Super psyched for this competition!

While folding origami is not "economically valuable task" which many commercial labs care about outright, I love this challenge b/c:

1. Origami, at the highest level, is IMO one of the most complicated dexterous task human hands are capable of.

2. I reckon even for fairly simple origami designs, you'd need more than 2 fingers. So this is a task that really showcase the use of 5-fingered hands.

3. Folding origami involves lots of occlusion. In fact, I've seen an origami master fold a crane more or less completely based on touch. This means tactile and even force sensing would be required for complicated origami designs.

4. Origami is an art form with long cultural history in Japan. It's not just the physical manipulation techniques involved, there's also a creative aspect that I think will be a frontier goal for Embodied AI to shoot for.

5. We're co-organizing this challenge with the Nippon Origami Association, who are basically the human experts. This means we'll have human expert benchmark against what embodied AI can do.

I reckon this is such a difficult task that this competition will last for years before embodied AI (both model and hardware improvements) can catch up to human performance.

I'm also very confident that on the path of solving robotic origami we'd have also unlocked some fundamental manipulation capabilities that'd be useful in lots of other real-world dexterous tasks.

Grateful to be able to do this with my buddies @DJiafei @chris_j_paxton as well as strong partners from @SharpaRobotics @LightwheelAI @BitRobotNetwork as well as friends from academia.