Robots can walk. They can dance. They can even do backflips.

But can they reliably fold your laundry, make coffee, or recover from mistakes in your kitchen?

In this episode, I sit down with robotics researcher Chris Paxton to talk about what’s actually hard about building intelligent robots.

We explore:

• Why robotics today is fundamentally different than it was 10 years ago
• The rise of world models and robot imagination
• Why contact and manipulation tasks are harder than navigation for robots
• The compounding error problem in long-horizon tasks
• Why robotics evaluation is still an unsolved challenge
• How new data pipelines and egocentric data are accelerating progress
  

If you’ve seen humanoids walking around conferences and wondered, “Are we really close?”, this episode brings clarity.

Follow Chris on X: @chris_j_paxton
Check out RoboPapers for deeper dives into robotics research: https://www.youtube.com/@RoboPapers