Stories, page 2
- Pixel open-sources a low-cost mobile manipulator
Jason Liu and Tony Tao released the robot, its data collection rig and its learning stack together, plus a second paper on whole-body manipulation.
- Tutor rents robots by the hour, humans in the loop
The MIT CSAIL spin-out sells labor hours, not hardware, and remote operators called tutors guide every deployment.
- Field splits over whether Astra is robotics' GPT-3 moment
Ten takes from 50 conversations at the frontier of robotics set off the week's loudest argument.
- Machenta's one-demo learning holds up across a week of clips
Edward Johns posted reactivity, recovery and steerability tests for a model he says was trained entirely in simulation.
- Tutor raises $75M and targets 1,000 robots by 2027
Josh Gruenstein says the company is in almost four times as many sites as a year ago, with robots directed by human tutors.
- CARD tracks contact and force, not just hand motion
A second force-first manipulation release lands in the same week, and the headline results are open-loop replays.
- Meta built a humanoid called Max with Fourier Robotics
Nothing has been shown publicly, no video, no task, no autonomy claim.
- Odin Robotics launches arms that fit existing factory lines
The pitch is programmed control for the exact steps and learned skills for everything that varies, with no performance numbers yet.
- Templeton and Merritt clash over "unsupervised" Cybercab
A public argument about Tesla's driverless taxi turned into a fight over one word, with no staffing figures on either side.
- Foxconn humanoids build NVIDIA servers, Ziegler says
A single post claims 99% efficiency on an NVIDIA server line, and nothing outside that post backs up what the number means.
- ETH Zurich quadruped solves a Rubik's cube with its feet
Three full autonomous solves on real hardware, using depth images and joint sensing alone.
- UMI-Live open-sources a two-handed robot data rig
Each gripper carries its own camera, LiDAR, compute and battery, and finished episodes land on Hugging Face automatically.
- HIRO prices its Origin robot at $9,950
The company says industrial automation priced out small businesses, and it is going after them with a sub-$10,000 machine.
- Mundane shows a robot that takes the shock for an electrician
A human drives it the whole time, and the company is pitching that as the point.
- DeFM is a foundation model that sees only depth
Manthan Patel put the weights, code and a demo out the same day he announced it.
- Micro-AGI hit $100M ARR fastest ever, says Lukas Ziegler
One post, one conversation at NVIDIA GTC, and no customer names or unit counts behind the number.
- Brad Porter bets general dexterity is 2 to 3 quarters away
The prediction rests on internal results nobody outside has seen, and John Carmack is making the case for the other side.
- Machenta exits stealth with $40M and one-demo learning
The robot foundation model was trained without a single pixel of real-world data, the founder says.
- NVIDIA puts 2,000+ sim-ready robot assets on Hugging Face
Comau, FANUC, Franka, Robotiq, Standard Bots, Universal Robots and KUKA are all in the library, free and ungated.
- Mimic runs a video generation model as its robot policy at Audi
Lukas Ziegler got the stack explained to him at NVIDIA GTC in Berlin, and the headline detail is where the training compute went.
- Real robot catches the error in RoboSimStudio's AI-built sim
The agent modelled a bar support as fixed, the hardware proved otherwise, and the fix went back into the simulation.
- SuperMimic beats 128 GPUs with one GPU in three hours
Pieter Abbeel and Kevin Zakka explain why a learned world model plus backprop beats the usual training stack.
- Tesla nears 1,000 robotaxis registered in Texas
A fleet photo and a new company safety page, both sourced from Tesla and its own staff.
- Humanoid Scott says Unitree's H2-X tipped a car, not lifted it
A week of frame-by-frame work on the H2-X clip lands on a seesaw, not a feat of strength.