ZurichRobotics #2

Antonio Arbues (Loki Robotics): Loki: Building Useful Robots in The Age of AI

In a time of shiny robot demos, building useful robots is the real challenge. This talk is about how at Loki Robotics we are approaching the problem of building robots that handle all the manual background work required to keep facilities functional. I will dive deep into the challenges of deploying robots in the real world, how a full-stack approach is key to building something really useful, how a teleoperation-first approach enables small teams to build the right thing, and how we are taking decisions to leverage the coming wave of AI as an enabler for scalability.

Giacomo Manzoni (Hexagon): A Gentle Introduction to Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation A comprehensive and accessible introduction to learning-based methods for dexterous robotic manipulation. We start by motivating the need for learning in this domain, then we will introduce imitation learning as one of the most prominent and practical frameworks. We will then dive into a technical analysis of some of the most widespread models like diffusion policies, flow-based models, and VLAs, collecting insightful ideas from academia while highlighting limitations of real-world deployment. We will task data (or rather the scarcity of it) and evaluations.