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Physical AI — the path to a beautiful tomorrow.
THE REPLICANT TRUTHA NEWSPAPER ABOUT PHYSICAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Forecast · 2026-11-03 · CET
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All we can do is learn to be human while the rain falls.
Issue № 6 ·
rev. 1 · Archive
Five studies explore why one large algorithm is not enough for dependable action in the physical world.
Imagine watching someone put objects on shelves without being told which movements to make. Learning from that video alone would be difficult for a robot too. A research team led by Jun Cen investigated whether videos could help robots perform tasks that were missing from their usual training examples.
When you pick up a glass, bending your fingers is only part of the job. They must touch the glass in useful places or it may slip. A team led by Zhixuan Xu studied how to teach robot hands using the changing places where fingers contact an object. Their system includes pictures from cameras near the fingertips and information about contact surfaces.
A robot relies on more than a trained neural network. It also uses a software harness: code that calls tools, remembers mistakes and decides when to retry. Kehong Gong and colleagues introduced TinyAstral to improve this surrounding software while leaving the larger model's parameters unchanged. They then trained a smaller model to work inside the improved system.
Imagine a robot following one person down a busy corridor. Someone wearing similar clothes crosses in front of it, and the robot may confuse the two people. A team led by Mingyang Lyu studied how improving a robot's ability to keep following someone affects the safety of its movements.
A small wheeled robot and a larger robot with a different steering system cannot move through a narrow corridor in exactly the same way. The command to turn right produces different motions. A team led by Zhidong Wang proposed teaching one program to plan paths for several kinds of robots while still respecting those differences.
Video, fingertip contacts and surrounding software help turn knowledge into physical action.
Concepts & terms
The key ideas in this issue, explained briefly.