A video from a Pi robot deployed at Dandelion Chocolate, fully autonomous w/ no interventions. 🤖
Deploying robots has taught us surprising lessons about the gap between proof-of-concept (i.e. building one box) and real-world utility (productively building boxes for hours).
I expected that the hard part is building the box, since it’s the most dexterous, but that wasn't what we found. Counterintuitively, the hardest part was reliably stacking the boxes. Our original table-mounted robot had poor visibility of the stack without special separately-mounted cameras. Plus, stacking requires more generalization (each box is placed in a different location), and an imprecisely-placed box can lead the entire stack to collapse many boxes later.
We recently switched this deployment over to a mobile robot, and it's fun to watch the robot being completely self sufficient for multiple hours. 🙂 Data and feedback from real world use-cases like these are quite valuable for the π pre-trained model as we scale!