Power grids worldwide face an aging infrastructure crisis, but China just announced a $1 billion solution involving 8,500 AI robots. State Grid Corporation of China plans to deploy this robotic workforce across 26 provincial regions by 2026, representing one of the most ambitious grid-specific robotics deployments ever attempted. Your energy bills and power reliability might never be the same. — Read More
Tag Archives: Robotics
A Hundred Robots Are Running A Bio Lab
The small robot has brushed past me five times in the last hour.
It runs loops around the perimeter of the third floor of this bio lab, serving as a courier. The machine’s job is to visit workstations and keep other robots – arms bolted to lab benches – fed with whatever they need be it pipette holders, sealed plates or something in a labeled bag. The little bot is relentless and unconcerned about me or much else beyond its job. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot chairs still rotating slowly on their bases from where it clipped them on the last pass.
About a hundred robotic arms fill this room, each one positioned beside a different scientific tool. The arms must deal with centrifuges, incubators, chambers and tubes. They run simultaneously and continuously. The small robot links them together, ferrying consumables between stations the way a junior scientist carries things between benches. Except the benches are robots. And so is the assistant. — Read More
π0.7: a Steerable Model with Emergent Capabilities
We’ve trained a new model, π0.7, that exhibits a step-change in generalization. π0.7 is a general-purpose model that can perform a wide range of dexterous tasks with the same performance as fine-tuned specialists, but even more importantly, it can follow new language commands and perform tasks that were never seen in its training data. In our experiments, we see π0.7 exhibiting the first signs of compositional generalization, recombining skills from various tasks to solve new problems, like using new kitchen appliances and even enabling a new robot to fold laundry for which there is no laundry folding data.
… A true generalist model should perform all of the skills out of the box, and be able to recombine them to solve new tasks. π0.7 demonstrates initial signs of such general capability: it can perform dexterous manipulation skills like those we’ve previously shown with our RL fine-tuned π*0.6 specialist models, with the same speed and robustness, it can compose and recombine the skills it learned to solve new tasks, and it can generalize across robot platforms, scenes, and tasks more effectively than our prior models. The examples below illustrate this breadth of capability, from fine manipulation to long-horizon household behaviors all with one model, straight out of the box. — Read More
China’s humanoid robot reaches 10 m/s sprint, edges closer to Usain Bolt’s record
Unitree Robotics has released a video showing its H1 humanoid robot reaching a sprint speed of up to 10 meters per second, claiming a new world record.
Tested on an athletics track, the robot recorded 10.1 meters per second as it passed a speed-measurement device, though the company noted a possible measurement error. — Read More
This World Model Learns Physics by Watching Videos
Yann LeCun’s team just taught an AI to imagine the future from raw video. On one GPU. With a model smaller than most apps on your phone.
You know how you can close your eyes and imagine what happens when you push a coffee cup off the edge of a table? You don’t need to actually do it. Your brain just… knows. Gravity. Impact. Shattered ceramic. Coffee everywhere.
hat is a world model. An internal simulation of how reality works. AI researchers have been trying to build the same thing for machines. Not by programming physics rules manually, but by letting the AI watch videos and figure it out on its own. If a robot can imagine the consequences of its actions before taking them, it can plan. It can reason. It can avoid stupid mistakes. The problem? Building these things has been an absolute nightmare. Read More
China leads the humanoid robot race — but the U.S. still has a shot
Since the start of the year, China’s humanoid robots have made waves at home and abroad — from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to China’s Lunar New Year Spring Gala — fueling bold claims about a new industrial revolution that would make it impossible for the U.S. to catch up.
Chinese companies now dominate the humanoid robot market, capturing over 90% of global sales with thousands of units shipped last year. While Elon Musk maintains that Tesla will ultimately lead the industry, he recently acknowledged Chinese firms as his primary competition and noted that Tesla’s Optimus robots won’t be ready for launch until at least next year.
To unpack the claims and look beyond the viral robot performances, Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech consulting company Omdia and the author of its latest humanoid robotics report, spoke to Rest of World at a virtual event on February 25. — Read More
World’s first ‘biomimetic AI robot’ debuts in Shanghai
1X unveils 1XWM world model for NEO robot platform
1X Technologies has announced the integration of its new video-pretrained world model, 1XWM, into its NEO robot platform. This development targets robotics researchers, developers, and early adopters interested in advanced home robots that navigate and act with human-like understanding. The initial release is for a limited group, primarily for research and internal evaluation, with broader commercial deployment expected following further validation.
he 1XWM model represents a technical shift from conventional vision-language-action (VLA) models by using internet-scale video pretraining combined with egocentric human and robot data. This model predicts robot actions by generating text-conditioned video rollouts, which are then translated into motion commands through an Inverse Dynamics Model. Unlike prior approaches, this method does not require tens of thousands of robot demonstration hours, enabling faster adaptation to new tasks. — Read More
Android Dreams
“The danger is never that robots disobey, but that they obey perfectly.”
At the convergence of frontier research breakthroughs, billions in capital, and rising geopolitical tensions lies a dream for a new physical world. After the LLM wave, robotics is seen as the next exponential growth domain.0Chinese manufacturing is viewed as an existential threat to the US, adding to incentives. And, though robotics is the hardest domain of AI1, multiple new AI strategies now offer clear paths to Embodied General Intelligence (EGI).2
Informed by conversations with frontier researchers, intuitions gained at Optimus and Dyna2.5, and my own syntheses, I predict inference-controlled robots will comprise half the world’s GDP by 2045. This scenario illustrates how. — Read More
Figure AI’s New Humanoid Robot Can Fold Your Clothes, Do the Dishes
The day that humanoid robots wash the dishes and do the laundry may be closer than you think. On Thursday, Figure AI introduced its next-generation robot, Figure 03, taking its technology beyond factory floors to the home.
“Figure 03 is a general-purpose humanoid robot for every day,” the California startup said. In a video, it showed off the new model performing a wide range of chores at home, including watering plants, serving food, folding clothes, and tidying up a room. — Read More
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