Robotics

Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot from Tesla is doing more stuff — this time folding a t-shirt on a table in a development facility. The robot looks to be fairly competent when it comes to this task, but moments after Musk shared the video, he also shared some follow-up information whi

It’s been two decades since I developed the first driverless motorcycle, Ghostrider, as part of the DARPA Grand Challenge, an event that is widely viewed as the dawn of autonomous vehicles. That was in 2004, and in 2008, we used a modified Prius to deliver a pizza in San Francisco without a h

Burro has been on our radar since early  2020, when the company (then Augean) participated in a technewss Robotics pitch-off. The Phly-based firm has actually been around since 2017, but it's really the last few years that have seen its agtech offering really take off. Those successes have, o

This is always a strange week for us. Save for the occasional disastrous patent dispute, things are (thankfully) almost uncannily quiet in the week separating Christmas and New Year's Day. You see a lot of reflective posts go up during this time, not only because the calendar year is coming to

Homes aren’t getting cheaper — or necessarily easier to secure. This year, the median household income for home buyers jumped to $107,000 from $88,000 last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. The volume of homes for sale in the U.S. reached a record a low, meanwhile

Last month, I took an extended break. In a bid to keep my robotics newsletter Actuator (subscribe here) up and running, however, I reached out to some of the biggest names in the industry. I asked people from CMU, UC Berkeley, Meta, Nvidia, Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute the same

Over the last few years, I've asked countless people in the robotics space “what comes next after warehouse/fulfillment?” The already popular category got red hot during the pandemic, as online shopping turned from convenience to necessity. Amazon has been leading the space for more than a

For the next few weeks, technewss’s robotics newsletter Actuator will be running Q&As with some of the top minds in robotics. Subscribe here for future updates. Part 1: CMU’s Matthew Johnson-Roberson Part 2: Toyota Research Institute’s Max Bajracharya and Russ

It’s no secret that foundation models have transformed AI in the digital world. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, LLaMA, and Bard revolutionized AI for language. While OpenAI’s GPT models aren’t the only large language model available, they have achieved the most mainstre

Sure, AI can write sonnets and do a passable Homer Simpson Nirvana cover. But if anyone is going to welcome our new techno-overlords, they’ll need to be capable of something more practical — which is why Meta and Nvidia have their systems practicing everything from pen tricks to collaborati

In May of this year, technewss ran a piece titled “Figure’s humanoid robot takes its first steps.” The story was a firsthand account of my visit to the startup's South Bay offices. The headline was a reference to both the company's first year of existence and its stated plan to h

Ripcord, a startup developing robots that can automatically digitize paper records, is hoping to raise $20 million to $25 million in a new funding round that would value the company at $110 million pre-money, according to a source familiar with the matter and a pitch deck viewed by technewss. Alph

[A version of this post appeared in technewss’s robotics newsletter, Actuator. Subscribe here.] The last time I'd spoken with the Nvidia at any length about robotics was also the last time we featured Claire Delaunay onstage at our Sessions event. That was a while ago. She left the compa

“Flexibility” isn't a word one often applies to the manufacturing process. Changing things up on the assembly line is a resource-intensive activity, but automation and robotics could go a ways toward removing some friction from the process. That's effectively the thesis statement behind