My Thoughts on Actuate 2024 - by Chris Paxton

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the bay area — over a year! — and during that time, so much has changed in the robotics and AI space. Nowhere was that change more obvious than at the Actuate conference by Foxglove. The conference had a star-studded lineup of speakers starting with Sergey Levine of Stanford and Physical Intelligence. It touched on most areas of robotics, from foundation models and humanoids to very grounded robots for farming, lawn care, and logistics. During the event, we were running an autonomous pick-and-place demo to show what you can do with the Stretch robots as well. The conference covered the range of robotics problems. There were actually only a couple talks which even touched on foundation models - there’s the inimitable Sergey Levine, of course, but also Michael Laskey talked about how they use NVIDIA Omniverse to train their own world model for landscaping tasks. But the majority of the talks were much more technical. Discussions on things like ROS

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the bay area — over a year! — and during that time, so much has changed in the robotics and AI space. Nowhere was that change more obvious than at the Actuate conference by Foxglove. The conference had a star-studded lineup of speakers starting with Sergey Levine of Stanford and Physical Intelligence. It touched on most areas of robotics, from foundation models and humanoids to very grounded robots for farming, lawn care, and logistics. During the event, we were running an autonomous pick-and-place demo to show what you can do with the Stretch robots as