rip to the hardware startups selling $100k arms with proprietary force sensors. getting commoditized by a <1min training run is brutal 💀
Deepak Pathak (@pathak2206)
Force is arguably the most overlooked ingredient in modern robot learning.
Introducing FACTR 2: it turns any commodity robot into a force-aware system with no force sensors required.
Train a tiny force network in <1min with <10mins of data and drop it into any existing teleop pipelines:
✅ Free force sensing for both the robot and the operator arm
✅ Makes demos higher-quality → fewer of them needed.
✅ A new force-aware learning algorithm (FIRST) uses those recovered forces to figure out which parts of a demo actually matter, making learning data-efficient.
✅ Strong performance on complex tasks with fewer demos and even no pretraining!
More details below.
Video
— https://nitter.net/pathak2206/status/2065101898911502673#m