, I've got a whole bunch of mid century quirky labour saving inventions in the back room I'd like to sell you.

agys3• 3 days ago

It’s not demonstrated yet as we still have to see a robot (humanoid or not) doing mundane tasks in full autonomy, efficiently and convincingly.

It still looks inefficient to have a humanoid robot vacuum a house by using an ergonomic tool designed around the human body.

mk892• 3 days ago

The uncut footage is so awesome.

Of course, you can mention all the things they can't do (what if there are stairs, what if the doors are smaller than the robot, etc) but it's mindblowing to see what they can do - and also the chat panel is really nice and makes it more interactive.

drcongo• 3 days ago

"Did you pack the cases yourself sir?"

nitin72• 3 days ago

In the domain of hardware, what is the equivalent of a harness? How well would this generalise to any robot, versus one that is specifically built the way Xiaomi did?

ACCount373• 3 days ago

Considering that they pre-trained on non-robot data, and mid-trained on data from other robot types? I suspect that generalization would be decent for most similar platforms - things with 1 to 2 arms and 2-finger hands.

You'd probably have to fine tune for good performance on a specific arm type. But this model isn't trained against hard assumptions of what the underlying hardware is.

darkwater8• 3 days ago

The first few second of the shirt folding arms trying to put the t-shirt properly on the table to start folding it are at the same time amusing and scaring.

What if the thing retrieves some anger-driven post from Reddit from its training data set and start literally to flip the table??

brador• 3 days ago

The fact it didn't do the 2 second tshirt fold trick shows it's just copying trained movements.

This is Automation not AI.

spaqin2• 3 days ago

Well, couldn't it have been trained on the 2-second fold trick? Besides, it might require more precise or quick movements than a regular fold.

adrian_b4• 3 days ago

The movements are simple, but you must start with a much more precise grip, which seems difficult to achieve for a robot.

whereistejas4• 3 days ago

this is what excites me most about the probable AI future. househelp is cheaply and easily accessible for most people in the east, however being able to afford a cleaner or maid in the west is a luxury. i spent a ginormous amounts of time every week keeping my house in shape. i look forward to the day when i will be able to carve out that time and get it back for myself.

fnoef• 3 days ago

I wonder, what will you do with that free time you will crave?

cognitiveinline• 3 days ago

Here's 10 things just starting with "A".

Amateur astronomy

Artistic painting

Audiobook binging

Aerial yoga

Archery practice

Aquascaping

Antique hunting

Acoustic guitaring

Alpine hiking

Astrophotography

.. Need more?

kroaton• 3 days ago

Work more for my boss and landlord so the fiefdom can survive.

whereistejas4• 3 days ago

i want to read more for the most part. my reading list is evergrowing.

shameless plug: https://whereistejas.com/inbox/

(PS: people who comment about the faults in my website will be downvoted. im sharing my reading list, not looking for a codereview)

Levitating2• 3 days ago

I think anything more advanced than a Roomba won't be cheaper than a maid for actually cleaning your house.

boelboel• 2 days ago

Househelp isn't cheaply and easily accessible for most people in the east, a large portion of people in the east is just poor but you don't consider them in 'most people'.

user_7832• 3 days ago

I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic. I was grinning ear to ear while seeing the video. You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry? And the model is at least as free as beer?

To quote the lyrics/meme, we used to pray for times like this. This is what robotics should be used for.

chunkyslink• 3 days ago

I am of course impressed by the model and the robot. Great stuff,

But the downside is that won't we all just turn into the obese, stupid humans at the start of the WALL-E film?

Mindfulness teaches us that we can enjoy the washing up, the laundry, planting seeds, tending the garden. It connects us to something. Without this will we end up with a rise in mental health issues, because for one thing people will just end up on social media in the time they save.

Just a thought.

echelon3• 3 days ago

This discourse reminds me of the handful of Christians who thought we needed Corn Flakes and uncomfortable clothing to stay chaste and that electricity made us stray from God.

Chill. Your brain is the product of the past. Reread that: your brain is anachronistic and outmoded.

We get to live in the future now. Count yourself lucky. You're one of the few that got to witness the birth of flight culminating in landing on the moon, except in this case your floppy disk became your personal shopper and stay-at-home Michelin star chef and part time driver.

It's okay to feel a bit of discomfort. It's hard to believe this is actually happening in our lifetimes, but it is! And that's so cool.

So sit back and enjoy the future.

Cthulhu_5• 3 days ago

Probably not, as the washing machine, dishwasher, car, computer, etc didn't cause that either.

edit for nuance: Sure, it did for some people I suppose. But they are the exception.

schnitzelstoat2• 3 days ago

Or we can use the free time to go to the gym.

Anything that frees us from labour is good.

spaceman_20203• 3 days ago

Ironically, the people who can afford to have in-house help to handle things like cooking and folding clothes - the rich - also tend to be fitter and more active

Maybe if you can shave an hour every day from chores, you will actually have the energy to enjoy physical activities

jldugger4• 3 days ago

You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

Did you watch it actually fold that shirt? Super slow and bad at it.

JumpCrisscross2• 3 days ago

Super slow and bad at it

Eh, this still has value for me if it can do it reliably. Leaving a robot to badly fold my t-shirts overnight and then badly put them in my closet the next day is fine. I don't need my casual wear beautifully folded. But I do need it organised, and that's apparently a chore I'll just never learn to like doing.

fragmede10• 3 days ago

The very first car was absolutely awful. Super slow and bad at it.

olalonde• 3 days ago

It can do it over 8 hours while you're sleeping though.

madwolf• 3 days ago

Is a Chinese robot vacuuming and mopping my floor every day? Yes it is. Could I do it better manually? Absolutely. I still prefer the robot to do an ok job than to do it myself.

sajithdilshan• 3 days ago

So what? it can take hours to do it and I can focus on something else. If these robots actually become available on affordable price I would buy one without blinking. It would totally free up my weekends, no more hours wasted doing laundry, cleaning the apartment etc.

coldtea3• 3 days ago

"Did you see the output of that Chat GPT 2? It's super lame code"

koonsolo2• 3 days ago

My dishwasher is also super slow and bad at it. But you know what? I still prefer that over doing it myself.

whereistejas4• 3 days ago

Most people in software misunderstand how physical goods work. When making machines you don't care about getting everything perfect all the time, you care about staying within tolerable limits all the time.

How bad do the folds in your laundry need to be for them to be no different then just being dumped in a pile? As long as we are above that point the robot is useful.

mlrtime3• 3 days ago

I can also vacuum my floor 3x faster than a robot vacuum. But so what, I'm not there when it happens.

epolanski3• 2 days ago

You're missing the forest for the tree.

ErneX• 2 days ago

I don’t need it to do it faster than me, I just need it to do it instead of me.

Plus it’s obvious it will get better.

theplumber• 2 days ago

I am worse than the robot and I don’t mind if it takes 3 hours to do it.

lp4v4n• 3 days ago

The pessimism in the comments here is entirely the reflection of the times we're living in.

Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.

It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.

If this video appeared in 60's or 70's, people would be in awe imagining the future where robots do everything.

echelon3• 3 days ago

Those of us who liked the open web and P2P and hacking on projects all the time are seeing these models as a way to rebuild the internet in a shape that pleases us. To build anything and everything we want. Sans opportunity cost.

And that's the real value - you don't have to burn the candle of your life away to get what you want. You'll have so much more time now that you aren't AST wrangling.

Opportunity cost is vanishing (or at least the cost is multiple orders of magnitude smaller). And that's the most exciting thing that's happened in tech since the internet.

I'll probably be able to make my own phone operating system.

I'll probably be able to decompile N64 games, port them to Rust, combine them, extend them. In a weekend.

I'll probably be able to make my own music management platform while simultaneously working on a few robotics projects.

A find my phone button.

Automate everything.

And that's maybe a month of projects.

mlrtime3• 3 days ago

This seems more likely than racism, or us exceptionalism as mentioned above.

People are and should be skeptical of this. The natural response would be

a) It will put me out of a job

b) I won't be able to afford it anyway.

letmevoteplease• 2 days ago

"the future where robots do everything" and "unemployment" are the same thing

GordonS• 3 days ago

There tends to be a lot of low-key (and some not-so-low-key) anti-Chinese xenophobia on HN, so that's likely a big part of it too.

coldtea3• 3 days ago

Nation wide NIH.

sph2• 3 days ago

More like pro-US exceptionalism, and any announcement for products created outside of it (whether it's EU or China) is met with doubts and skepticism.

Unless something is from Japan, then it's perfect and any criticism is because you don't appreciate its unique cultural heritage.

shevy-java• 3 days ago

Well. I already decided some time ago that I don't want to have my money go into US corporations as long as the orange King is living out his genocidal fantasies (and even without that, I am already annoyed to no ends about Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google abusing everyone else so blatantly and violently, including buying legislation - look at the mandatory age sniffing movement before you can access information on the www any longer; this is fascism, and children are abused as fake reason for change here). But I am not all that happy about China becoming so dominant in the whole product chain either. I think the production should be more balanced world-wide, globally. And also, very much so, locally. I am also aware that this is very hard to do, for various reasons, but still if I have a little influence then I really would rather not empower the USA or China any more than they already abuse everyone else here. And both do, by the way.

cultofmetatron2• 3 days ago

western elites are currently at odds with the chinese elites and every impressionable idiot is being inundates with antichinese propaganda.

Lets be frank, every single issue we have with the CCP is either also being done by the west or in the works.

chinese oppression of the uighurs is nothing compared to whats going on in Gaza.

china forces prisoners to peel garlic while american prisoners are paid pennies a day to fight wildfires while being prohibited from being paid for those very same skills as firefighters when rehabilitated.

america is quickly workin on legislation to to make criticism of certain foreign governments illegal with very real reprucussons (revoking passports).

At least china has a working power grid and high speed train network.

sneak• 3 days ago

It’s not just HN. The USG has been manufacturing consent for war with China (trade or otherwise) in the US population for decades. Same goes for Iran.

Gareth321• 2 days ago

It's strange because my impression has been pro-Chinese comments on HN. I suppose it depends on the topic, the time of day, and how many bots each government is employing on a given day for the key words and their compute budget. This submission seams rather balanced to me.

some_random• 2 days ago

This is one of the most pro-china forums out there, what are you talking about

yanhangyhy• 2 days ago

i think it's because the media. it never tells the real china, instead it's full of fake news and sterotypes. so people outside of china cannot get the real information.

i have one good example: the rare earth probelm. i saw many artices on this topic in reddit/x, and many times, it comes with a pic of an old farmer/dude in a dirty environment doing it's work. so it implies this is just a dirty work, western countires dont want to do it is because it's dirty and they dont want to harm the environment. only china dont care about this,

exmaple link: 1. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/us-china-rare-earths-d... 2. https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2026/07/16/...

but in reality, its not true. its only true long time before, assume china didn't have advanced tech on this is totally insane, consider china has joined this indsutry for decaseds and lead in the tech. but in most comments area, people still assume it's dirty so only china is doing it.

if you dont know your 'enermy', you will keep lose. This happens so many times.

antfarm• 3 days ago

We nearly destroyed our planet to get there. Technocrats here applaude the new technological achievements that make life a little easier (less boring?) for the top one percent while willfully ignoring the associated costs for everyone else. Manufacturing these at scale will only make things worse. We are approaching peak decadence ever faster.

red-iron-pine2• 2 days ago

Wall-E tried to warn us

fragmede10• 2 days ago

The top 1% already have humans to do things for them though.

spaceman_20203• 3 days ago

Every single thing that’s come out of China in the entire AI/Robotics space lately has been a massive net positive for the world

Open Source is a good thing, regardless of where it comes from

idiotsecant6• 2 days ago

It's also relevant that China isn't open sourcing results because that's something China will do forever on some philosophical grounds. They do it because it is currently in the best interests of the Chinese state (and the world, as it turns out, coincidentally) but as soon as that stops being true there is zero chance it'll continue to be open source.

rvz• 3 days ago

I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic.

Time and time and time and time and time again, technologists are always naïve to never realize that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I am expecting the opposite effect to happen with the actual use of robotics. Mass displacement of every sector of labor.

This is not ruled out.

poncho_romero2• 2 days ago

Mass displacement of every sector of labour. Dissent policed by Boston Dynamic's robodogs. You will own nothing and be happy.

whilenot-dev• 3 days ago

This is what robotics should be used for.

I disagree. We should use robotics to extend our reach into hazardous environments, enhance our physical capabilities, or to provide a steady handling of things where it's absolutely needed - doing laundry in my household is none of these.

Folding laundry takes me 10 mins every 10 days. I organize my closet once in a while according to my sense of fashion, and now I'll just need to keep that structure. I don't always like to do these chores, but I have no issue in acknowledging them as part of my responsibilities. Why would I even automate[0] that?

Robotics is costly, and I see no way how that would change anytime soon. That isn't a flaw of some kind either, it's rather just one of the limitations that needs to be accounted for, neglecting that would be detrimental to the future I envision.

Don't get me wrong, I love robotics with a passion, as engineer I like to tinker, and I'm a big admirer of FESTOs bionic research[1]. It's just that the field suffers from an "overpromised and underdelivered" aura as far as I can remember, and I remember the presentation of ASIMO[2] 26 years ago.

Some people would like to see the field hyped up, focused on the consumer like every other field in tech, probably for financial gain, but I personally see the value in its downplay. To be honest, I love these reality checks, as I see them as a valuable part of the learning process all together - a journey for what it means to automate, and what it means to define as human natural chore.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1205/

[1] https://www.festo.com/us/en/e/about-festo/research-and-devel...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO

rocketvole• 2 days ago

You could replace "robotics" with "AI" in what you wrote above, and it would sound like what people were saying about llms when they first came out. Not trying to glaze one way or another but historically this take is outdated.

bob7782• 2 days ago

Sure but the robots that extend our capabilities often start by replicating our current capabilities, even if those are as simple as folding clothes. It provides a baseline for the next generation of robots that can do more.

ksec• 2 days ago

I keeping saying this, the best AI / LLM coming out isn't another question / answer chatbot or automate my email and essay.

It is Robotics! Finally doing my dishes and laundry for pete sake! And hopefully help me to find stuff I keep forgetting where I put it.

fragmede10• 2 days ago

I have so many airtags because otherwise I'd lose all my shit.

sexy_seedbox• 2 days ago

we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

Until it can check all pockets for tissue paper...

falsemyrmidon• 2 days ago

My wife already doesn't do that

ModernMech• 2 days ago

I saw robots doing this in tech demos 15 years ago. And even those robots weren't doing anything new. Like all AI models, this is just AI repackaging and rebranding of things that robots have already been programmed to do using more classical control methods. The idea to do everything via AI was of course thought of for a long time, but the conclusion has been we have faster and more reliable methods to do the same thing with less compute, and that's still true.

During my undergrad I worked on a project where we set off a bunch of walking robots, recorded their walks, and then used the data as the basis for a learned walking controller. I see this Xiaomi model as pretty much like that.

It's a nice technology and maybe could lead to better folding one day but unfortunately it's not "finally we have robots that can do our laundry" (yet).

backlava1211• 2 days ago

Yeah exactly. I've been seeing demos like this for ages. I'm kinda shocked at the lack of skepticism in the comments here. The hackernews comment sections have changed a lot these past couple years...

allisdust• 2 days ago

This super interesting link showing things that were impossible even a couple of years back, sitting below the day old news about Kagi's me too browser tells everything about HN audiences. West will fall behind in robotics and mostly because of the wrong priorities of its VCs and developers.

21asdffdsa122• 2 days ago

But can it goldplate oysters?

whatever1• 2 days ago

Did you see any of the MSE numbers? around 50% success rates in the tasks.

Anyone in robotics can tell you that building an 80% solution is doable, very fast. Covering the last 20% can take your entire lifespan

mandeepj• 2 days ago

You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

I’m still waiting for it to peel, slice n dice onions so that I do not have to cry while doing so, and not pay $8k for that robot.

backlava1211• 2 days ago

You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

No, we don't.

I wish we did, that would be amazing.

There have been demos like this over a decade. But they are just that, demos. Demos done in a controlled environment.

If there was a robot I could buy that could effectively fold laundry or do dishes, I would gladly drop 50-100k on it, but such a thing doesn't exist and likely won't for a long time.

villish2• 2 days ago

You would honestly pay 50-100k on a robot that just folds laundry or does your dishes? In the US you can get a maid that cleans once a week for $150-250 and would do a much better job. By the time that cost would equal this robot, the robot would be obsolete, not to mention any maintenance costs.

Also dishes are the easiest chore to do around the house, especially if you clean them after use instead of letting them pile up.

backlava1211• 2 days ago

I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic.

Actually, it seems like 99% of the comments are glazing this with zero skepticism actually. If anything the comments are too enthusiastic and lack the measured discernment that was more common on HN 5+ years ago.

RGamma• 2 days ago

The outlook on this, as so often, depends on personal finances.

brewcejener• 2 days ago

The singularity is literally here right now! Some people will never be happy! This is easily the most amazing thing I have seen in my life! These things will be taking care of and raising babies very soon!

JSR_FDED• 1 day ago

Maybe it’s the music of the first video, and maybe because it’s late, but this made me quite emotional. On the one hand it’s like a child learning to interact with its environment. On the other hand it’s a requiem for yet another thing that used to be human.

avilay• 3 days ago

Neither the Github nor the HF repos have anything on the XiaomiRobotics-1 model or datasets :-( They have a bunch of assets (datasets, code, model, etc.) for XiaomiRobotics-0 however, but I don't know much about that family of models.

adrian_b4• 3 days ago

Code: Coming soon
Model: Coming soon

Obviously, XiaomiRobotics-0 was their previously published model, which must have been weaker.

I assume that "soon" means "a week, or two".

GNaLVEre• 3 days ago

What if mum but venture backed lmao

Bob_bo• 3 days ago

I think this robot is really well-made! Xiaomi seems to be quite controversial these days, but personally, I still really like the brand.

epolanski3• 2 days ago

Got two Xiaomi phones in a row, one in 2018 for 250 euros (note 8 pro) and one in 2023 for 300 (13T) and I liked them a lot.

My gripe with the second one is lowish battery life, it always bites me on longer trips when my gf's Pixel 8 lasts considerably more, but was also way more expensive.

Will check battery reviews better next time I shop for a phone, I don't care much for the rest.

trallnag• 2 days ago

I just can't deal with all the ads on Xiaomi phones. Switched over from Chinese phones, still remember my JiaYu G4 fondly, to Samsung few years ago where the situation is a bit more bearable

6bb32646d83d• 2 days ago

I have Roborock (Xiaomi) automatic vacuum and it's fantastic technology. iRobot had a 10 year lead and did nothing with it. The robot is competent at avoiding clutter, clean the mops itself, leave my floor sparkling and so far has been extremely reliable.

orangebread• 3 days ago

How are there still people who look at all this advancement and the only thing they can utter is "it's not there yet?" It's clearly here, and if it's not to these nerds' expectations, it'll prob meet it in 4-6 months. This was cool asf.

Levitating2• 3 days ago

Because you see a robot do one thing, doesn't mean it can do other things. We've had good robot demos for decades.

For all we know they could've spent 5 years and 10 million dollars on getting this robot to fold laundry. That doesn't mean it'll be able to mop the floor better than a Roomba in a decade.

fragmede10• 2 days ago

No we haven't. Back in the 90's Honda's Asimov could barely walk. Now we have robots managing to run marathons. Clothes folding had to be played back at 50x speed because the compute just wasn't there yet. It still is barely there, some of those videos are sped up. They've probably spent way more than 5 years and 10 million dollars developing that robot. Roomba already came out with a mopping robot, why would you want this one to do that?

Fricken• 2 days ago

It's probably because robots have been doing cool asf demos for half a century and they're still mostly just demos. Elon has made a lot of money greasing the 4-6 months away crowd.

meerita• 3 days ago

I love this future. A robot that does all the chores relentlessly of the house while you spend time just working on the stuff you like.

spwa4• 3 days ago

Please keep in mind that "uncut footage of ..." is the same as those instagram videos where people throw a basketball backwards 20 meters while drinking beer, straight into the goal.

It doesn't prove this is average performance. In fact, if it was, that's not what they'd be showing.

porridgeraisin• 2 days ago

From my skim of their paper, they have gotten robodojo 14% versus previous sota 9%. So its an improvement, but doesnt seem like a reliable model yet, which is fine. I also notice the model becomes worse with more data on the printer refilling task, so thats either a bad run or its a data point against the robustness. The transfer learning results are meaningful. 75% on new complex tasks from <10 hours of demo is really good. I believe this is a 2x improvement over the SOTA. 10 trials per task is standard for these papers but is pretty weak statistically. Memory tasks its weaker at but they have acknowledged it, and I cant see why this arch would have problems w that in the future.

chronogram• 3 days ago

This is amazing! I can see in a few years having Home Assistant use an LLM to coordinate my home while I'm away. Tell the LLM to make an inventory of my home and then send the vacuum and the robot around to clean everything up. A multimodal LLM can inspect pictures for items that need to go in the dishwasher, the laundry or needs polishing and reorganise my closets to best allocate space, make the beds, take care of the plants. It has all day to do it while the solar panels provide ample energy anyway.

AbuAssar• 2 days ago

then this robot will have a face, a soothing voice and a personality...

we all know where this is going ;-)

coldtea3• 3 days ago

Cue the variations of:

"No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame"

KitN• 2 days ago

pi.website

DO SOMETHING

Gud• 2 days ago

It's happening so fast now.

AI will absolutely dominate our future. I believe we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.

Maybe I'm pessimistic but I always thought Bill Joy was prescient.

https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/

arh5451• 2 days ago

Anyone have any recommendations for robot hardware where I could test this open-source model? It would be a cool/fun project to get it working on a little robot.

monkeydust• 2 days ago

Would love to see a load/unload dishwasher benchmark.

khurs• 2 days ago

How dare Xiaomi post a realistic picture of where modern consumer robotics is at.

They will never become trillionaires if they don't pretend they are making a million humanoid robots by end of the year.

iandanforth• 2 days ago

For a bit of context there are some classically very hard things going on in this video, so if you're not impressed, be glad you didn't have to try to build this 10 years ago.

- Coordinating two hands

- Mobile body

- Deformable objects

- Thin affordances (bag zip in particular)

- Multi-object single grasp

Really a host of things that had individually been tackled as either perception or manipulation problems and probably led to more than one person's PhD here on HN.

mosura• 2 days ago

Really interesting.

From even before the RAM shortage there was noise in the robotics world of sensor and actuator shortages due to them being bought up in bulk by some of the major AI labs.

wolttam• 2 days ago

This is very cool, and the paradigm that scales to bringing truly useful robots to virtually all domains of life - just as LLMs have scaled to that degree across virtually all domains of knowledge work.

I picture a lot of perfectly tended gardens growing food.

thesockerr• 2 days ago

I hope I can use this sooner

Kuyawa• 2 days ago

Always remember this is the Model T from Ford, imagine what they will do in 10 or 100 years from now

Exciting times we live in

aavci• 2 days ago

Please help me understand. Is it more effective to have a general model like this instead of a state machine that leverages other models and a deterministic set of code?

sekh602• 2 days ago

As a house spouse I want this! I _hate_ folding laundry and always procrastinate on it. Doesn't even need to be able to load the machine like they additionally show, "just" folding it is enough for me!

ycui7• 2 days ago

feels like the American domestic manufacturing is done, there is no hope to save it.

LoveMortuus• 1 day ago

I need a robot that would earn money instead of me. I enjoy doing the dishes, laundry and work around the house~

yardie• 1 day ago

I've been playing around with Hugging Face's Lerobot[0] projects and it has been a lot of fun. To me, it has really democratized the field and has made it much easier to get into the subject without having a mechatronics degree and research lab budget. I've built 2 AI controlled robot arms: SO-ARM101 and Koch. I'm in the process of building a dual armed mobile bot[1] that looks very similar to this one. It will be interesting to see what Xiaomi's engineers push to Github.

[0] https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/index [1] https://xlerobot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Xiaomi-Robotics-1

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