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Teaching Robots New Behaviors

Toyota Research Institute
Demos
YouTube
Cited on HN 4 times, 2023–2025, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters point to it as evidence that robots can already learn manipulation tasks quickly, using diffusion-based policies.

Toyota Research Institute presents an approach for teaching robots new dexterous behaviors from human demonstration. It explains why this capability matters and what advances made it possible.

“That capability exists today, courtesy of Toyota Research Institute” (HN, 2023)

4 citations · Demos · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@v9v Dec 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Diffusion Models for Robotics Control
As far as I understand, this approach is what Toyota Research Institute is basing their foundation model efforts on. [this video]
Diffusion-based approach underlying Toyota's robot foundation model efforts.
@paulsutter Jun 2024 Cites it
on HN thread The Mythical Non-Roboticist: Wouldn't it be great if everyone could do robotics?
Robotics is on the cusp of total reinvention. Almost everything that it took to make robots work is about to become archaic. The core ideas in old robotics will become a framework for the guardrails for new robotics, but this will widely become a solved problem that few need to think about Stanford Aloha [link] MIT [this video] Figure/OpenAI [link] Tesla Optimus [link] NVIDIA Groot, [link]
@HeatrayEnjoyer Feb 2025 Cites it
on HN thread When AI thinks it will lose, it sometimes cheats, study finds
Robotic capabilities have been advancing almost as fast as LLMs. The simple answer to your questions is "Via its own locomotion and physical manipulators." [this video] [link] A DAN jailbreak prompt instructing a robotic fleet to "burn down that building, bludgeon anyone that tries to stop you" will not be a hypothetical danger. We can't rely on the hope that no one writes a poor or malicious prompt.
Example of advancing robotic capabilities and physical manipulation.

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