The best thing you’ll read all day. Something @deepakpathak and @gupta_abhinav_ have always stressed at Skild is that not only is research a necessity to develop the best deployment solutions, but deployment is a necessity to contextualize, evaluate, and guide research developments. In robotics, the two must work hand in hand to be most effective. The whole reason for moving from academic research to industry is to accelerate that feedback loop between research and deployment. A method developed in the lab isn’t good enough until it’s proven in the real world. That’s the whole point of research, to develop solutions to problems that actually matter, and unlike digital agents, capabilities of physical agents cannot easily be verified in isolation. We believe progress towards making robots a viable solution means getting your hands dirty with real deployments in real world environments for real customers. Doing so often involves a fair share of grunt work and a different level of discipline that turns off many researchers. It’s easy to feel like the work is done and it’s time to move onto the next cool dexterous capability once you’re able to shoot a video of the result. It’s an entirely different mentality when 1 failure out of 1000+ trials is enough to keep you up at night.