标签：#robotics

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...

Flexion Robotics, a startup founded by ex-Nvidia engineers, has a clever way of training robots to do useful work.

General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop something closer to human intuition.

General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop something closer to human intuition.

Farday Future hasn't quite given up on EVs, but it's now also pitching a lineup of robots, including humanoids and a quadruped with an optional canine heads.

Agility Robotics, the humanoid robotics startup that spun out of Oregon State University in 2015, expects to generate $620 million in proceeds.

Shinkei makes a refrigerator-sized robot called Poseidon to kill fish quickly and humanely.

Figure says its F.02 robot "contributed to the production of 30,000+ X3 vehicles" at BMW's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Loaded 90,000-plus sheet metal parts. Logged 1,250-plus hours on a live assembly line. After ten years of stage demos and treadmill walks, that is a real number from a real factory, and it deserves to be read carefully. So here is the part most coverage skipped: that robot has been retired. The headline numbers are real Two of the loudest names in the field finally stopped quoting choreography and started quoting line output. Figure's Spartanburg run hit greater than 99% placement success per shift on a 37-second load cycle, ten-hour shifts, five days a week, all on the chassis assembly line. Tesla, separately, says more than 1,000 Optimus units were already working its Fremont floor in January 2026, doing battery assembly, pack loading, cable routing and parts handling, with a dedicated line targeting 100,000 to 300,000 units this year per The Robot Report. I want to be clear that this is genuinely new. A fixed pick-and-place task, run for months on a production line at automotive takt, with a placement success number you can audit, is not a demo. It is the first time the category has produced metrics an operations lead can actually argue about. Take the capability seriously. The trouble starts the moment you treat the capability number as an availability number. The footnote that inverts the headline The single most important sentence in Figure's announcement is the one about retirement. F.02 "return[ed] to HQ from BMW as part of our fleet-wide retirement" once Figure 03 launched. So the 30,000-car figure is the lifetime output of a pilot that has ended, not the running rate of a station that still exists. As of now there are no Figure robots on the Spartanburg line. BMW's own June 2026 material reads the same way once you stop skimming. The company frames its next move as a new pilot at Plant Leipzig in Germany starting summer 2026, wit