Flexion Robotics

Twitter boi, do you want to see a humanoid AI lab from the inside? Well I do ;) Join me to visit @FlexionRobotics A world-leading lab building the AI brains for humanoids – in Zurich, one of the best hubs for Physical AI. Their goal? Build the Android of robotics. One operating system that works on any humanoid hardware. It is crazy what their robots can do. We pushed a robot on the stairs. It didn't care. They left one in a rainy forest it was never trained on. Chilled and hiked there. And because they let robots train on their own, from zero through reinforcement learning, the robots do odd inhuman things. Eg they stand up from the ground in ways no human ever would. If their humanoid brain works, this will be industry defining. This is why Flexion is one of Europe's Most Ambitious Startups. 🇪🇺🔥 0:00 Intro 0:38 Inside a Lab with 14 Humanoids 2:17 What’s Actually Inside a Humanoid? 4:43 The Robot Navigates on Its Own 6:31 Why Grasping Is So Hard 7:01 Stairs, Pushes, and Balance Tests 7:55 Training 4,000 Robots in Parallel 10:50 Teleoperation vs Reinforcement Learning 14:35 The Case for Humanoids 15:55 Why Europe Could Win Robotics Please like & RT 🙏

"Teleoperation in robotics is very popular right now." "We’re intentionally avoiding it." @rdn_nikita CEO & Co-founder @FlexionRobotics on how they’re training robots at scale: “We’re betting heavily on simulation and reinforcement learning.” “No motion-capture suits. No VR headsets. No armies of people piloting robots.” “Instead, we train as much as possible in simulation.” “If a new robot comes in, we load its URDF, retrain in the simulator, and deploy a new neural network.” “So when we train one robot on a task, we’re effectively training dozens or hundreds of embodiments at once.” “That’s the flywheel.”

Today, we're joined by @rdn_nikita, co-founder and CEO of @FlexionRobotics to discuss the gap between current robotic capabilities and what’s required to deploy fully autonomous robots in the real world. Nikita explains how reinforcement learning and simulation have driven rapid progress in robot locomotion—and why locomotion is still far from “solved.” We dig into the sim2real gap, and how adding visual inputs introduces noise and significantly complicates sim-to-real transfer. We also explore the debate between end-to-end models and modular approaches, and why separating locomotion, planning, and semantics remains a pragmatic approach today. Nikita also introduces the concept of "real-to-sim", which uses real-world data to refine simulation parameters for higher fidelity training, discusses how reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and teleoperation data are combined to train robust policies for both quadruped and humanoid robots, and introduces Flexion's hierarchical approach that utilizes pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for high-level task orchestration with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and low-level whole-body trackers. Finally, Nikita shares the behind-the-scenes in humanoid robot demos, his take on reinforcement learning in simulation versus the real world, the nuances of reward tuning, and offers practical advice for researchers and practitioners looking to get started in robotics today. 🗒️ For the full list of resources for this episode, visit the show notes page: twimlai.com/go/760. 📖 CHAPTERS =============================== 00:00 - Introduction 04:07 - Is robot locomotion solved? 06:04 - Sim-to-real gap 08:58 - Adding semantics to policies 09:42 - Modular vs end-to-end architectures 10:29 - Planner model 12:21 - Adapting RL techniques from quadrupeds to humanoids 15:39 - Behind robot demos 18:09 - Humanoid robots in home environments 22:03 - Training approach 23:56 - VLA models 27:59 - Closing the sim-to-real gap 32:55 - Task orchestration using VLMs 36:38 - Tool use 38:10 - Model hierarchy 43:37 - Simulator versus simulation environment 44:57 - Combining imitation learning and reinforcement learning 46:42 - RL in real world versus RL in simulation 52:58 - Reward tuning and value functions in robotics 56:38 - Predictions 1:00:10 - Humanoids, quadropeds, and wheeled platforms 1:02:45 - Advice, recommended robot kits, and community pla