For decades, we’ve dreamed of robots that can seamlessly step into our world and lend a hand. Now, that vision takes a significant stride forward.

Most robots are pre-programmed or teleoperated for narrow, repetitive task sequences. They lack the ability to truly learn for themselves or adapt to unpredictable environments. Moreover, transferring learned skills from one robot body to another remains incredibly difficult. To take on the hardest problems at scale, robots of every shape and size need AI models giving them the ability to think, act, and interact intelligently to safely complete tasks.

We demonstrated how Gemini’s multimodal understanding could drive real-world action with Gemini Robotics. Today, we are introducing Gemini Robotics 2 – the intelligence layer powering the next generation of truly adaptable robots. As it takes its first literal steps, this major advance unlocks intelligent whole-body control, advanced dexterity, and multi-robot collaboration. — Read More

Frontier LLMs were pre-trained on trillions of tokens of text, most of it at least initially taken from the web. The internet was, in effect, a free pre-training corpus that humanity had collectively assembled.

In robotics, there’s no such equivalent. That generally means all attempts to solve and get to physical AGI in some form involve working through this idea of the data bottleneck. In this piece, I’ll go deeper into the bottleneck, and introduce a version of the robot data pyramid highlighting the various kinds of data used in robot learning that can be combined to help address it. — Read More

… Robots today can already perform many individual skills that seemed out of reach only a few years ago – from following natural-language instructions to navigating buildings and manipulating objects. The harder challenge is completing an extended task that requires all of those abilities to work together without human intervention. That’s the difference between a robot that can perform an impressive demonstration and one that can do useful work in the real world.

A real-world job involves a sequence of decisions. The robot has to interpret instructions, navigate unfamiliar spaces, manipulate objects, recover when conditions change, and continue toward its objective without someone stepping in. Every successful action creates new opportunities for failure, making reliability over time fundamentally different from mastering isolated skills. — Read More

Robots are here, and they’re going to change the world, with Unitree currently in pole position. Joining me to discuss are Niko Ciminelli, longtime SemiAnalysis advisor, robot kid, venture investor, and Western New York native — go Bills! — along with Reyk Knuhtsen, robotics lead at SemiAnalysis. Lily Ottinger is co-hosting.

Our conversation covers:

Why robots are the real general-purpose technology
How everyone keeps underestimating Unitree
China’s edge
Why you can’t AI your way out
What America should do next

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Robotic warfare is shifting the source of state power away from citizens to firms. The transition will produce a new social contract.

XIn December 2024, the Ukrainian National Guard’s 13th Khartiia Brigade carried out a combined ground and air assault near the town of Lyptsi. Air assets coordinated with dispersed ground forces bounding from cover to cover. Dozens of attackers overran Russian positions, cleared mines in the vicinity, and laid down a defensive perimeter around the captured territory. But not a single Ukrainian was present on the battlefield.

To achieve this, soldiers piloted a mix of unmanned ground vehicles mounted with machine-gun turrets, aerial drones bristling with grenades and assault rifles, and more conventional kamikaze drones. This experiment allowed the Ukrainians to trade valuable human advantages like spatial awareness and tactical flexibility for the assurance that their only casualties would be robotic. For a country suffering severe manpower shortages, such a tradeoff was welcome amid a gruesome war of attrition fought against an adversary with more than three times its population. — Read More

US robotics firm Figure has showcased its humanoid robots performing household tasks in a coordinated bedroom-cleaning demonstration. In a newly released video, two robots enter a minimalist room and begin organizing items, including hanging up a coat, closing a laptop, and placing headphones away. — Read More

#robotics

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

#robotics

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

We’ve trained a new model, π_0.7, that exhibits a step-change in generalization. π_0.7 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 π_0.7 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. π_0.7 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

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