We might be solving the wrong problem in robotics.

That’s what this makes clear.

UMI → Universal Manipulation Interface
A simple $400 gripper that lets you teach robots by demonstration.

You hold it like a tool. Show the task. The robot learns.

No teleoperation.
No expensive… pic.twitter.com/OLIZoU0CGk

— Pascal Bornet (@pascal_bornet) 6 avril 2026

We might be solving the wrong problem in robotics. That’s what this makes clear. UMI → Universal Manipulation Interface A simple $400 gripper that lets you teach robots by demonstration. You hold it like a tool. Show the task. The robot learns. No teleoperation. No expensive hardware. No robot-specific data. Stanford open-sourced everything → hardware, code, datasets. What stands out to me is the bottleneck. Not algorithms. Data. Teleoperation → ~35 demos/hour UMI → ~111 demos/hour And the data transfers across robots → UR5, Franka, others. The design is surprisingly practical: → GoPro fisheye lens (155° FOV) + mirrors for depth → SLAM + IMU for precise 6DoF tracking → latency matching for dynamic tasks → diffusion policies for multimodal actions Then it scales. Cheng Chi takes this further with Sunday Robotics (with Tony Zhao). A $200 glove → deployed in 500+ homes → ~10 million real-world interactions. Not lab data. Real human behavior. Their robot learns dishes, laundry, espresso → with zero robot-specific data. This is where the shift becomes obvious. From training robots in controlled environments → to learning directly from humans at scale So here’s the real question: Will robotics be unlocked by better models… or by unlocking data? #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #AI #Innovation #FutureOfWork

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