OpenAI Blog

Robots that learn

We’ve created a robotics system, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot, which can learn a new task after seeing it done once.

OpenAI Blog
Oct 19, 2017

Generalizing from simulation

Our latest robotics techniques allow robot controllers, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on physical robots, to react to unplanned changes in the environment as they solve simple tasks. That is, we’ve used these techniques to build closed-loop systems rather than open-loop ones as before.

OpenAI Blog
Feb 26, 2018

Ingredients for robotics research

We’re releasing eight simulated robotics environments and a Baselines implementation of Hindsight Experience Replay, all developed for our research over the past year. We’ve used these environments to train models which work on physical robots.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Teach and Grow: An Agent-Centered Architecture for General Robot Learning

Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL) is an agent-centered architecture that transforms a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks, enabling a robot to compose, execute, and revise behaviors in new scenes without task-specific policy retraining. The system maintains a Skill Library and structured Experience Memory to capture successes, failures, and repairs, allowing persistent reuse and agent-directed adaptation. Evaluation on the LIBERO benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance, and the authors propose a scaling-law hypothesis suggesting that accumulated reusable experience reduces future-task error and teaching demand following a power-law trend.

By Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 2

ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics

arXiv:2607. 00272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional robot programming is challenging: it requires orchestrating multimodal perception, managing physical contact dynamics, and handling diverse configurations and execution failures.

By Runyu Lu, Yubo Wu, Ethan Kou, Letian Fu, Wenli Xiao, Ajay Mandlekar, Yinzhen Xu, Guanya Shi, Ken Goldberg, Ang Chen, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Guanzhi Wang
OpenAI Blog
Nov 7, 2018

Learning concepts with energy functions

We’ve developed an energy-based model that can quickly learn to identify and generate instances of concepts, such as near, above, between, closest, and furthest, expressed as sets of 2d points. Our model learns these concepts after only five demonstrations.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

WetRobo: A Reproducible Robot Kit for Coding Agents in Biological Laboratories

WetRobo is a reproducible robot kit designed to enable wet‑lab researchers to delegate tasks to coding agents without teleoperation or neural‑network training. The kit includes a robot arm, essential lab equipment, pre‑recorded teleoperation demos, and a skill file, allowing a coding agent to observe the lab, write, and execute programs using external tools. Experiments with OpenAI Codex on tasks such as lifting a Petri dish lid, removing a bottle cap, and opening an incubator door demonstrated successful performance in two different laboratories, outperforming a fine‑tuned vision‑language‑action policy that failed to transfer.

By Yuna Oikawa, Kei Endo, Takanori Uzawa, Yunzhe Zhang, Manan Anjaria, Lerrel Pinto, Sherry Yang, Koji Tsuda