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.
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