Open-Source Software Is Starting to Help Robots Think
TL;DR
After open-source hardware accelerated robotics development, the software running robot brains is increasingly going open too. Hugging Face, Nvidia, and Alibaba have all made significant open-source robotics bets in the past two years, releasing foundation models for robot control. This lowers the cost of building capable robots for research labs and startups, with the industry hoping for an LLM-style breakthrough.
Nauti's Take
A real breakthrough in robotics: open-source models from Hugging Face, Nvidia, and Alibaba dramatically lower the barrier to building robot applications. New possibilities open up for SMEs and research groups previously priced out of expensive stacks.
The catch is uneven quality, missing safety standards, and the fact that productive deployment still demands significant engineering around the model.
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