Why Robotics Is Harder Than It Looks with Chris Paxton

Robots can walk. They can dance. They can even do backflips.

But can they reliably fold your laundry, make coffee, or recover from mistakes in your kitchen?

In this episode, I sit down with robotics researcher Chris Paxton to talk about what’s actually hard about building intelligent robots.

We explore:

• Why robotics today is fundamentally different than it was 10 years ago
• The rise of world models and robot imagination
• Why contact and manipulation tasks are harder than navigation for robots
• The compounding error problem in long-horizon tasks
• Why robotics evaluation is still an unsolved challenge
• How new data pipelines and egocentric data are accelerating progress
  

If you’ve seen humanoids walking around conferences and wondered, “Are we really close?”, this episode brings clarity.

Follow Chris on X: @chris_j_paxton
Check out RoboPapers for deeper dives into robotics research: https://www.youtube.com/@RoboPapers