Perception
NeRF (Neural Radiance Field)
A NeRF (Neural Radiance Field) is a neural scene representation that maps a 3D position and viewing direction to volume density and view-dependent color, trained from posed images via differentiable volume rendering. Introduced by Mildenhall et al. in 2020, NeRFs synthesize photorealistic novel views and encode scene geometry implicitly. Variants such as Instant-NGP made training fast enough for practical robotics use.
Why it matters for physical AI
Dense, differentiable 3D scene models support grasp planning, sim-to-real asset creation, and visual localization, and NeRF-style representations feed digital-twin pipelines for training manipulation policies.
Build physical AI
Put these concepts to work on real hardware
Axol is a dual-arm robot built for physical AI — teleoperate it, collect demonstrations, and deploy learned policies out of the box.