标签：#robotics

US robotics researchers flew to Venezuela with snakebots after getting a call.

Gritt is coming out of stealth with $34 million and plan to automate the hardest tasks on construction sites.

Agility is opening a new training center for its Digit robots in Fremont, California.

I was tired of buzzword-heavy AI projects and marginally impactful demos. Surely we can do something more inspiring with these LLMs than build another chatbot? For me, the answer is physical AI: the moment all those breakthroughs finally reach into the real world, in robots that see, move, and figure things out for themselves. I think it is the most exciting frontier in tech right now. It is also genuinely hard to break into, because it is not one field. It is about five of them stacked on top of each other: electronics, mechanics, programming, data, and AI. Eight months ago I started my own robotics journey from scratch, and I was completely overwhelmed. How do you get from blinking an LED to a humanoid that does your dishes? There are thousands of scattered tutorials out there, with no sense of what comes first, or what any of it is building toward. So I decided to build the map. Stealing the best idea from my favorite games: If you have ever played a factory-building or strategy game like Satisfactory or Civ Six, you know the feeling. You start with almost nothing, and you unlock new tech one satisfying step at a time. Those games are proof that we will happily spend hours mastering an intimidatingly complex system, as long as it is laid out as a clear tree of unlocks. So why not point that same instinct at learning something real? That is exactly what a tech tree is: a structured, visual path where each node is a skill and each connection is a prerequisite. You start at Curiosity on the far left and work your way right, through electronics, mechanics, code, data, and AI, all the way toward autonomous robots and humanoids. The idea is simple: turn gaming time into learning time. What the tree actually is Every node on the tree is a skill to learn, and the star-shaped nodes are hands-on projects where theory finally meets a soldering iron. Nodes are color-coded by discipline, so you can see at a glance whether you are in electronics, mechanics, programming, data s

The CEO of Foundation Future Industries, which counts the president’s son as its chief strategy adviser, tells WIRED it’s exploring some “kinetic things.”

​I. The Terminal Velocity of Disembodied Intelligence ​The current paradigm of artificial intelligence is approaching a fundamental cognitive ceiling. We have built vast, sprawling minds, yet we have trapped them in sensory deprivation chambers. Today’s Large Language Models and industrial robotics operate under a fatal flaw: the reliance on linear, arbitrary tokenization. Traditional AI chops raw text into disconnected, non-semantic fragments, wasting immense computational memory tracking the mere phonetic order of spelling and grammar. ​Simultaneously, industrial machines navigate the physical world through siloed sensor pipelines. They process light, space, and kinetics as heavy, raw digital arrays, relying on brute-force algorithmic equations to stitch reality together. This is not intelligence; it is computational exhaustion. To achieve true artificial general intelligence, the machine must stop reading about the world and begin to inhabit it. ​II. The Biological Imperative ​Nature solved the hardware-software integration problem millions of years ago. Human biology remains the ultimate benchmark for flawless, metabolic efficiency. Our somatosensory system does not wait for a central brain to read a text string before pulling a hand away from a fire; it processes physical feedback in milliseconds through decentralized neural highways. ​Human cognition leverages cross-modal integration within the angular gyrus, allowing visual data to be instantly cross-referenced with kinesthetic feedback to trigger anticipatory motor reflexes. Furthermore, biological intelligence is inherently tied to physical survival. We manage thermodynamics through a centralized hypothalamic thermostat, protecting the body from cellular destruction, while routing ambient light data to deep-brain structures to drive a natural circadian rhythm. True AGI requires this exact synthesis of abstract thought and biological mechanics. ​III. The Logographic Paradigm Shift ​To bridge the gap between

If you have ever built an autonomous mobile robot, you have likely run into the dreaded "Shuffled USB Port" problem. You boot up your robot, fire up your ROS 2 launch files, and... crash. Your LiDAR driver is trying to parse data from your IMU, and your IMU node is screaming about invalid serial frames. Because Linux assigns virtual serial paths like /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 based purely on which device initialized milliseconds faster, relying on default OS paths is a recipe for system instability. When you are scaling up to dozens of Jetson Orin nodes —each equipped with an RPLIDAR C1 and a Yahboom 10-axis IMU —manually hardcoding paths or writing rigid scripts on every individual machine isn't viable. Here is how production-grade robotics fleets handle plug-and-play USB binding dynamically using configuration-driven udev rules. The Core Concept: Vendor ID vs. Physical Port vs. Serials Linux's udev (device manager) allows us to dynamically create stable symbolic links (symlinks) like /dev/rplidar and /dev/imu when hardware is plugged in. How we identify those devices determines our fleet's flexibility: USB Serials: Unique to each individual chip. Highly secure, but requires registering every single replacement sensor in your codebase. Physical USB Ports ( KERNELS ): Tied to a physical slot on the carrier board. Great if you have identical sensors, but forces technicians to plug cables into highly specific, undocumented ports. Vendor ID (VID) & Product ID (PID): Identifies the USB-to-serial converter chip on the sensor board. Because the RPLIDAR C1 uses a Silicon Labs CP210x chip ( 10c4:ea60 ) and the Yahboom IMU uses a QinHeng CH340 chip ( 1a86:7523 ), they use completely distinct silicon. This means we can map them dynamically and reliably using just their VID/PID —allowing field technicians to plug them into any USB port on the Jetson without breaking the system. Step 1: The Configuration-Driven File ( devices.conf ) Hardcoding vendor rules inside shell scri

The soft, oddly intimate home-chore robot has been given some very tactile hands.

General Intuition is betting millions of hours of video game data can train the foundation models for physical AI, making it easier to build smarter robots with minimal real-world data.

Top robotics researchers and founders explain how robot autonomy is evolving.

Top robotics researchers and founders explain how robot autonomy is evolving.

Forterra has deployed more than 100

While other humanoid startups chase sky-high valuations, Agility Robotics is betting its future on execution — and a SPAC.

📖 Read the full version with charts and embedded sources on ComputeLeap → You can now buy a walking, flipping, kung-fu-kicking humanoid robot on AliExpress for $4,900 — less than a used Honda Civic, less than a semester of community college, less than what most people spend on a couch-and-TV combo. Unitree's R1 AIR shipped its first global batch in April, and it represents something the robotics industry has been promising and failing to deliver for decades: a humanoid robot that a normal person can actually afford. But here's what the breathless headlines won't tell you: price is falling faster than capability. The gap between what this robot costs and what it can actually do is where the hype lives — and understanding that gap is the difference between seeing a revolution and seeing a very expensive toy. The Number That Matters The Unitree R1 AIR stands 4 feet tall, weighs 55 pounds, and packs 20 degrees of freedom into a bipedal frame that can run, do cartwheels, throw punches, and execute spin kicks . At CES 2026, Unitree's booth stopped traffic with R1s replicating Bruce Lee sequences, Michael Jackson dance moves, and Mike Tyson combinations. The base R1 AIR ships with a monocular camera, 8-core CPU, and onboard AI for voice and image recognition. For $1,000 more, the standard R1 at $5,900 adds six more degrees of freedom (26 total), binocular depth perception, waist articulation, and head movement. Both come with hot-swappable batteries — about an hour of runtime per charge. To put the price in context: Figure AI and Tesla each shipped roughly 150 humanoid units in 2025. Unitree shipped 5,500 . That's not a typo — Unitree alone outshipped every Western humanoid manufacturer combined by a factor of 20x. The R1's $4,900 price point isn't an outlier. It's the leading edge of a Chinese manufacturing tidal wave. The Raspberry Pi Parallel — and Its Limits When the Raspberry Pi launched in 2012 at $35, it didn't replace laptops. It didn't become the computer most peo

AI and Robotics in the New Age of Industrialization Since 2025, a new era of...

What happens when a machine no longer needs to be trained to see something new? That's the quiet question sitting underneath this week's news, buried next to a less invasive brain implant and a handful of robots getting tougher for the real world. Neuralink says it's completed its first "transdural" brain implant, a surgical approach built to reduce trauma during the procedure. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how you get sensors close to a human eye without hurting anyone, I find these less-invasive-implant strategies worth watching, because the surgical-risk problem is basically the same one we wrestle with in ophthalmic hardware. Vision is getting less invasive too, in its own way. Roboflow rolled out text-prompt object detection built on SAM3 (Meta's latest segmentation model): you type the class of object you want "forklift," "cracked tile," whatever, and it returns boxes and masks without you collecting a single training image first. That's a real shift. For most of computer vision's history, teaching a model to recognize something new meant labeling hundreds of examples before you could even start; this collapses that step into a sentence. The same week brought several applied builds using the same detect-then-orchestrate pattern: a drone system that patrols for intrusions, a pipeline that inspects transmission lines for damaged cables, and an airport tool that spots foreign debris on the tarmac. The Robot Report's roundup of June's biggest robotics stories leaned heavily on humanoid robots companies going public, new deployments, and production milestones stacking up faster than would have seemed plausible a few years ago. Apptronik unveiled its Apollo 2 humanoid alongside a dedicated data-collection facility built so the robot keeps learning after it's deployed, not just during initial training which quietly answers one of the harder questions in robotics: how do you keep a system improving once it's out of the lab? X Square Robot raised e

As you'd expect, there were robots aplenty at the AI Engineer World's Fair Expo, although with mixed...

Video AI systems consistently fail to track what happens when the camera looks away: when a scene pans away from an object in motion and returns, current models re-render the object in its original position rather than showing the logical result of off-screen change. Scaling to more parameters makes this failure worse, not better, according to WRBench , a new benchmark that tests what researchers call "world model reliability." The benchmark presents AI video systems with scenes where something happens off-screen — the camera pans away while an object is in motion, or while a light changes, or while an open door should stay open — then pans back to see what the system believes should have happened. A system that genuinely models the world would track what occurred during the off-screen interval. Current systems mostly don't. Key facts What: A new benchmark tests whether video AI systems can track what happens to parts of a scene the camera isn't currently showing. Across 23 models, the answer is mostly no — and making the models larger made the problem worse, not better. When: 2026-06-19 Primary source: read the source (arXiv 2606.20545) The benchmark covers twenty-three different video generation models and nearly ten thousand video clips across six categories of off-screen change, each designed to test a different aspect of world continuity: objects in motion, light sources changing, object states such as open or closed doors, and several others. This gives a comprehensive picture rather than a single narrow test. The most striking finding is the scaling result. The researchers tested one of the more capable video generation systems at two different sizes: a smaller version and one with more than ten times as many parameters. More parameters didn't help. Scaling made the off-screen tracking problem measurably worse. The larger model produced more realistic-looking frames, but it was less accurate about what should have happened to the parts of the scene it wasn't

The startup, Proception, is taking a unique approach to collecting training data to tackle one of the hardest problems in robotics: hands.

We’ve taken one small step towards robot police officers: a drone capable of disarming a suspect: In a June 22 video posted on the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Instagram page, an officer wearing goggles can be seen operating a drone to retrieve a knife from an armed suspect hiding inside a cluttered house. “After not responding to negotiators, a drone was deployed inside the residence,” the post says. “Drone pilots located the suspect hiding in a corner of a garage” and then used a high-powered magnet attached to the drone to grab the knife out of the suspect’s hand. In the video ­ which is soundtracked by the “Mission: Impossible” theme song—the intercepted knife can be seen spinning around in the air as the drone carries it back to the deputies...