Embody AI.
Move things in the
real world.
8 micro-lessons · ~84 min · Real Docker images
Physical AI · robotics, world models & VLA
World models, VLA policies, and the on-robot runtime — the 2026 stack for embodied systems.
Real skills, real career delta.
Skills you'll gain
10- Read VLA / world-model papers without panicWorking
Decode Pi0.5, OpenVLA, GR00T N1.7, Cosmos Predict/Transfer/Reason, RT-2, Diffusion Policy, RDT — what the architecture is, what dataset, what eval suite, where the gap is.
- Build & playback a LeRobotDataset v3Working
Record episodes with `lerobot-record`, push to Hugging Face Hub, replay with `lerobot-replay`, segment by language. The 2026 data lingua franca.
- Train a contact-rich manipulation policy in Isaac Lab 2.3Production
PPO + domain randomization for a Lift / Open-Drawer / Stack task; vectorized sim on a single GPU, Hydra config, Wandb logging, ONNX export, Lab-Arena gating.
- Deploy a VLA policy server (Pi0.5 / OpenVLA-OFT / GR00T N1.7)Production
FastAPI + ONNX/TensorRT in Docker; sub-50ms p99 latency on RTX 4090 / Jetson Thor; horizon=50 action chunks; Pydantic observation contract.
- Wire a learned policy into ROS2 JazzyProduction
rclpy node, action server, JointState publisher, Foxglove 2.0 panel layout, Cyclone DDS QoS profile that doesn't drop frames at 50Hz.
- Run the standard eval suites (LIBERO, SIMPLER, RoboCasa, Lab-Arena)Working
Author the eval config, run on sim, parse the success-rate JSON, gate CI on regressions, report MMRV + Pearson against real rollouts.
- Domain-randomize + sysID + DAgger closure for sim2realProduction
DR ranges in Isaac Lab event-manager API; MuJoCo MJX system identification (mass/friction/PD gains); DAgger with real teleop expert; the standard 5-step handoff.
- Wrap any policy in a safety guardianWorking
Rate limiter on joint targets, joint-position/velocity clamps, force/torque thresholds, soft e-stop watchdog, ISO 13482-aligned event log; works in sim and real.
- Generate synthetic episodes with NVIDIA CosmosAdvanced
Cosmos Predict 2.5 rollouts; filter with Cosmos Reason 2; merge synth + real in LeRobot v3; quantify sim-only vs hybrid eval lift on RoboCasa or LIBERO.
- Run a fully on-device runtime on Jetson Thor / OrinAdvanced
TensorRT NVFP4/FP8 quantization for the VLA policy, CUDA-aware DDS, Foxglove over Wi-Fi telemetry, thermal/power budgeting — the deployment shape humanoid startups buy.