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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think you need a physics engine (outside of simulation/testing)? Don't humans get by pretty well with only an intuitive one?

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Human motor planning involves, at least, forward and inverse models for performing stochastic optimal control (at least, that's the standard formulation of the problem). An intuitive physics engine may be built into our heads, but whether or not it is, just running it forward doesn't seem to suffice for motor control.

it is for simulation, as you say - but this is a critical for employing reinforcement learning. The internal (inverse) model will of course, be based on a simplified system, like a DNN

Maybe or maybe you could just model what the workers already do, predict what they should do, and dynamically provide feedback, simulation, etc.

im not quite sure what you're suggesting. there needs to be a source of ground truth to inform the robot if what is being done is right. And actually having a physical robot arm for this would be way too slow

Right, the ground truth is the existing human labor - and yes, run sims at scale makes sense, but if you don't build and model using the real world you'll rapidly get a solution that only shows the sims errors in modeling the world. All the best robots I've seen run sims, but very narrowly and with a well defined problem to refine via a well designed model.

Offer stands to help you, but given the deadline for the next batch is days away, you would need to let me know as soon as possible via a comment, then I'd contact you via email.

shoot me an email with your background etc. I'm not aiming for this batch actively but i wouldn't mind a chat. Google my name to get my website an email. it should be the first result

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