Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model

This looks to not be an openly available model, but I think if it were, availability of an easy single-camera navigation setup could allow for a lot of cool hobbyist projects.

If you're wondering what prevents or mitigates AI hallucinations on the AI layer from replicating or acting out on the physical layer look up QNX. They manage the deterministic reasonin gof robotics. You know them better as Blackberry.

It's implied, and I'm hoping it's true, that this is a map-less navigation. Which is impressive. This kind of task is much easier if you have a pre-captured map of the environment, but if they are doing this without a map it's great. Historically you were always faced with "The Kidnapped Robot" problem where robots that didn't know where they were couldn't navigate even a little bit. Here the robot appears to be able to follow directions as long as they are interpretable from its current vision (or via dead reckoning).

> achieves 76.6% on R2R-CE (Room-to-Room in Continuous Environments)

I would like to know what it did the other 23.4% of the time!

For a claim such as state of the art, or claims such as "great at any task" needs something of more substance. I've seen maze-solving robot competitions which can zoom around in seconds. The sped up video in the first part, and the "obstacle avoidance" are too slow for me to believe this is state of the art.

While impressive at 8B, what would the expectation be in real life, that it's run remotely or autonomously with a strapped on GPU and battery?

Producing specific niche models for 100 year old industries that have mountains of data and warehouses full of folders will be the european take on AI.

It may come late but it‘ll be safe and reliable. It also requires a lot of OCR.

Ok, this is really cool. The fact that the robot can use pointing to decide where to go is a great design decision, and robotics really is the next frontier. Definitely cheering on Mistral here!

Robots handle clean labs well; messy real‑world environments are still the real bottleneck.

Maybe their LLMs are not the best but design is top-notch!

Mistral seems to be going wide and niche. Could be a smart strategy going forward.

I love Uniqlo even more after seeing this.

Frontier labs are realizing that software/models themselves don’t have real moats and move to embodied ai.

SOTA 80% means a practically useless robot. What are they really imagining their ICP to be here?

Was it tested on a road in a car ?

I'm ready for my home helper robot that makes dinner and does the dishes and takes out the trash.

But I'm scared for when those home helpers get drafted to fight in wars, either for or against me...