physical AI is only robotics if it's truly physical
San Francisco, CA
Joined September 2009
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Slick design
🧵After testing every hand glove on the market, here’s why we rebuilt ours around magnetic encoders：
After seeing just about every hand data glove on the market, I’m convinced most of them are solving the wrong problem first.
Here’s the thing nobody likes to say out loud: if your glove can’t tell you exactly where each finger joint is, every downstream model inherits that error. Hand data is only as good as the joint angles underneath it. So when we built DAS Dex 2.0, we started there.
Why not soft gloves? They deform. The surface changes shape as you grip, so the contact geometry is never fully modeled, and mapping deformation back to a 21-point hand model introduces errors that need repeated recalibration. Comfortable to wear, hard to trust as ground truth.
Why not EMF? Electromagnetic tracking drifts near metal and EM sources — exactly the environments manipulation data gets collected in. Why not pure IMU? It needs constant recalibration and drifts with temperature and time.
So we went with magnetic encoders. An exoskeleton with a built-in skeletal model reads joint angles directly — no soft-body deformation to back out, no line-of-sight dependency, strong immunity to EM interference, and no constant recalibration. You read the joint, you get the angle.
The classic objection to exoskeletons is bulk. That’s the real engineering story here: we built a custom miniature magnetic encoder just super thin and moved the whole structure to the side of the fingers instead of the back of the hand. 21 encoders per hand, 150g total (without wrist cam) — thin enough that it gets out of the way while you work.
On the sensing side: a self-developed full-palm thin-film e-skin, over 980-point high-density array covering the whole palm (not just fingertips), reading normal force down to 0.1N. A 3D silicone surface adds grip. We tuned specifically for low cross-talk — press one point and it stays one point, no phantom spread.
Put together: direct joint readout + full-palm tactile + wrist camera + IMU, in a glove light enough to forget you’re wearing. That’s what we think ground-truth-grade hand data collection should look like.
We just debuted DAS Dex 2.0 at CoRL 2026. If you’re working on dexterous manipulation, teleop, or hand data pipelines and want the technical details — benchmarks, tactile specs, how we validate joint accuracy — my DMs are open. Genuinely love to meet everyone there!
Going to some recent deployment sites in the Bay Area for robots, I am seeing a lot of instances of a robot thinking it grabs something, and carrying the imaginary object to the end position. This is embarrassing.
Using a learned policy for everything just converts easily detectable failures into needlessly difficult AI problems.
Like...if you're not holding anything, whether that's determined visually or via a force sensor, can't you just reset and spam retries? Is this whole thing running inside of a global state machine or not?
What fraction of today's VLA failures disappear when you add some basic physical state checks?
Why do new-age software engineers want to black box everything?
Why can't they be tasteful in their applications of frontier technology? Do they care about success, or novelty more?
Our problem is not just the fact that robotics engineers are rebranded software engineers now. It's worse than that....they are rebranded software engineers who don't understand system architecture.
I know you're working with off-the-shelf hardware and off-the-shelf models and you are fueled by matcha and SF delusion, but damn, it would take like one day to catch some of these bugs. Have some pride in your work. Get it working.
Don't be a leech, contribute to the positive public opinion of robot usefulness.
Thane Hunt retweeted
To all the crypto VCs flocking to SF: please don't turn robotics into your next speculative bubble.
This industry doesn't need inflated valuations, manufactured hype, and another boom-and-bust cycle. It needs patient capital, real engineering, and long-term conviction.
Robotics founders need to be more selective than ever about whose money they take.
The wrong capital can destroy an industry faster than the wrong technology.
Just had the pleasure of seeing Quan Vuong (co-founder at Physical Intelligence) talk about robotics at @fdotinc today. I saw him speak once before.
I thought it was a fluke the first time, but I like this guy. He's sharp and futuristic, but also conservative and pragmatic.
This is what it looks like when a researcher successfully transcends and becomes a leader.
Nothing better than watching a domain expert say "I don't know".
Throwing robots into molten steel is cool too, but this is where it's at.
Look at the contrast between Figure AI throwing their robots into molten steel vs the @UnitreeRobotics HX-2.
It's not lost on anyone that this robot could also be used to cause harm, but this video is a very optimistic take. I've always thought it was weird that people couldn't see any applications in a highly athletic robot. Protecting someone from an attacker, saving a child from being hit by a car, etc.
In the US, we're building geriatric little robots that can fold laundry and load the dishwasher. In China, they are trying to build superheroes.
With manipulation control models rapidly becoming a race to the cost floor, to accuse Chinese robots of merely being parkour demonstrations is short-sighted.
The difference is very simple… In the US, a robot won't succeed unless it can independently spur economic growth or make some people a lot of money. In China, the government can simply benchpress new sectors into existence through strategic partnerships and spending with private industry.
I'm sure one of these things will be asking me to see my visa the next time I'm in China. Places like crowded city centers and airports will have them first. The robot cannot fear for its bodily harm, so the potential for it to be a protector (rather than an antagonist on a bad day, à la police officer) is there, depending on the choices of the creators.
Thane Hunt retweeted
We are open-sourcing V1.0 of our agentic robotics framework, ASPIRE, with full real robot skill discovery and self improvement capabilities! On the day Astra arrived, our lab switched the backend model and saturated all the benchmarks to ~99% over night.
And the frontier is already on the move:
- Opus 5.5 slightly edges out Astra on our robot simulation bench.
- Sonnet 5.5 hits the Pareto frontier of cost vs. robot capability, $12/task.
We first introduced ASPIRE and /robot skill library in June, way before the big models could reliably do robotics. A rising frontier tide lifts all boats, but Astra was a 0->1 tsunami on many tasks.
Now you can also feel the Physical Bitter Lesson at home like we did on that fateful day ;)
links in thread
Seems like every other white paper claims that their idea can be easily commercialized, usually written by a bunch of PhDs who have never shipped a product in their lives.
And authors can claim novelty now because people are widely looking at robot arms again, so they take half-century old concepts and reapply them to whatever open-source little 3-D printed arm they found connected to whatever hugging face software setup was vibe coded for them by their Claude subscription.
It's OK to be honest about when you are applying old ideas to a more receptive audience - you don't have to claim everything is a breakthrough.
Another Pied Piper box!
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The guys who went and bought 30 Mac minis last year because they misunderstood open claw are going to once again bankrupt themselves because the 2026 box comes preconfigured for them.
Action Jack Barker would be proud of the new Pied Piper Box. 🙂
Really smart, young team, but it seems no one is safe from the lure of VC dollars.
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Very important research as everyone goes into @SFTechWeek
Thane Hunt retweeted
We're hosting a robotics night at @MissionRobotBay this Wednesday during @SFTechWeek
Robotics, off the record - What's said in the room stays in the room.
We're fed up with the robotics hype. So we're bringing together people from across the robotics industry to test real robots, give honest opinions, and talk about what actually works and what breaks.
Co-hosting with @thanehunt & @Scav
Only few spots left, join uss 🔽
partiful.com/e/TprLtwRJBJaBw…
We're hosting a special robotics event at @MissionRobotBay for @SFTechWeek on October 7th.
As all claim and some deliver on, we are doing things differently. We are optimizing for hardware builders first and foremost, high conviction people with spicy approaches to problems, and even some investors. If you haven't put your hands on an actual robot yet, let's fix that. Drinks and refreshments will be served.
Space is limited, so DM us for a spot.
Cohosting with @BaslyAsma and @Scav !
partiful.com/e/TprLtwRJBJaBw…
This is awesome
you can use the expressive harness to create interactive presentations with coding agents like @claudeai
here is the behind-the-scene of such example with Opus 5.5
Thane Hunt retweeted
I sat my 7-year-old down and explained to him that dying industries (legacy media, academia, DNC politics) ride algorithmically driven cultural hysterias both because it’s the only way they can stay relevant and because their business models demand it.
He looked up at me and with a tear in his eyes asked, ‘so, for the sake of the journos, the assistant professors, and Dem Politics Inc, we’re obligated to attest to the moral urgency of the hysteria and act completely emotionally dysregulated?’
‘Yes,’ I answered him. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
And then we both sat quietly.
