robotics

Robots and AI are running experiments around the clock, from battery chemistry to cancer therapies. But can they be trusted to get it right?

For a young Tixiao Shan growing up in China, a broken Nintendo 64 controller wasn’t the end of a game—it was the beginning of a journey to understand how electronics work. That drive has since propelled him to the forefront of research on robotic perception. At nonprofit research institute SRI International’s Scene Understanding and Navigation (SUN) Group in Princeton, N.J., he is teaching autono…

Figure AI's Helix-02 ran 200 hours without a single human intervention. China made 10,000 humanoid deployments mandatory by year-end. Three Chinese robotics companies filed for IPO in the same week. The experiment phase is over. Value Description 200h Figure Helix-02 continuous autonomous operation 149,000+ Packages sorted, zero human interventions 10,000 Humanoids China mandates in real work by …

Let's be honest: standard AI chatbots are getting a bit boring. You ask them a question, they write back a beautiful paragraph of text, and then... nothing. They don’t actually do anything for your business. If you want to add a customer to your CRM, update a product on your website, or change something in your database, you still have to do it manually. That is why we decided to build something …

Quick glossary for readers new to VLA/WAM terminology VLA Vision-Language-Action model: a robot policy that starts from a pretrained VLM backbone and adapts it...

Physical Intelligence is drawing on the broad knowledge of large language models to help robots understand instructions and learn to carry out any task independently

Physical Intelligence is drawing on the broad knowledge of large language models to help robots understand instructions and learn to carry out any task independently

Echo started as a companion-platform idea: memory, proactive behaviors, a model picker, a lot of surface area. When I picked it back up I wanted the opposite. One thing, done well: talk to the robot, and the robot talks back out loud. So I rebuilt it, and renamed it to what you actually say to it. Hey, Reachy. The loop wake word -> listen (VAD) -> transcribe (STT) -> brain (LLM) -> speak …

Luke Larson is buzzing about matcha and his plans to build Vale into a Seattle-born beverage empire — think Starbucks, but make it matcha — scaling from a handful of local cafes and mobile bars to a nationwide network of thousands of automated machines. Read More

Scientific Reports, Published online: 15 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41598-026-57374-9 Data-driven adaptive integral variable structure control method for AGV trajectory tracking system based on BP neural network observer

A six-axis robot arm sitting on your desk used to mean five figures and a service contract. Chris Annin's AR4 quietly tore that idea up — and with the brand-new Mark 5 revision, he's calling the hardware officially finished. The AR4 is an open-source, six-degrees-of-freedom robot arm you build yourself from CNC-cut aluminum, 3D-printed parts, and off-the-shelf motors and electronics. It's the lat…

The UK keeps producing world-class technology, then watches many of its companies scale in America. Rory Daniels, Head of Emerging Technology and Innovation at techUK, joins Thinking on Paper to discuss whether the United Kingdom can remain competitive as quantum computing, robotics, photonics, AI and advanced computing begin to converge. The UK has strong research […]

You already run coding agents (opencode, Codex, Claude Code) in tmux on some remote box: a dev server, a cloud instance, a GPU node. They work. The problem is you : you're chained to a terminal to drive them. Start a task, wait, answer the agent's mid-run question, read the result. If you step away from the desk, the agent stalls on its next question until you SSH back in. From my phone, I wanted…

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. As robots advance in terms of dexterity and other physical capabilities , it becomes more likely that humans may find themselves working alongside them. If that happens, how will robots’ emotional capabilities need to advance for them to successfully work with people? In a recent study, researchers tr…

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO En…

Getting a palletizing project done right has always depended on having the right information at the right time. Product specs, floor constraints, financial targets: when any of it is missing or wrong, the project pays for it later. IQ is the platform Robotiq built to change that. It captures the information behind a palletizing project, structures it, and generates a validated Workcell design bas…

AI can read the literature in an afternoon and design molecules a chemist never would. So why can't a robot hold a pipette? The post Why Robots Still Can’t Do Science appeared first on Nautilus .

Engineers have invented an ingenious liquid-metal pump that could make future soft robotics and wearable devices much more portable and agile. The innovation, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature Communications, presents a low-voltage power source with the potential to transform robotic systems for a wide range of applications, from […]

Infinite Data Generation for Robotic AI We created the world's first game engine purpose-built for robotics. Lucky Engine spins up virtual worlds where your robot can try, fail and learn a million times then steps into reality already knowing the job. No hardware to break, no lab time to book, no waiting. A new game engine built from ground up by the Lucky Robots team This is not Unity or Unreal,…

Moon missions come in all shapes and sizes, from car-sized rovers packed with scientific equipment to towering rocket payloads—and now, a small, shape-shifting machine that is about the size of the average palm. When the Japanese Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) touched down on the lunar surface in 2024, a small rover called LEV-2 […]