Qwen-Robot Suite: A Foundation Model Suite for Physical World Intelligence
Posted by ilreb 19 hours ago
Comments
Comment by w10-1 13 hours ago
The TAM for robots is much, much larger than for coding or services, and much more strategic when you think about manufacturing and war-making.
The Qwen "suite" is a workmanlike breakdown with demonstrated tasks that seems to me as an outsider to suggest that one could start building integrated systems this year, and have simple products next year. I'd be very interested in an assessment from engineers from the robotics companies (cars, biomedical robots, manufacturing...).
Elsewhere on HN I see hundreds of comments on SpaceX's long-telegraphed merger with Cursor but no serious evaluation of this.
Comment by rsalus 3 hours ago
how do you figure?
Comment by ragebol 2 hours ago
If I could get an affordable robot to do a subset of them, I'm in the market for one.
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Comment by martythemaniak 12 hours ago
First, very much expected. Both Google and Qwen have been building explicit spatial reasoning and spatial output capabilities in their models since last fall, gemini 3 was released with support for outputting trajectories for example. I only took a look at Robonav (more relevant for my needs) and its architecture and capabilities are inline with other similar models (eg nVidia's alpamayo).
Second, the overall architecture they describe mirrors what I've been working on: You have general purpose LLM that takes a look at the works and the task in front of it and reasons to break it down into subtasks and tool calls, and you can think of RoboNav and RoboManip as tool calls here. The harness keeps a memory and manages the context of the LLM and tools and keep looping until the objective is complete.
Consider the task of clearing snow off a driveway using this suite: An LLM (Qwen 3.7 plus) takes look at the driveway and decides which areas to clear. The harness then tells robotnav to go to an certain location, then robotnav takes over an runs in a loop until the robot is that that location. Then the harness tells robotmanip to use the plow to clear strip of snow. The harness will then call the planner LLM to plan an execute the next clearing and repeats until the driveway is clear.
So what' the issues? Well, they didn't release the weights, nor the training scripts so you can't actually use it. But also, it's all very research-y still, the models are "small" but still huge/expensive for current edge hardware. You'd still need lots of data collection, HITL, and fine-tuning and evals to make it work for your task. You'd also need a secondary safety system to make sure the models don't wreck something. But overall, I do expect robots to use an agent/model combo like this in prod in a few years.
Comment by jvanderbot 9 hours ago
Well I guess I'll have to have a look!
Comment by officialchicken 2 hours ago
Why do you hate subscriptions? What if you get a summertime snow storm?
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