Teaching a humanoid robot to move around in the world is difficult and challenging

From the YouTube page:

Robert Playter is CEO of Boston Dynamics, a legendary robotics company that over 30 years has created some of the most elegant, dextrous, and simply amazing robots ever built, including the humanoid robot Atlas and the robot dog Spot.

This is a completely different world from large language models. It took 15 years for Boston Dynamics to get its Atlas robot to produce a natural looking walk. This discussion is worth viewing and thinking about. Figuring out how to get a robot to move is at least as intellectually challenging as getting an LLM to produce coherent and sensible prose. One might even argue that it is more challenging. At this point getting LLMs to produce coherent prose is not difficult. Multiple-column multiplication is difficult; eliminating confabulation is difficult; but mere prose production is not. But for some reason we don't know how to calibrate the difficulty of that behavior and so are prone to overvalue the significance of what the LLM is doing. But we are unlikely to view the movements of a humanoid robot and conclude that it's only a hop-skip-and-jump from playing a competent game of basketball.

On predictive control (c. 24:38):

Robert Playter: yeah those things have to run pretty quickly

Lex Fridman: what's the challenge of running things pretty quickly a thousand Hertz of acting and sensing quickly

RP: you know there's a few different layers of that you you want at the lowest level you like to run things typically at around a thousand Hertz which means that you know at each joint of the robot you're measuring position or force and then trying to control your actuator whether it's a hydraulic or electric motor trying to control the force coming out of that actuator and you want to do that really fast something like a thousand Hertz and that means you can't have too much calculation going on at that joint um but that's pretty manageable these days and it's fairly common

and then there's another layer that you're probably calculating you know maybe at 100 Hertz maybe 10 times slower which is now starting to look at the overall body motion and thinking about the the larger physics of of the uh of the robot

and then there's yet another loop that's probably happening a little bit slower which is where you start to bring you know your perception and your vision and things like that and so you need to run all of these Loops sort of simultaneously you do have to manage your your computer time so that you can squeeze in all the calculations you need in real time in a very consistent way