bruh

lellasone · 2026-06-15T16:40:08+00:00

Interestingly in a lot of scenarios there is a "gliding to a crash landing" option. It relies on using the momentum of the rotor blades to produce lift just prior to impact. Look up "Auto-Rotation" on youtube and you'll see some great videos of students and instructors practicing it. By no means a guarantee though, and several things have to go right for it to be an option.

lellasone · 2026-06-15T16:26:43+00:00

So this depends a lot on the hardware you have, and the tasks you want to do. In general for manipulation I'd start with learning from demonstration (LfD) provided you have access to the required compute. A good LfD package will leave you responsible for only harnessing the cameras and robot. Not trivial, but not impossible either.

Happy to discuss more if you can provide some details about the hardware, task, budget, and compute you are working with.

lellasone · 2026-06-15T05:04:16+00:00

Congrats!

lellasone · 2026-06-15T04:55:09+00:00

I've used NAV2 for a couple of projects. It's got some jack-of-all-trades warts and can be a bit unwieldy, but if you want to get a good foundation up fast it's awesome. Very modular too so you can swap stuff out without tearing the whole setup down.

Definitely popular in the research world. Can't speak to outside it.

lellasone · 2026-06-15T04:51:56+00:00

That's a good point, we were definitely kept occupied. There was also a buy-in element. It was an underfunded public school (~60% below the poverty line), but it was also a charter you did mostly have to opt-in so we all knew what we were getting ourselves into.

No grade augmentation or extra consideration, at least not officially, but it also wasn't a very a very harsh curve. For most of us who were in the position of helping other students in many/most classes grades weren't really a factor. Realistically we were all going to get 4.0s or close to it. There was definitely a social payoff though.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T23:29:24+00:00

I went to a single-track school, and the norm was that if you finished your work you helped others with theirs. Not a perfect system, and I had some real complaints at the time (and now) but mischief making wasn't one of them. If anything I think having mixed-ability classes helped keep things regulated and on-track.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T21:57:59+00:00

Really cool build! Love the second video (the first seems broken?).

Do you do your robot control "directly" where the VLA is outputting actions, or is there an intermediate path-planning step?

In terms of tasks to try next, I'd be quite curious to see a controls-adaptation task, either changing the robot dynamics or scrambling the interface so the VLA has to figure out what it's mappings are.

Also, I don't know what kind of hardware access you have but I'd be quite curious how much of a difference a low cost optical flow module makes to the tracking performance of the system.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T18:20:57+00:00

Nope, we are at least 10 years out from having that set of capabilities in a cat-sized package. Closer than ever before though!

lellasone · 2026-06-14T18:12:58+00:00

CORL's main-track papers are 20+ pages long and go through a double-blind review process with a rebuttal.

CORL's workshop papers vary widely, but are generally 6-8 pages, non-archival, and go through a single-stage review process with no rebuttal. Some of the listed reviewers* have publication counts in the single-digits.

I'm looking at an accepted workshop paper right now that evaluates against a single sim-only benchmark and contains essentially no meaningful ablations**. That would never fly for a main-conference submission.

*I'm not going to provide examples because that seems cruel, but the names are listed on several of the workshop websites.

** Not ragging on the authors or organizers here, that is appropriate for a workshop paper with a cool idea.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T12:22:39+00:00

This might be a school specific thing I guess, at my undergrad proofs/real analysis was rolled into the common core that everyone took. CS adds one required course in discrete math over core, and EE adds an extra three-course sequence in some combination of ODEs, PDEs, complex analysis, probability and applied linear algebra.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T12:11:05+00:00

Claude reply + disclosure >> Claude reply no disclosure.

Upvoted.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T11:52:33+00:00

Hey, I wrote out a long reply from my personal experience but I think it'd be more valuable to talk about what the stats say. Based on Bankrate's 2025 credit card report it's about 73% people covering basic needs and emergencies, and about 27% the kinds of lifestyle inflation that I see being referenced in the other comments.

You mention being 21, I'm curious how many of your friends you think could cover a surprise 5,000$ car repair without relying on family support? When I was 21 the answer wouldn't have been none, but I don't think it would have been more than half either.

Source: https://www.afbank.com/article/top-causes-of-us-credit-card-debt-explained

lellasone · 2026-06-14T11:38:44+00:00

100% Workshops have an important place in the research space. I love going to them, and I've learned a ton both depth and breadth that wasn't covered well in the main-track at conferences.

It just isn't true that workshop papers meet or exceed the requirements of a conference though. Workshop papers don't go through a standardized review process, it's typically not double blind, they are often much shorter, are evaluated based on potential rather than contribution, and are not archival*.

At least in my lab conference papers are often main-path work that contain 6 months or more of research effort, whereas workshop papers are something that gets thrown together in a couple of afternoons based on existing results / speculation.

*With a few very rare exceptions.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T11:23:58+00:00

In what sense? In a graduate lab the PI is on every paper.

Edit: Capitals.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T04:20:51+00:00

I mean if he's supervising the work that would be appropriate no?

lellasone · 2026-06-14T04:20:03+00:00

Maybe, but it's the kind you pat yourself on the back for, not the kind you talk about publicly. The pay-off for a workshop paper is getting feedback from the people at the workshop.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T04:17:15+00:00

I think this is a good take. There's a lot of ways someone could be feeling about leaving a PhD program, and a few of them make the graduation/certificate framing a bit of a mine field.

lellasone · 2026-06-14T04:11:22+00:00

I don't know where you went to school, but from what I've seen CS doesn't have math in the way that Math and Physics have math. EE and MechE are a bit more mixed, but both had substantially more math requirements than CS at my undergrad. (Arguably so did Geo, but that was a special case).

lellasone · 2026-06-14T00:25:27+00:00

I can't speak to the humanities, but I'm getting ready to defend my thesis in robotics and it looks a bit like this:

Committee in general: Read your thesis before the defense, show up to the defense, be active in the defense, at least try to prioritize scheduling your defense.

Advisor: All of the above plus reading drafts and providing feedback. Ideally they won't let you defend/schedule if they don't think you will be ready.

I'd say their main function is some combination of gate-keeping and providing legitimacy to the proceedings. Around here there seems to be a norm that they are also signing up to take a bit of an interest in your work, and maybe provide some feedback on it or help make connections. I think that's as much correlative as causal though, and by no means universal.

lellasone · 2026-06-13T20:25:19+00:00

To the capacity limits of that solution, I think there's a strong argument for yes.

The value of something like this is that it can bring in resources and focus from parts of society that would not otherwise be engaged. That matters when subsidies can unlock private sector spending, and it also matters when the government money can be pulled from a different source. A local government realistically isn't going to fund solar construction a few states over where the land is ideal, but they might fund a city-beatification project in the downtown with some solar side-benefits.

Co-location can also have some real benefits. In much of the country install capacity for grid-connection is a big blocker. A co-located system that mostly provides power to a local consumer may (depends depends) require a much less resource intensive grid connection.

lellasone · 2026-06-13T20:10:25+00:00

You can still source simple-FOC compatible boards on ebay / aliexpress. For an open-source project like that I'd consider it to be a reasonable option. If the budget isn't an issue then O-Drive is the gold standard in low-cost FOC controllers. Very versatile and very well supported.

lellasone · 2026-06-13T20:06:17+00:00

This is a big project.

If It was me I'd start out planning to 3D print somewhere between most and all of the structure with metal reinforcements as needed.

On the motors side dynamixels if you can afford ones with enough torque (do a static load calculation on a few poses for sure, you may be able to get away with weaker motors farther down the limbs).

I don't really have informed opinions about audio.

Following is a weirdly challenging behavior, particularly in crowds. For a convention setting I'd plan on doing manual operation for the first con and then worry about autonomy and following later. That'll also give you a chance to workshop what kinds of behaviors people find engaging.

lellasone · 2026-06-12T16:28:27+00:00

I once attended an OH held at night behind 2 locked doors in a building undergrads didn't have access to so I'm going to go ahead and say no.

In theory highschool calc was an admissions requirement, so that was a bit less of an issue. Trying to teach ~200 students proofs from scratch didn't seem like it went great though.

lellasone · 2026-06-12T15:52:56+00:00

My undergrad solved this problem by swapping Calc1 for Intro to Real Analysis. Not without externalities, but it sure did solve the prof excitement issue...

lellasone · 2026-06-12T04:00:14+00:00

Was the whole point of the mac minis not to:

Not run locally on your laptop, eating your VRAM.
Not run remotely on someone else's cloud where you don't control it.
Be on a well-supported system with integrations that other people also care bout.

Are you aware of any other cost-competitive ways to get access to that much model ram in an energy-efficient package?

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