Teams building robots can now download a large robot control model, adapt it to their own machines and use it commercially without paying a licence fee. Runway, a company best known for AI video tools, released Praxis-1 on 11 November with its weights, inference code and fine-tuning code under the Apache 2.0 licence.
Praxis-1 is what Runway calls a world action model: it learns how the physical world behaves from large amounts of video, then predicts both what will happen next and what a robot should do. Runway says its research found that ordinary web video worked as well as recordings of people operating robots as training data, which matters because robot data is slow and costly to collect. The model has 27 billion parameters and can be adapted to a new robot with light fine-tuning.
Launch partners ran it on a legged humanoid, an industrial robot arm and a dual-arm warehouse robot. Runway says it reaches 46.2% success on NVIDIA’s RoboLab-120 benchmark, the best of the world action models listed there. These are Runway’s own figures.
Why it matters: smaller robotics teams may not need to build a robot brain from scratch. How well it works on real factory or warehouse jobs still needs independent testing.
Source: Runway