标签：#robotics

If you've ever wanted a robotic duck as a companion, now's your chance.

Perceptron offers an AI model that it says can help machines navigate the world while also providing in-depth visual intelligence.

Robot bodies are waiting for their AI brains to catch up.

The $200 million extension comes just months after the physical AI startup reached a $2 billion valuation.

Record-breaking robot races are less substantial than household chore challenges.

And they looked absolutely ridiculous doing it.

During a recent visit to Generalist AI, I watched a robotic arm improvise and use a banana as a tool.

The Mission Robotic Vehicle is making the first attempt to attach a new thruster to an aging satellite.

The divestiture comes as the two once-tight companies have started to diverge on the business side.

"Smile because it happened" — Dr. Seuss The Setup Earlier this year, I took on a short-term trial role with an early-stage robotics startup. The premise was straightforward: help with data collection, annotation, and evaluation workflows—essentially the backbone of any modern robotics or embodied-AI system. The trial didn't work out long-term. I was let go after about two months — a decision that, honestly, came down in part to my bandwidth as a student. Balancing a full course load with a startup trial was harder than I anticipated. But that's not the story I want to tell. What I do want to share are the technical lessons I took away — lessons about building robust data pipelines, about the gap between theory and practice, and about what I'd do differently next time. These aren't company secrets. They're about the general engineering challenges that anyone working with robotics data pipelines will encounter — challenges I'd read about in papers but hadn't truly internalized until I was standing in front of them. 1. The Data Pipeline Shape Is Universal—But the Details Aren't If you've spent any time in ML or robotics, you've seen this described: Data Collection → Annotation → Evaluation It's a standard three-stage pipeline. Industry vendors describe it explicitly in their robotics content. Academic projects model this structure. It's the field's shared vocabulary. Companies such as Scale AI and Toloka use similar industry workflows involving data collection, annotation, and evaluation. What isn't shared are the specifics: the sensor setup, the calibration procedures, the annotation rubric, and the evaluation metrics. Those are where a company's IP lives. The pipeline shape? That's just the map. And the map is public. What I'd do differently: Simulate before you collect. Data collection is expensive — in time, hardware wear, and cognitive load on operators. Before running a full session, run a feasibility study with a small batch. Verify your sync and capture scripts

July 2026 is over. The month that opened with AUTONOMOUS 2026 and WAIC 2026 running simultaneously on opposite sides of the Pacific closed with the sector tallying what it built. The number that defines the period is $55.8 billion in robotics funding across H1 - nearly double the prior full-year record. But the more durable signal from this week is operational rather than financial: Neura Robotics has a confirmed deployment date at a Schaeffler facility in December, NVIDIA's simulation-to-real pipeline is now functional at production scale, and five simultaneous shifts are reshaping factory floors right now, not in 2027. The questions that drove the first half of 2026 - does Physical AI work, is the funding real, will the robots actually arrive - are no longer interesting. H2 starts with harder ones. Stats: Value Description $55.8B Robotics funding raised in H1 2026, nearly double the prior annual record $8.6B Humanoid startup funding in H1 2026 alone, 1.8x all of 2025 December 2026 Confirmed first deployment of Neura Robotics humanoids at Schaeffler's German facilities 5 Simultaneous operational shifts reshaping factory floors identified in the mid-2026 analysis Neura Robotics Has a Deployment Date: December 2026 in a Schaeffler Factory Most Physical AI deployment announcements are directional. "We are partnering with X to explore robotics in our facilities" is a press release. A confirmed month and a specific facility is a contract. Neura Robotics confirmed that Schaeffler - one of the key investors in its $1.4 billion Series C alongside Amazon, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and the European Investment Bank - plans to deploy Neura's humanoids in its German facilities in December 2026 . Schaeffler manufactures precision bearings and components for electric vehicles, operating in environments where dimensional tolerances are measured in micrometers. Deploying a humanoid robot in that context is a fundamentally different challenge than warehouse pick-and-place or automotive sequ

Researchers fear AI is moving too fast, while Mark Zuckerberg is worried about who owns it. Plus: Inside Black Forest Labs’ push into robotics.

Gemini Robotics 2 includes three models, but only one is publicly available right now.

The massive seed round was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo's Conviction Partners.

Forget YouTube videos—frontier physical AI models need multiple camera angles, dense annotation, and soon, brain wave readings.

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.”