Recent work in visual representation learning for robotics demonstrates the viability of learning from large video datasets of humans performing everyday tasks. Leveraging methods such as masked autoencoding and contrastive learning, these representations exhibit strong transfer to policy learning for visuomotor control. But, robot learning encompasses a diverse set of problems beyond control including grasp affordance prediction, language-conditioned imitation learning, and intent scoring for human-robot collaboration, amongst others. First, we demonstrate that existing representations yield inconsistent results across these tasks: masked autoencoding approaches pick up on low-level spatial features at the cost of high-level semantics, while contrastive learning approaches capture the opposite. We then introduce Voltron, a framework for language-driven representation learning from human videos and associated captions. Voltron trades off language-conditioned visual reconstruction to learn low-level visual patterns, and visually-grounded language generation to encode high-level semantics. We also construct a new evaluation suite spanning five distinct robot learning problems $\unicode{x2013}$ a unified platform for holistically evaluating visual representations for robotics. Through comprehensive, controlled experiments across all five problems, we find that Voltron's language-driven representations outperform the prior state-of-the-art, especially on targeted problems requiring higher-level features.

Science and technology is taking over the world with new innovations every day. If you Google the latest science news, you will see that science has advanced so much over the years that people are finding it difficult to catch up on the latest inventions. From flying drones to self-driven cars, every new invention is proving to be useful to the world and human effort is gradually being replaced. With machines that are highly efficient and having the ability to do more work than human beings, many people are losing jobs over time. The world of science is caught up with one of the most recent inventions.

The researchers were able to get autonomous modular robots--robots that have the ability to control themselves, like the Roomba vacuum cleaner--to join forces and make one cohesive megabot. Researchers who study swarming insects like termites and ants know that these animals can accomplish things in coordinated groups that they could never manage on their own: carrying large objects, taking out predators, and creating intricate structures. A single powerful robot needs a redesign every time users come up with a new task for it; a bot built for building things can't be expected to pivot to search-and-rescue missions. At the same time, robot swarms provide something a single robot can't--redundancy.

Spoiler alert: Do not read if you haven't watched the current season of "The Walking Dead." Steven Yeun has gone from "The Walking Dead" to an animated life. The actor, who was horribly dispatched in the seventh-season opener of the AMC drama, can currently be seen in "Voltron: Legendary Defender," flying a red metallic lion into space as he helps save the universe. Yeun had already taken on the role of the mysterious Keith, the orphaned paladin (pilot) of the red lion, in Netflix's reboot of the '80s cartoon series, aware of the brutal end that was going to befall Glenn Rhee, his "Walking Dead" character. "It's all a little bittersweet," says Yeun. "I feel great, though. It feels good to have completed something."

Announced last Summer, Soul of Chogokin Voltron from Bandai is almost upon us. Released in Japan at the end of last year, fans of the classic Voltron will be happy to know that it is coming Westward very soon and is indeed a truly epic toy. While many may know of the original Voltron series from the 80's, the series actually comprised of two disparate anime, Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. While Voltron at the time in the West may have seemed unique, in Japan the original series were already somewhat late to the party as to the use of the combination gimmick. Most super robot shows of that era used the "gattai", or combination, approach to their mecha.

In its quest to conquer as much of the universe as the wires will reach, Netflix has engaged DreamWorks Animation in a revival of the 1980s space-robot franchise, now titled "Voltron: Legendary Defender," whose 13 episodes go live to binge or not to binge Friday. They've slapped on a fresh coat of digital paint, turned up the sound and assembled a cast that includes Steven Yeun, Tyler Labine, Bex Taylor-Klaus and Rhys Darby, familiar from the live-action world, along with Jeremy Shada (the voice of Finn on "Adventure Time"), Kimberly Brooks and Josh Keaton, whom you are as of yet more likely to have heard, in cartoons or video games, than seen. Does it better its predecessor? Your cherished memories aside, that is a bar set low. So, yes, it does better by them – by quite a lot and, at the same time significantly, not by too much.

Like scads of kids in the mid-'80s, producer Joaquim Dos Santos was drawn to his local toy store by "Voltron: Defender of the Universe," imploring his favorite uncle to buy him the giant title robot. "He thought he was going to buy me this little Transformer toy when we went to the store, but it was this 100 diecast Voltron, and I could see him just cringing taking it up to the register." Lauren Montgomery is a bit too young to remember everything about the anime series, but she knew that she liked it and is excited to be collaborating as co-executive producer with Dos Santos on a new version for Netflix premiering June 10 dubbed "Voltron: Legendary Defender." "There was no YouTube, so it was hard to go back to as I grew up," says Montgomery. "Once it came out on DVD, and now you can even watch it on [anime website] Crunchyroll, I re-familiarized myself with it." Though a hit, the original lion-based "Voltron," created by Peter Keefe and John Teichmann in 1984, only ran for one year.

The first teaser trailer for the Netflix animated series "Voltron: Legendary Defender." Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos are the creative team behind Netflix's "Voltron: Legendary Defender." The mechanized lions of Voltron are roaring back to life. The popular 1980s cartoon fantasy franchise with one really cool giant robot is being introduced to a new generation with the Netflix's animated series Voltron: Legendary Defender. Produced by DreamWorks Animation, the first 13 22-minute episodes will drop on June 10.