Let's talk about Mels in real life.
Robotics simulation is special because, like other sims we know and love e.g. Flight Simulator and Kerbal Space Program, it’s a fun medium to learn and play. But unlike other sims, the AIs you create in Mels can power real robots!
We didn't deliver on this aspiration in gen1 Mels since we optimized for fast and cheap training (for gameplay) at the expense of quality and capabilities (for real robots), confining Mels to virtual AIs. gen2 Mels lets us have our cake and eat it too.
🦿sim2real
Unfortunately, training good enough models is necessary but insufficient. We need an entirely new pipeline to make it as easy for you to load a digital Mel brain on a physical Mel body as it is for you to build and train a Mel today. Think: a kit of parts for a Mel, firmware to power the hardware, a protocol for the RL policy to operate the robot, a network loader, etc.
And then we need to solve the “sim2real gap”, which is a fancy term for AI not behaving in the real-world like it did in simulation. This needs high-precision modeling of actuators in sim, calibrating robot model properties with the actual hardware to account for tiny spec deviations in manufacturing, and randomizing the right things in training.
sim2real is tricky enough when you have a well-designed, locked-down robot body. Making it all work, while keeping it fun, for any robot you create is...hard! The good news: frontier AI models are entering the chat and might solve these problems sooner than we ever imagined.
🕹️ Demo Time
As a first step towards building any Mel you can dream up IRL, we’re developing sim2real Mels experiences for robot creators we ❤️ starting with GrowBot: growbot.mels.ai. Try it out!
