Archive
- A $9,950 industrial robot and a robot that takes the shock
HIRO Industries says its Origin robot will cost $9,950 when pre-orders open next week, against the six figures it says industrial robots normally cost. Plus a teleoperated robot built to take the blast instead of an electrician.
- Machenta taught a 3-robot assembly line in two minutes
Edward Johns says his team set up a three-robot packaging line in two minutes using one demonstration per robot, with a model trained entirely in simulation that had never seen the objects. The same day, a depth-only foundation model for robots landed with weights and code.
- Machenta exits stealth: one demo, no real-world training data
Machenta says its robot foundation model learns a new task from a single demonstration, trained without a single pixel of real-world data. Meanwhile John Carmack points out no robot alive can change the batteries in a jack-o-lantern.
- One GPU, three hours: SuperMimic's 1000x humanoid training
Humanoid Scott put Unitree's car-lifting clip under the knife and concluded the robot tipped a balanced shell rather than lifting anything. Meanwhile the cost of training a humanoid to move fell by a factor of a thousand.
- Adcock calls Figure's new model "baby AGI"
Brett Adcock says Figure's newest model is the most significant moment he has ever had in robotics, and that it was tested in a secret apartment built inside headquarters. Nobody outside Figure has seen it.
- Figure lines up three humanoid generations
An AI agent built a working physics copy of a two-arm robot task from a phone video in 56 minutes, then fixed its own modelling error after the real robot disagreed. Plus Figure's hardware timeline in one shot and Eka's pick-rate numbers.
- Figure's F.03 hits 13 days of nonstop walking
Brett Adcock says Figure's F.03 has now walked 422 miles and 1.5 million steps without stopping, on a treadmill test that started as a side project to break the robot. Two other teams showed robots running autonomously for days, not minutes.
- Scott: Unitree's H2 tipped a gutted car, not lifted it
Humanoid Scott went frame by frame on Unitree's car-lift clip and says the fulcrum sits forward of the B pillar, meaning the robot tipped a balanced shell. Unitree has not responded.
- SuperMimic: 1 GPU, 3 hours, 129,514 motions
A new humanoid control method claims it beats a 128-GPU, 7-day setup using one GPU for three hours. Pieter Abbeel says it works because a world model is faster than a regular simulator.
- Flora goes open, Gecko's Navy deal hits $300M
A data engine chewing through 200,000 hours of video a day on 500 GPUs just had its weights posted for free. Plus the Navy quadrupled a robot inspection contract and Eka came out with a force-first manipulation model.
- The cornhole run, throw by throw
Google said its Apollo humanoid sank seven straight cornhole shots. The engineer who ran it then posted the whole log: throw #1 landed 85 cm short because the grip was slipping, and the fixes came one throw at a time.
- Adcock calls out a Hark refund story as a lie
Eric Lu said he emailed Hark support claiming the product failed, got a $30 pizza credit, and never downloaded the app. Brett Adcock replied with two words and a link from his team.
- A robot learned dexterous hands from minutes of play
Ruoshi Liu says minutes of human play, with no task demonstrations and no sim2real, were enough to train a dexterous manipulation policy. Jitendra Malik picked it up as his answer to what world models should actually be trained on.
- ASPIRE open-sourced after a model swap hit 99%
Jim Fan says his lab swapped the backend model in its robotics framework and saturated every benchmark to about 99% overnight. Elsewhere, the first reply to Tesla's newest clip was a researcher asking whether the footage is AI-generated.
- A G1 wrote its own code to fetch a Pringles can
An-Chieh Cheng says her team's G1 humanoid found the pantry and handed over a Pringles can with no pre-built map and no training for the task, because a coding agent wrote the program as it went. Separately, the SONIC controller moved onto full-size humanoids.
- Gemini 4 Argon sank seven cornhole shots on Apollo
Google says it showed its model a video of a human playing cornhole, and the Apptronik Apollo humanoid then hit seven straight. Takahiro Miki, who ran the demo, posted the blow by blow, including a throw that fell 85 cm short because the grip slipped.
- Gemini 4 Argon is driving humanoids, Google says
A world model trained on 30,000 hours of first-person video learned exactly where hands go and still could not say what happens to the things they touch. Going to 30,000 hours did not close the gap, and the field spent the day arguing about why.
- Zero-shot dexterity, and 300+ Cybercabs in Austin
A robotics startup says it went from zero to $100M in annual recurring revenue in six months, and nobody outside has checked a single number. Meanwhile two labs taught robots to thread nuts and catch boxes with no real-robot training data at all.
- Did those NEO orders ever actually ship?
Keerthana Gopalakrishnan answered a friendly post about bringing NEO to India with one question: did you ship last year's orders? Quiet Sunday otherwise, plus a small fight over whether controllers still matter.
- Tesla: 300+ Cybercabs in Austin, 8x in 30 days
A University of Washington group says its robots mesh gears and thread nuts with zero real-world training data, all clips at 1x. Meanwhile Tesla says Austin now has more than 300 Cybercabs, eight times as many as a month ago.
- Hark hits 281K daily users, and a humanoid catches boxes
Brett Adcock says Hark pulled 281,165 daily active users and 4.3 million messages in its first 48 hours, enough traffic to knock it over. Meanwhile a Unitree G1 learned to step sideways and catch boxes thrown at it.
- Adcock: Figure lifts way more than 50 lbs
Brett Adcock told Chris Paxton his humanoid payload chart was wrong, then fixed his own typo to say Figure can carry much heavier than 50 lbs with full loco-manipulation. Paxton's reply: the source ChatGPT pulled was wrong.
- Workhorse: a G1 humanoid learns from humans, no teleop
A Unitree G1 topples and climbs a suitcase, catches a thrown box and kicks boxes into place, learned from human demos with no teleoperation. Meanwhile Chris Paxton says neither Figure nor Optimus can lift what a warehouse worker lifts every day.
- Adcock ships Hark Pro with a 100,000 free plan cap
Brett Adcock's Hark Pro is live on web, iOS and Android, with the first 100,000 sign-ups getting the paid plan free. Also: a new humanoid built to walk into oil and gas disasters so people do not have to.