Sports have long served as an important test for robots. The best-known example of the phenomenon may be the annual RoboCup soccer competition, which dates back to the mid-1990s. Table tennis has played a key role in benchmarking robot arms since a decade prior. The sport requires speed, responsiveness and strategy, among other things. In […]
Google DeepMind develops a ‘solidly amateur’ table tennis robot Read More »
It’s incredibly easy to dump carbon into the atmosphere and accelerate climate change. It’s a lot harder to take it out. Startups are experimenting with massive industrial systems to draw the pollutant out of the air, with facilities costing hundreds of millions of dollars to construct. That has some other founders thinking, why not use
Applied Carbon’s farm robot turns plant waste into biochar to capture CO2 Read More »
There’s a long list of reasons why you don’t see a lot of non-vacuum robots in the home. At the top of the list is the problem of unstructured and semi-structured environments. No two homes are the same, from layout to lighting to surfaces to humans and pets. Even if a robot can effectively map
Researchers are training home robots in simulations based on iPhone scans Read More »
Mytra has been quietly operating behind the scenes since its May 2022 founding in a bid to rethink warehouse automation. The startup brings a solid pedigree to the table, founded by automotive vets from EV firms, including Tesla and Rivian. Warehouse/fulfillment has been a white hot category for automation since the pandemic hamstrung the global
Former Tesla humanoid head launches a robotics startup Read More »
Google found a new way to demonstrate what its Gemini AI model can do, with help from a robot. This was a robot from Google’s Everybody Robots Division, which was shut down last year. But apparently the robots are still around, so Google put a yellow bowtie on one of them then used Gemini to
A robot navigates an office space with Google Gemini Read More »
Roboticists at The Faboratory at Yale University have developed a way for soft robots to replicate some of the more unsettling things that animals and insects can accomplish — say, a reptile self-amputating a limb, or ants building bridges by temporarily fusing their bodies. In one demo video, we see a soft quadruped robot crawling
Meet the soft robots that can amputate limbs and fuse with other robots Read More »
Generative AI has already shown a lot of promise in robots. Applications include natural language interactions, robot learning, no-code programming and even design. Google’s DeepMind Robotics team this week is showcasing another potential sweet spot between the two disciplines: navigation. In a paper titled “Mobility VLA: Multimodal Instruction Navigation with Long-Context VLMs and Topological Graphs,”
Watch a robot navigate the Google DeepMind offices using Gemini Read More »
Florida man is back with a vengeance, and this time, he’s going after Walmart delivery drones. Yes, really. Walmart was demonstrating its delivery drone technology in Clermont, Florida — about 25 miles outside of Orlando — and a man allegedly shot the drone out of the sky when it flew near his house. Apparently, he
What happens when you shoot down a delivery drone? Read More »
Amazon has decided to discontinue its Astro for Business device, a security robot for small—and medium-sized businesses, just seven months after launch. In an email sent to customers and employees on Wednesday, provided to TechCrunch, the reason for putting Astro for Business on the shelf is a simple one: Amazon wants to focus on its
Amazon retires its Astro for Business security robot after only 7 months Read More »
Will robots ever have living, human skin? Researchers have been exploring the question and they’ve come up with some pretty unsettling results. I think it’s fair to say that no one would confuse any of today’s robots, no matter how advanced, with another human being. Even when a company like Tesla or Figure creates a
These robots with living skin are absolute nightmare fuel Read More »
