MIT's Philip Isola on the Era of Robot-Use Agents: General Models Controlling Any Robot
ycombinator · x · 2026-09-27
MIT professor Philip Isola argues in a recent essay that we may be entering the era of robot-use agents: general-purpose models that can control different robots, write policies, and learn new physical tasks with little or no robot-specific training. One of AI's biggest recent surprises has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software.
YC's Decoded podcast hosted founders of WaddleLabs and Robocurve, two startups at this frontier. Key points from the discussion:
- Robot-use agents should control robots via code, VLAs, or direct actions, picking whichever is optimal for the situation.
- There's a serious lack of evals comparing robot-use agents; the guests frequently ask others to benchmark new models.
Related event: YC Decoded Explores Robot-Use Agents: Coding Agents Generalize to Robotics(6 posts)→
More from Embodied
- Clean point clouds: Tersus GNSS MVP S1 scans turned into high-quality splats in LichtFeld Studio — janusch_patas · 2026-11-11
- Flashing cheap ESP32 IoT devices with ESPHome for a smart-home upgrade — haydendevs · 2026-11-11
- MessyMem on Compact Long-Term Memory for Agentic Robots Hits CoRL 2026 Main Poster — leto__jean · 2026-11-11
- NYU's Steertuning Lets a Robot Learn a Chore From 5 Minutes of Human Demo — CyberRobooo · 2026-11-11
- Boston Dynamics Atlas demoed with Blender 5.3 — TomLikesRobots · 2026-11-11
- Lamport Robotics posts robot 'wake-up test' demo video — R4nsack · 2026-11-11