Pi robot runs fully autonomous for hours at a chocolate factory — stacking boxes was the hard part
chelseabfinn · x · 2026-09-15
Physical Intelligence shares a video of its Pi robot deployed at Dandelion Chocolate, running fully autonomously with zero interventions for multiple hours.
Counterintuitive lessons from real-world deployment:
- The team expected assembling the box (the most dexterous task) to be hardest — actually it was reliably stacking the boxes;
- Why: the original table-mounted robot had poor visibility of the stack without separately mounted cameras; stacking demands more generalization (every box lands in a different spot); and one imprecise placement can collapse the whole stack many boxes later;
- They recently switched the deployment to a mobile robot, which is fully self-sufficient for hours.
The team notes that data and feedback from such real-world use cases are valuable for scaling the π pre-trained model.
More from Embodied
- Tesla Cybercab Heads to Mainland China for First Public Display — XFreeze · 2026-09-15
- RewardAI's OM-1 Robot Foundation Model Zero-Shot Generalizes to Arms and Humanoids — zipengfu · 2026-09-15
- Peking University Releases MobileVLA-R1 2.0 with RL-Enhanced Robot Control — PekingUniversity · 2026-09-15
- X Humanoid Debuts Pelican-Sim 1.0, a General World Model Simulator for Embodied AI — X-Humanoid · 2026-09-15
- General Robotics pitches AI to automate parts of robot development — VraserX · 2026-09-15
- Full fruit fly brain map, 166,700 neurons, flies a drone in real time — anselm · 2026-09-15