Small robots, useful questions

Sample notebook entry for the blog layout. This is an illustrative explanation, not a new research result or product announcement.

An arm reaches for a dot. There is no complicated scene, no cinematic camera, and no long list of tasks. Just two joints and somewhere to go.

That simplicity is useful. It leaves room to notice what changes when a learned policy replaces an untrained one.

Let the reader disturb the demo

A good experiment gives you something to change. In Robot reacher, moving the target lets you ask whether the behavior holds up somewhere new. Switching checkpoints makes the comparison immediate.

The interesting moment is not always a successful reach. It might be a hesitant movement, a target the arm cannot quite reach, or a difference between the route you expected and the one the policy takes.

Name the source of the behavior

This example learns from synthetic demonstrations. That matters: it is not evidence of a policy trained on a physical robot, and a browser simulation cannot establish real-world safety.

Keeping those facts next to the interaction gives the reader a fair starting point. Clear labels are part of the experiment, not fine print beneath it.

Leave with a better question

What happens near the edge of reach? What changes with the starting pose? Where does the trained policy still struggle?

A small demo does not need to answer every question. It should make the next one easier to ask.