Bringing Robots to Life with AI: The Three Computer Revolution - Ep. 274

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Our guest today is Yashraj Narang. Yash is a senior research manager at NVIDIA and the head of the Seattle Robotics Lab, which I'm really excited to, learn more about along with you today. Yash's work focuses on the intersection of robotics, AI, and simulation, and his team conducts fundamental and applied research across the full robotics stack, including perception, planning, control, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, simulation, and vision language action models. Full robotics stack, like it says. Prior to joining NVIDIA, Yash completed a PhD in material science and mechanical engineering from Harvard University and a master's in mechanical engineering from MIT. And he's here now to talk about robots, the the field of robotics, robotics learning, all kinds of awesome stuff. I'm so excited to have you here, Yash. So thank you for joining the podcast. Welcome. Thank you so much, Noah. So maybe first things first, and this is a very selfish question I I mentioned before we started, but I I think the listeners will will be into it too. I've never been to the Seattle Robotics Lab. I don't know much about it. Can we start with having you talk a little bit about your own role, your background if you like, and, you know, give us a little peek into what the Seattle Lab is all about? Yeah. Absolutely. So the Seattle Robotics Lab, it started in, I believe, October 2017, and I actually joined the lab in December 2018. And the lab was started by Dieter Fox, who's a professor at University of Washington. And, you know, at the time, I believe he had a conversation with Jensen at a conference. Jensen Huang, of course, is CEO of NVIDIA. And Jensen thinks way far out into the future. And at that point, he was getting really excited about robotics. He said, you know, essentially, that we need a research effort in robotics at NVIDIA, and that's really how the lab started. So that was kind of the birth of the lab. And at the beginning, the lab you know? And it still does a very academic focus. Okay. So we consistently have really high engagement at conferences. We publish a lot. We do a lot of fundamental and applied research. And recently, NVIDIA has been developing, especially over the past few years, a really robust product and engineering effort as well. And so we're working more closely and closely with them to try to get some of our research out into the hands of the community. So, you know, fundamental academic mission, but it's really important for us as well to, transfer our research, and get it out there for everyone to use. Fantastic. And you mentioned Dieter Fox, I believe, at UW, University of Washington. Is the lab is there a relationship there? Yeah. So, when Dieter started the lab, we, you know, over a number of years, had …