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Hasan Poonawala

@hasanpoonawala

Robots, algorithms, tinkering. https://poonawalalab.github.io/

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11.11.2024
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Latest posts by Hasan Poonawala @hasanpoonawala

Very cool work

11.03.2026 20:13 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Why do they have a bad reputation?

11.03.2026 10:32 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

1. Starship robots seem to be moving faster compared to a few years ago. What changes helped achieve that?

2. How much processing is on board versus the cloud?

04.03.2026 12:05 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

1. What are the major roadblocks to using more robots in construction?

2. How autonomous are the robots you deploy (percentage, maybe?) ?

03.03.2026 11:17 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Yup, feedback is a critical part of having imperfect processes reach their desired end. That is, closed loop and open loop are very different.

16.02.2026 12:59 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Six Things I Learned Watching a Robotics Startup Die from the Inside | Rui Xu I spent a year as COO of a YC-backed robotics startup. The company didn't make it. Here's what I actually learned.

nice blog post about a humanoid robotics startup failure: ruixu.us/posts/six-th...

11.02.2026 14:04 πŸ‘ 10 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

For all robotics or for robotics at Tesla?

29.01.2026 03:42 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Neat, do you describe the setup somewhere?

29.01.2026 03:06 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

It HAS to be either autobotting or decepticonning

28.01.2026 02:34 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Those kp values look high, try 1000, maybe even 100.

27.01.2026 11:27 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

CC vim mode is off to me

26.01.2026 20:46 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

What do you like about diffusion models?

26.01.2026 16:27 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

If the fingers are set to try to snap together, maybe reduce the gains, and try to make the set point equal the width of the object.

26.01.2026 12:05 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Try increasing the number of iterations for the dynamics solver. If that fails then possibly reduce the stiffness of the contact model, though you'll get more intersections between bodies.

26.01.2026 03:16 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

What local model are you using?

22.01.2026 23:35 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Perhaps that's another good reason to not frame the number of citations as a measure of recognition.

22.01.2026 11:07 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Very meta, too! Neuro-inspired observation of neural phenomena.

10.01.2026 14:30 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Did you bolt the arm straight into the wood?

17.12.2025 12:28 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Fair, but does that improvement need to occur through the journal system? There's an argument for journals enabling expert feedback outside of buddy networks, OTOH.

11.12.2025 21:13 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

"Imagine landing your dream job, only to discover that half your workday will be spent not on the work itself but on cold-calling strangers to beg for money."

07.12.2025 16:08 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Do these tear up the grass/soil any?

06.12.2025 01:44 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Preach

01.12.2025 23:51 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
GitHub - philfung/awesome-reliable-robotics: Robotics research demonstrating reliability and robustness in the real world (continuously updated) Robotics research demonstrating reliability and robustness in the real world (continuously updated) - philfung/awesome-reliable-robotics

Also, a list of my favorite robotics papers:

github.com/philfung/awe...

01.12.2025 17:40 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Snippings of recorded talks

Snippings of recorded talks

Last week’s #AI4Robotics workshop was fab & fabulously full 😊 If you missed out we've good news -
πŸ“½οΈ All 15 talk recordings are now online πŸš€! tinyurl.com/4ns5apvd
Catch up on cutting-edge work in #robot perception, action & autonomy - from #SLAM & control to computer vision & large-scale learning!

27.11.2025 10:04 πŸ‘ 35 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 2

Loving Justin Carpentier's talk right now. Nice workshop!

21.11.2025 15:52 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

With that soundtrack it feels like it could be a scene from the animatrix.

11.11.2025 21:21 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Collaborative news curation as a service, demonstrating the value of social media based on protocols, not platforms and a β€œplaybook for killing information voids.”

06.11.2025 22:05 πŸ‘ 76 πŸ” 23 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 0

AI tornado!

01.11.2025 16:23 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Ideas: AI hoover, AI funnel, AI suck up (vs trickle down?).

01.11.2025 16:21 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Schematic showing how changes in prompts map to changes in a model’s latent space.

Left panel, titled β€œPrompt Space”: a beige, wavy sheet with thin contour lines and many black dots. Two dots are labeled x (lower middle, with an arrow pointing to it) and xβ€² (upper right). A short dotted segment between them is labeled Ξ΄.

Right panel, titled β€œLatent Space”: a square grid with x–y axes (a right-angle mark at the origin) and the label β„α΅ˆ. Two points are shown: z (lower) and zβ€² (upper right). A short dotted segment between them is labeled Ξ΅.

Two long curved arrows map from the sheet on the left to the grid on the right: the upper arrow labeled Llm lands on zβ€²; the lower arrow labeled SipIT lands on z.

Centered below: Ξ΄ > 0 β‡’ Ξ΅ > 0.

Schematic showing how changes in prompts map to changes in a model’s latent space. Left panel, titled β€œPrompt Space”: a beige, wavy sheet with thin contour lines and many black dots. Two dots are labeled x (lower middle, with an arrow pointing to it) and xβ€² (upper right). A short dotted segment between them is labeled Ξ΄. Right panel, titled β€œLatent Space”: a square grid with x–y axes (a right-angle mark at the origin) and the label β„α΅ˆ. Two points are shown: z (lower) and zβ€² (upper right). A short dotted segment between them is labeled Ξ΅. Two long curved arrows map from the sheet on the left to the grid on the right: the upper arrow labeled Llm lands on zβ€²; the lower arrow labeled SipIT lands on z. Centered below: Ξ΄ > 0 β‡’ Ξ΅ > 0.

your embeddings are not safe!

every prompt directly maps to its embedding and back. they’re isomorphic

SipIt is a linear time algorithm for quickly and efficiently extracting input text from embeddings

www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.15511

28.10.2025 12:03 πŸ‘ 29 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 3