Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Survey

Scaling deep learning to massive, diverse internet data has yielded remarkably general capabilities in visual and natural language understanding and generation. However, data has remained scarce and challenging to collect in robotics, seeing robot learning struggle to obtain similarly general capabilities. Promising Learning from Videos (LfV) methods aim to address the robotics data bottleneck by augmenting traditional robot data with large-scale internet video data. This video data offers broad foundational information regarding physical behaviour and the underlying physics of the world, and thus can be highly informative for a generalist robot. In this survey, we present a thorough overview of the emerging field of LfV. We outline fundamental concepts, including the benefits and challenges of LfV. We provide a comprehensive review of current methods for extracting knowledge from large-scale internet video, addressing key challenges in LfV, and boosting downstream robot and reinforcement learning via the use of video data. The survey concludes with a critical discussion of challenges and opportunities in LfV. Here, we advocate for scalable foundation model approaches that can leverage the full range of available internet video to improve the learning of robot policies and dynamics models. We hope this survey can inform and catalyse further LfV research, driving progress towards the development of general-purpose robots.