ABB Robotics

RAPID FIRE QUESTIONS FROM GTC! 🎤💥 Did a rapid-fire round with @ABBRobotics and @NVIDIARobotics at GTC Berlin with Craig McDonnell and Amit Goel (thanks for taking part in this rockstars!) One answer split in a way I didn’t expect. I asked them to finish the sentence: “In five years you won’t program a robot, you will _.” Between the two of them I got four verbs. Demonstrate. Instruct. Coach. Prompt. Those aren’t synonyms. Each one is a different stack: → demonstrate means teleop rigs and imitation learning → instruct means language-conditioned policies and a grounding problem → coach means a human in the training loop, corrections accumulating over time → prompt means a foundation model behind an API and you live with what it gives you Nobody has settled this. The people building it haven’t settled it either, which I find more interesting than any roadmap slide. Same thing on “seeing, thinking or grasping, where have robots come furthest?” One said thinking. The other said seeing. In the same conversation. Best answer of the round, on what they’d automate in their own working day: “cleaning up, so I don’t get yelled at at home.” NVIDIA GTC was a blast! 💚 More info here: abb.com/global/en/areas/robo… ~~  ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com

Walked out of the NVIDIA keynote at GTC Berlin still chewing on the simulation piece! 🇩🇪 Physical AI is going strong. The world will be full of robots very soon. One of the most important things to create better robotics applications is… simulation. @ABBRobotics is rolling RobotStudio HyperReality® out to their users, built on @nvidiaomniverse libraries. You export the whole cell, robots, sensors, parts, lighting, into Omniverse and simulate it with physics. A simulation is only as good as the kinematic model of the specific arm in front of you, not the nominal one off the datasheet. Every real robot differs from its CAD by tolerance, link deflection, backlash and thermal state. ABB's Absolute Accuracy calibration measures that serial number and corrects the model toward it. Skip it and the render is beautiful while the robot still misses. So it doesn't replace real-world testing. It moves the surprises earlier, where they're cheap. ABB and @NVIDIARobotics are also launching a physical AI education program, hands-on in RobotStudio and Omniverse. May the robots be with you, and more from GTC coming! :) ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com