Have there actually been advances in robotics that could make them mainstream, or is the progress still painfully slow? I think robotics would be the next logical step after AI hype, but I'm having hard time figuring out which company will be the next Nvidia there.
We have made enormous jumps with transformer models (language models being integrated in the stack, and vision language models (VLM), and even vision language action models (VLA)). Pair this with recent advances in reinforcement learning and we can do things we couldn't do a few years ago; the whole space is fascinating!
...but we're nowhere near usable robotics in complex human environments for complex multistage tasks yet. It's an incredibly difficult problem where we still don't have the hardware, the software, or the sensors for it. The other thing to keep in mind is that since it's so expensive and difficult to do, there's no marketplace yet driving significant advances like we had with phones to hone in on such efficient amazing pieces of tech across the industry.
I wrote a bit about where we're at with the research last year; it's a bit out of date with even cooler advancements, which is why I'm working on another article in the same vein now.
I also did a project (Master's thesis) integrating an LLM into a ROS2 stack as a high level action planner, specifically to prove that LLMs have contextual understanding of the real world that can benefit planning missions.
