LLMs Advance Direct Control of Robots

LLMs are increasingly being used for direct control of robots performing simple tasks such as fetching beer or water. The robotics company reports an “incredible” improvement in lower-level control and says ChatGPT-5 has completed many tasks successfully on the first attempt.

Coding agents could make general-purpose robots more practical: instead of spending about 10 hours programming a simple task, a robot could generate and deploy roughly 1,000 lines of code in under a second. The company says this could significantly expand a robot’s usefulness.

Near term, substantial glue code will still be needed. The company is instead simplifying the interface for LLMs: navigation using onboard SLAM, 2D LiDAR and a navigation stack can be reduced to about two lines of code. It also points to OpenAI’s Astra as evidence of rapid progress in 3D-spatial understanding, while acknowledging uncertainty about how quickly major models will advance and saying it plans to use the best models available on the market.