Robotics
Robotics
26 stories · page 1 of 3The man who built Alexa at Amazon becomes Boston Dynamics CEO from 7 October
Boston Dynamics announced on 6 October that Rohit Prasad takes over the company. He spent 12 years at Amazon, where he led Alexa and artificial general intelligence, and created the Amazon Nova models. The reading that Hyundai is putting in a product person, not a roboticist, is ours.
Read →Boston Dynamics shows the new Atlas hand: 13 degrees of freedom and no pinky
Four fingers, one actuator type, touch sensors on the fingertips and palm, a load of over 100 pounds. The pinky is gone because the CTO asked the team to tape their two small fingers together for a day and report what they could not do. Per IEEE Spectrum, the goal now is how to make 100,000 of these hands a year.
Read →Anthropic: robots can already do three quarters of physical work, but beat human cost on only 0.3 percent
On 30 September Anthropic published a robot exposure index, with task ratings made using Claude. Robots today can do 74 percent of physical tasks in the US, mostly in controlled settings. They are cheaper than humans for 0.3 percent of tasks, and at the past pace of price declines it will take 40 years to reach 10 percent.
Read →Waymo presented its plan for London, but first it needs both national approval and the city's consent
On 24 September Waymo published its vision for a driverless service in London under the UK scheme for automated passenger services. The scheme needs approval from the Department for Transport and consent from Transport for London. For now there is no permit, and Waymo says it is ready to earn one.
Read →The makers of FLUX opened a model that predicts a robot's next move together with how it will look
FLUX 3 Action is a 7-billion-parameter model derived from Black Forest Labs' video and image generator. Per the company it leads the RoboLab-120 ranking with less than half the parameters of the previous best open model. The weights are free for research, and commercial use needs a separate licence.
Read →Atlas has started training at Hyundai's Georgia plant, with parts assembly promised for 2030
Boston Dynamics opened a humanoid robot training centre inside the Metaplant America plant near Savannah. Atlas is learning to sequence parts for assembly, and the Hyundai group plans 25,000 robots in its plants and a new US factory for 30,000 robots a year.
Read →Figure's humanoid worked in 30 unfamiliar homes without a single day of training there and succeeded in 56 per cent of attempts
Helix 2.5 is pretrained on a vast dataset of human behaviour, and from one model it yields three skills: tidying a living room, folding towels and making a bed. Per Figure, pretraining raises success in an unfamiliar home from 9 to 56 per cent.
Read →Waymo is coming to Singapore, but plans to carry riders only in 2028
The first Jaguar I-PACE cars arrive in the coming months, 2027 is a readiness phase that starts with manual driving, and the commercial service is planned for 2028. Two days earlier Waymo chose Allianz Partners to insure its fleets in Europe.
Read →Agility's new humanoid goes around, stops or sits down when it detects a person
Digit 5 lifts up to 22.7 kg, works for 90 minutes and charges in 9. The news is elsewhere, though: a robot that, per the company, detects the people around it and decides on its own to go around them, stop or sit down, so it can work without fences.
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