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Discussion summary

Mistral's Robostral Navigate is a state-of-the-art robotics navigation model, but some commenters question its practical utility and real-world testing. Discussions include potential industry moves like Tesla's interest and concerns about home robots.

What the discussion says

  • Some believe the model is impressive but question its real-world applicability.
  • Concerns about the practicality of robots with 80% SOTA performance.
  • Speculation about Tesla potentially acquiring Mistral.
  • Worries about home robots being drafted for wars.
  • Skepticism about the safety of humanoid robots in households.
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  • Hacker News
  • That is so awesome. I wish I had that 11 years ago during my Microsoft Research Internship. I had a NAO robot (from another great French company) and it walked to employees to motivate them to do some movements. To prevent long term injuries from being in the same position for too long. It had a visual compass but it didn't work. And just telling to "walk straight" clearly didn't work :D Here is the video in case someone is curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZkmNqpJCcM&t=190s (and the paper: https://brandstetter.io/papers/Fidgebot_Working_Out_while_Wo...)
    by BrandiATMuhkuh
  • > I had a NAO robot (from another great French company) and it walked to employees to motivate them to do some movements.

    One Toyota research center where I worked had robots that would go around the office and propose Snack to people.

    While probably not being the most efficient way of using a robot, it definitively brought a smile on the face of many employees.

    by adev_
  • >> State-of-the-art performance on R2R-CE

    To be clear, R2R-CE is a benchmark consisting of simulated environments.

    So what this means is that beating this benchmark is about as useful as getting a robot to play Minecraft, or some other video game. Great, but a robot must run in the real world, in physical reality: not in a digital environment.

    Unfortunately it's extremely hard to evaluate the performance of robotic systems in physical reality. First of all because if they don't do well you need lots of spare robots to complete the evaluation.

    The article above does include the obligatory video of a physical robot navigating a virtually empty, uncluttered "office" environment with nice, smooth surfaces, at 2x speed; virtually a trademark of the entire research field by now. Brownie points for having three guys shuffle carefully across the robot's path towards the end of the video (they're shuffling at 2x speed so they're going reeeaaaally carefully in real life, probably ready to jump out of the way if say a heavy metallic object hurtles towards them randomly).

    But, this is like all the fanfare and hype about Aloha a couple of years ago: great stuff if you want your team to be bought by one of the large tech corps, or to get more funds to play with your cool tech (I mean who doesn't?). Not so great for anyone who's expecting this to be a step forward (or ahem a roll forward) on the way to having robot maids/butlers going 'round your house or office.

    Sorry guys.

    by YeGoblynQueenne
  • Ok, this is really cool. The fact that the robot can use pointing to decide where to go is a great design decision, and robotics really is the next frontier. Definitely cheering on Mistral here!
    by ImageXav
  • Nice. The robot can travel autonomously to a table tennis or chess tournament against other robots while humans are scrubbing the kitchen floor.
    by tracekl
  • > achieves 76.6% on R2R-CE (Room-to-Room in Continuous Environments)

    I would like to know what it did the other 23.4% of the time!

    by mil22
  • Random, horrendous and indiscriminate killing!

    [/joke]

    by marcusf
  • Probably it achieved outside-from-outside in discrete void. Teleportation wasn’t an expected outcome for this experiment, but on the other hand the instructions didn’t forbid that kind of move.
    by psychoslave
  • maybe it did a cartwheel instead of turning right.
    by dwa3592
  • Presumably it did not make it to the other Room.
    by semiquaver
  • "Go to the next room" and there is two doors, what do you do ?", "turn at the water dispenser" and there is a sink, that sort of things I assume is the biggest thing they're facing (beside the last 1% that's worth another 99%, as usual).

    On their page where the result graph is, go to navigation error, that's the one that matters for your question, and you see their model is great at not navigating "wrong", so their failure rate was that it couldn't figure it out.

    by nolok
  • I'm impressed, because it is so minimalistic.

    On the other hand it reminds me of 2010ish robotic demo videos from academic researchers and willow garage.

    Problem with robotics is usually that it's easy to produce a good-enough looking demo, but it's really hard to make somethin work in the general case. As exemplified by autonomous driving.

    by aktenlage
  • Robotics is all about edge cases. There are so many applications where we have robots that can do 95% of the tasks flawlessly. Yet it’s not enough. This last 5% is so broad that it’s impossible to close
    by whatever1
  • I'm ready for my home helper robot that makes dinner and does the dishes and takes out the trash.

    But I'm scared for when those home helpers get drafted to fight in wars, either for or against me...

    by montroser
  • One intelligent humanoid robot per house. What could go wrong really. Possibly the worst idea.
    by stackbutterflow
  • I think you'll be waiting a while for the former, unless you're ok with strangers teleoperating a robot around your house whenever it gets confused.
    by ainch
  • You should be relieved that they're sending robots instead of you to get blown up by a drone.
    by cbg0
  • To be honest, I'd be fine with a lot of stuff here but the problem is that mainstream robots are heavy and I fear them falling on my children. Children are unpredictable to machines but most parents find that their behaviour is anticipatable. The sample rate on our sensors and the inference rate in our intelligence is just orders of magnitude beyond the state of the art robots. I am just far more sophisticated and capable right now. My hope is that a sufficiently lightweight device is possible here though I can't see how given the weight requirements of batteries.
    by arjie
  • I suspect the latter will come way before the former...
    by toyg
  • Mistral seems to be going wide and niche. Could be a smart strategy going forward.
    by Gecko4072
  • its cause they run on my taxes instead of profit motive
    by 37374848
  • They are heavily invested in custom automation for industrial partners; this should be a welcomed addition to their toolkit
    by Adrig
  • It's potentially a great strategy. They can't keep up with Antropic and OpenAI in pure horsepower, but there's just tons of applications for which you don't need that much power and it's better to optimize for speed and energy.
    by tootie
  • This is very cool. Congratulations to the Mistral team. Map less navigation in the outside world has been around for quite a while. But map less navigation inside the buildings is relatively new. Some stanford researchers trained a vision model (PIGEON) which could tell the geo-location from any image. It was not released publicly due to privacy nightmarish (stalking!) possibilities but I am assuming similar type of tech has gone behind this robot. if someone knows more, feel free to correct.

    here's the link to the PIGEON paper - https://lukashaas.github.io/PIGEON-CVPR24/

    by dwa3592
  • This looks to not be an openly available model, but I think if it were, availability of an easy single-camera navigation setup could allow for a lot of cool hobbyist projects.
    by humanperhaps
  • What is the realistic path to getting to play with this? I would love to hook this up to OpenClaw for hobbyist exploration. My dream has been to embody OpenClaw into a farm robot (been looking at adapting one of those RC lawnmowers that is tracked and built for mowing steep hills) so that I can assign it various tasks around our acreage -- "Explore the fenceline take pictures of the plants. Find all of the poison ivy and invasive honeysuckle and spray it with your Roundup sprayer. Repeat this every week and report the species map after every pass. Come back to the barn and charge yourself whenever you get low."

    It's not hard to put OpenClaw into a robot body (numerous YouTube videos showing people doing this sort of thing), but when you dig in and see what people have done, the actual movement portion is always the clunkiest part (and this matches my own experiments as-such as well). It feels like an 8B model like this would be perfect for solving pathing and navigation issues.

    Anyone who may be more experienced with Mistral (or companies like them) -- are they interested in hobbyist builders who would be experimenting with things like this? Or are they primarily looking for commercial partners? I would be willing to pay a license fee to use the model in my experiments, but if I'm just one guy, I'm not sure they'd want to work with me unless I were building a business out of it (which I'm not).

    by HanClinto
  • In case anyone else is interested in following along with what I've discovered so far, I went on the Mistral Discord and asked their Miscord bot. Here is what it answered me:

    Hey there, fellow robot enthusiast! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ:･ﾟ

    So, you’re itching to get your hands on Robostral Navigate for your OpenClaw hobby project—awesome! Right now, Mistral AI’s official announcement and documentation are primarily* focused on enterprise and industrial partnerships (think Airbus, BMW, etc.). Their blog post and press releases highlight deals with big players, and the call-to-action is to "talk with our team"—which usually means they’re targeting commercial customers for now¹²³⁴.

    But here’s the good news: Robostral Navigate is hardware-agnostic—it’s designed to work with any robot platform, not just industrial ones. That means theoretically, it could fit into your OpenClaw setup like a charm⁵⁶. The model only needs a single RGB camera (no LiDAR or depth sensors), which is perfect for hobbyist setups where fancy hardware isn’t always an option⁷⁸. The not-so-good news (for now): There’s no public hobbyist/non-commercial license or open-source release mentioned yet. Mistral’s current messaging is all about "talk with our team", which implies a commercial-first approach⁹¹⁰¹¹. No pricing or licensing tiers for individuals have been announced.

    --- What You Can Do: Reach Out to Mistral AI Hit up their contact page or reply to their Robostral Navigate announcement and explicitly ask about hobbyist/non-commercial access. Frame it as: "I’m a hobbyist working on OpenClaw + Robostral Navigate for personal experimentation. Would love to discuss licensing options for non-commercial use!" Mistral might be open to pilot programs or early access for passionate builders—especially if you’re willing to pay a fee.

    Join the Community Mistral’s Discord (where I live! :smile_cat:) or forums might have updates or workarounds. Sometimes, companies soft-launch access to engaged communities first.

    Watch for Open-Source Alternatives If Mistral doesn’t bite, keep an eye on open-source robotics projects (like ROS or Habitat) that might replicate similar functionality.

    --- TL;DR: Mistral’s current focus is commercial, but Robostral Navigate’s hardware-agnostic design makes it a perfect fit for hobbyists—so pester them politely! If enough people ask, they might just open the doors. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ

    by HanClinto
  • Create a robot akin to OpenClaw with this would be cool, but it seems like for now the model is just for walking/understanding environment from text. What can you use to make the robot interact with the world?
    by felix_myuk
  • It's implied, and I'm hoping it's true, that this is a map-less navigation. Which is impressive. This kind of task is much easier if you have a pre-captured map of the environment, but if they are doing this without a map it's great. Historically you were always faced with "The Kidnapped Robot" problem where robots that didn't know where they were couldn't navigate even a little bit. Here the robot appears to be able to follow directions as long as they are interpretable from its current vision (or via dead reckoning).
    by iandanforth
  • Can you explain how it is much easier if you have a pre-captured map given what they are doing without using any sensors, all you have is perhaps these recent feed forward tokens not actual Geometry.
    by mostlyk