From the archive
AI robotics combines perception, planning and learning with machines that act in the physical world. Follow developments in humanoid robots, autonomous systems, robotic manipulation and embodied intelligence. Our reports examine what was demonstrated, the conditions it worked under and the gap between a controlled trial and reliable deployment, with sources you can check and space to discuss the results.
Lead story
MIT researchers have developed an AI system that matches live surgical X-rays with a patient’s preoperative 3D scan, reaching sub-millimetre precision in tests. The practical point is not a shinier scan. It is a quicker way to show clinicians where a tool is inside the body during minimally…
Read the report & discussion ↗Intel AI Watch
AAEON has announced the MIX-PTLWV1, a Mini-ITX motherboard built around Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors and aimed at edge-AI work such as machine vision, robotic automation and industrial inspection. The important bit is not another processor family name in a press release. It is the attempt to…
Meta AI Watch
Meta is opening Muse connectors to developers, according to Alexandr Wang, the company's chief AI officer. The pitch is simple: plug your API into the agent, and people can use your service just by asking for it. The consumer assistant Meta launched earlier this month has just grown…
Hugging Face Watch
Write code, run it, read the feedback, revise. A community article published on Hugging Face today argues that the loop which made coding agents useful is now being pointed at robots, world models and editing tools, with code serving as the interface between a model and the physical…
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI is hiring robot-builders at up to $500,000 a year in base salary, and the shape of the roles says this is a hardware company in the making. The robotics team's open jobs have grown from 11 in May to 27 today, covering everything from the motors that…
Arm Watch
Arm has pulled more than 80 companies into a programme called Arm Total Design for Physical AI, and alongside it has published the first sketch of a Robotics Capability Framework: six levels that grade what a robot can do, from machines that follow fixed rules to systems that…
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA has published a workflow that hands one of robotics' most tedious jobs to a stack of AI agents: a coordinator such as Codex or Claude manages the task, specialised subagents do the scene surgery, and a validation gate decides when a Blender scene is fit for a…
xAI Watch
xAI's speech-to-speech model has become a shelf product. Grok Voice is now live on fal.ai, the fast-inference platform, with real-time streaming, audio cloning and support for more than 25 languages. The number that should make voice-stack vendors sit up is the price: $0.00083 per second of audio, which…
Hugging Face Watch
Getting LeRobot running on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin is less a pip install than a small expedition through Python versions, CUDA libraries and C++ ABI compatibility. A new Hugging Face Community Article lays out the author's route to a working container, including the traps that turned a supposedly…
NVIDIA Watch
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is using open-source medical-imaging AI to turn children’s cardiac scans into patient-specific 3D models in seconds. The practical leap is speed: NVIDIA says work that once occupied a skilled researcher for four hours can now fit into routine clinical care.
Watch Desk
Atoms, the robotics company founded by former Uber chief Travis Kalanick, has hired former Meta AI executive Vikas Chandra as its vice president of AI. Chandra says he will build “foundation models for the physical world”, designed to help machines understand and act in real-world environments. That matters…
Berkeley BAIR Watch
Robotics may be approaching its ChatGPT moment, says UC Berkeley scholar Ken Goldberg, but the route to useful machines runs through control theory and scarce physical data as much as flashy AI models. His argument matters because robots have to act in a messy, high-dimensional world, not merely…
Watch Desk
Argonne National Laboratory is turning AI from a research assistant into part of the laboratory team. Its three new Genesis Mission projects aim to let AI plan experiments, send work to machines, interpret results and choose what happens next across biology and materials science.
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA is open-sourcing OSMO, a Kubernetes-native workflow orchestrator designed to run physical-AI work across data-centre GPUs, workstation hardware and robots. The useful idea is simple: describe the whole journey in one YAML workflow, then let OSMO route each task to the platform that can handle it.
Watch Desk
Generative AI is often good at finding possibilities, but safety-critical systems need an answer that obeys the rules at the end. MIT researchers have developed HardFlow, a deployment-time method that lets a model explore more freely during generation, then enforces hard constraints on its final output. The work…
Berkeley BAIR Watch
A new AI framework from researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford helps a Unitree G1 humanoid robot learn movements from people, then combine those skills into sequences it was not separately trained to perform. The significance is less the acrobatic flourish than the attempt to give one robot…
Arm Watch
Arm chief executive Rene Haas says AI could help cure cancers that humans cannot solve in their lifetimes, while humanoid robots could become widespread within five years. The more immediate constraint, he argues, is less futuristic: there are not enough chips to build all the data centres AI…
