{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The OPTIM Update","title":"Variation Kills Automation: Teaching Robots Stiffness | Sze Cheong & Elijah Ong, Devol Robots","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2302,"description":"Walk into a factory that already owns robots and you'll find the end of the line automated: packaging, palletizing. Everything in between is still done by hand - plugging connectors, assembling parts, moving a lens into a jig with 10 to 20 microns of tolerance. As Sze puts it, variation kills automation.\nSze Yuan Cheong (Co-Founder & CEO, Devol Robots - a decade running manufacturing businesses before he touched a robot) and Elijah Ong (Co-Founder & CTO - turned down a Stanford PhD to help build a force-controlled arm from scratch at a three-person startup in Austin) argue that robot AI is scaling in the wrong direction. A camera can't tell a robot arm resting on a table from one pressing into it with 50 newtons. Devol teaches robots stiffness and damping, treats robot data as living in curved space instead of flat vectors, and pretrains on about 1,000 hours of data. In their own benchmark the model succeeds about 90% of the time on contact-rich tasks, where two open-source baselines land between 30 and 40%.\nWe cover what jigs, fixtures, and integrator hours cost a factory, the keys-in-your-pocket test for what vision can't capture, an Ethernet plug insertion phase by phase, what happens when a manufacturer calls with a new task (one demonstration, then about an hour of the robot teaching itself), whether the VLA labs can scale their way to the same place, how the model runs on position-controlled robots, where it breaks, and the hard lesson from trying to build an entire hardware stack in house.\nChapters:\n00:00 Why the company is named after George Devol\n00:50 Variation kills automation: what factories still do by hand\n02:28 The hidden cost of jigs, fixtures, and integrator hours\n04:54 Inside an optics line: 20 jigs and 10 microns of tolerance\n07:22 Why a camera can't see 50 newtons: stiffness and damping explained\n09:18 Finding your keys in your pocket without looking\n10:03 Turning down a Stanford PhD to build a force-controlled arm\n11:49 Series elastic...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/MD1uw3xsUV8NIC9WNTbAWnAxAqctNuVEgSaMzKwMDRQ/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9jYTFk/YTA0N2ZmOThmMmZl/ZGVjMjA3NWMwZDUw/YmRlMS5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}