Hardware Podcasts

Why Traditional Robotics Data Collection Is Obsolete and What Replaces It

The Robot Report Podcast · 8 May 2026 · 1h 04m

What this episode covers

Eric Chan, chief scientist and co-founder of Rhoda AI, explains the company's Direct Video Action (DVA) model, which uses internet video data to train robots for zero-shot learning. Chan contrasts this approach with traditional Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, arguing that predicting future video frames provides a more scalable and data-efficient prior for robot control. The discussion covers the technical challenges of low-latency inference, the use of force/tactile inputs, and the future of prompting robots via language or single-shot demonstrations.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Rhoda AI, Familiar Machines, Escape, Maxon
Products
Yambo, Sony IBO

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