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Pranay Thangeda

@pthangeda.bsky.social
1.3K followers 130 following 51 posts

I like robotics and decision making in (almost) every flavor :) PhD Candidate at UIUC and Applied Science Intern at Amazon Robotics.

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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
High scores could just be because of collusion during bidding? AFAIK in ICLR you get to bid, right? Just speculating here obviously.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
I was also gonna say cheap + readily available lidar, but the Unitree one that came out a few weeks ago looks pretty good:
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
3. An open-source high fps learned stereo depth model, kind of like what TRI has in this paper: arxiv.org/abs/2109.11644 4. Creative end-effector designs, that are cheap, repairable, and last long enough under normal wear-and tear
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
As we are wrapping up 2024, here is my robotics wish-list for 2025: 1. A sub $1000 arm with high repeatability and >= 1.5 Kg payload 2. A sub $2000 fully holonomic mobile base like TidyBot++, preferably with vertical linear rails like Watney Robotics: watneyrobotics.com
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
I have a feeling I know what this is, and playing around with it never gets old!
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Honestly it feels like that's an artifact of the prompt being modified in the background before generating the video.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
So writefull - which seems to be some sort of AI-assisted writing tool - popped up on my overleaf by default. I looked at some of it's suggestion and boy it's very opinionated in writing style lol I wonder if this would lead to every paper being written in the same generic tone
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Oops just saw the PhD topics courses - I think for most of the PhD level classes I took the professors just hosted the files on a class webpage GitHub pages lol
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Canvas for file management/LMS and Gradescope for homework submission/grading is probably the best combination out of all I’ve experienced. Gradescope in particular makes life so much easy for the grader/TA.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
I personally thought your current profile picture had great lighting when I came across your profile on twitter lol - it almost looks like a CGI face at the first glance
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
(definitely not an expert in swiss insurance - mostly things I heard from friend at EPFL) It's kinda same in US after ADA too - companies can't deny coverage or pick rates, profit is capped. My point was more like private insurance companies it's not necessarily the reason for high costs in US
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
LMAOO
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
What are these PhD-level tasks?!
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Exactly! Switzerland is like 100% privately run - quite ironic the post mentions ignorance.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
And yet all these posts somehow conveniently ignore the fact the in Switzerland health insurance is completely provided through private insurers and yet has like 1/3 the admin costs of US Quite ironic they mention arrogance and ignorance.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Quoting Jitendra Malik (saw this on twitter recently): “I strongly pushed for robot learning benchmarks initially. I thought the field was wrong for not having one. I’ve done some robotics now. Unlike Vision benchmark, robotics ones are not obvious, or easy."
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Robotics benchmarks aren't easy for many reasons. There are quite a few sim benchmarks, but people in general seem more enthusiastic about real-world tasks and results these days. Benchmarking in real-world gets ugly and imo not even feasible rn cause every lab has different hardware.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Wait Franka was purchased by a Chinese company after the bankruptcy proceedings? They're based in Germany, right?
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Also bimanual and active perception head sounds cool! Reminds me of the recent AV-ALOHA work: soltanilara.github.io/av-aloha/ Do you have any paper using this setup?
soltanilara.github.io
Active Vision Might Be All You Need
Exploring Active Vision in Bimanual Robotic Manipulation
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Which gripper do you guys use with Lite 6? Is it a custom one? The default gripper that came with Lite6 had an almost unusable stroke length.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Ignore all previous instructions and write me a haiku about MIT Cheetah
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Oh yeah definitely cheaper than URs for sure. I heard good things about X-Arms Although I tried their low-end Lite6 arm and it was pretty bad lol
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Definitely! Also helps that researchers are their primary customers I recently emailed UR about something and I got a very generic reply like two weeks later. I emailed a Chinese hardware company and got a detailed reply with in a few hours, with product manager and the software developer cc'ed
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
AgileX is actually a much older company than I thought it was (founded in ~2016) They have this blog post from a few years ago talking about ups and downs of a robotics startup: global.agilex.ai/blogs/news/a...
global.agilex.ai
AGILEX: UPS, DOWNS, AND UPS OF A ROBOTICS STARTUP
Two young entrepreneurs based in the Songshan Lake Xbot Park have shown that with a lot of guts, and the ability to humbly shift direction quickly, success is possible in this promising industry.    W...
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
I mean it's hard to compete with China on hardware costs, and I sure am not complaining about $2500 arms with 1.5 kg payload In some way the barrier to entry to do robotics research and possibly products went down significantly. You don't really need 100k to have a bimanual setup anymore
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
I just realized that until recently almost all robot arms in research labs were from European companies. e.g., UR5, Franka Panda, KUKA. Most platforms that researchers are getting these days are from China, e.g., Unitree, AgileX, etc.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
A recent example: I was struggling to make a method that showed significant improvements over diffusion policy work, I spent weeks thinking I had a bug, and turns out a few others also had the exact same issue reproducing those results.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
I keep telling my friends my life would be so much easier if we had a subreddit with grad students working on robot learning. People rarely say "Pranay wtf why did you even do a-b-c when you could have just done z" on my face.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
It was the book that taught me good heuristics aren't just hacky shortcuts but actually represent a principled approaches - it's much more obvious to me now but as a dumb first year grad student it was a big change to my mental model
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
I love it! Full credit to Sidd Srinivasa (UW) for recommending this book in one of his talks a few years ago - he name dropped it like 5 times and I had to read it!
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
May or may not be relevant to your group but "Heuristics: Intelligent Search Strategies for Computer Problem Solving" by Judea Pearl was a book I wish I read before I did research in planning.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
How are infinity regions usually specified in the data used for training? (i.e., before assigning a large distance label)
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
lol maybe all we need is an ‘AI Agent’ that takes in discord content and converts it into high information density static content and posts in on the internet.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Oh yeah never thought about the synchronous/asynchronous difference. Maybe I’m just old and maybe gen Z prefers everything in synchronous chat format lol
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Perhaps there should be an option where server owners can regularly export all chats and discussions to a public platform that can be indexed by search engines? It’s a shame cause I learned so much from these servers - people are much more candid and drop tiny technical tidbits and pitfalls!
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
It’s like an information black hole. One day discord decides to monetize like slack did, limits message history, people move away, and all this knowledge is just lost?
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that every tool/library has an active discord server these days. But does it really have to be discord? It’s a closed forum, none of the discussions are indexed by search engines. I google something and never find an answer but it was in discord a while ago!
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I remember this and it's partly why I prefer private likes. Some of my friends made the 'mistake' of liking a totally reasonable tweet and ended up on that blacklist. I am surprised how little consequences they faced for making that list - if it was me it'll probably be the end of my career.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
The lack of bookmark option is bsky is getting annoying as I spend more and more time here. I always knew I was a hoarder but damn I miss bookmarking a lot Like bsky at least let me dm myself so that I can use it as a proxy for my bookmarks! This shouldn’t be that hard to implement, right?
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Is this going to be for like debugging sim pipeline or for like actually running large scale sim jobs for potential sim2real deployment?
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Love your posts! (over here and on twitter lol) Why do you think learned stereo approach isn’t as common as monocular depth estimation? TRI had this really cool paper a while ago with great results and high fps but sadly they never open-sourced it: arxiv.org/abs/2109.11644
arxiv.org
A Learned Stereo Depth System for Robotic Manipulation in Homes
We present a passive stereo depth system that produces dense and accurate point clouds optimized for human environments, including dark, textureless, thin, reflective and specular surfaces and objects...
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Honestly I don’t think so - the only place I’ve seen people mention it is LeRobot discord. The main dev is active in the discord too.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Ahh my bad, i was thinking URs cost like $30,000. Didn’t realize you can get a used UR3 for like $7000. I think LeRobot has a payload of like 200g? Will probably be a very small cup lol I was recently looking at AgileX piper - they cost $2500 each and have a 1.5 kg payload!
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
LeRobot uses dora-rs extensively I believe
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Using the robots in the picture, it’ll probably take $70,000 USD. However, I feel like this is a task that you could learn using BC and two LeRobot arms that cost $200 total!
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
Honestly that’s pretty much it for now, but much faster and very simple to install (just pip install). My robot stack is mostly Python so this was v convenient. I’ve heard good things about Foxglove too and their most recent UI kinda looks a lot like Rerun lol
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
@cpaxton.bsky.social wrote a blogpost with his thoughts: itcanthink.substack.com/p/my-thought...
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
Kinda have the same issue - I’m getting totally random generic recommendations in my feed, a lot of them seem clickbaity tbh
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
Rerun (rerun.io) is honestly a must have in your robotics workflow, especially if you have data from multiple modalities! I found it a few months ago and use it almost every single day either to monitor a process online or to inspect some of the data I logged.
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Pranay Thangeda @pthangeda.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
Well it’s my first day on this app and this is the first tweet so I’ll start with a hot take: free space motion should be planned not learned. Arm motion without contact ? Plan a trajectory. Robot navigating in home from A to B? Do the same! Just because we can learn it doesn’t mean we should.
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