The Design Landscape of Robot Learning Is a Minefield

I spent about a year building the software and hardware for a fully robotic version of the classic wooden Labyrinth game - the one with a marble guided through a tilting maze controlled by two knobs - from the ground up. It was an exercise in learning, patience, and perseverance. The goal: have the robot use reinforcement learning to learn how to play the labyrinth game and solve any maze I threw at it. Spoilers: I got it working in simulation, built a lot of pieces, and got a simple problem solved on real hardware, but other projects came calling before I ever got the labyrinth to finish solving itself. Even as someone who has worked academically and professionally on robots for a decade, across hardware, VLAs, and everything in between, I was repeatedly surprised at just how narrow the path to success is in robot learning, for both hardware and software. The entire landscape of “teach a robot to do a thing” is a minefield. I learned several lessons, and viscerally experienced…