The latest in robotics, explained clearly — for builders and the curious.
Vela, from a Fudan/CUHK team, predicts spline curves with an adaptive horizon instead of action chunks. Its biggest margins over π0.5 came on real egg-cake and potato-shredding tasks, not on benchmarks.
The Japanese giants will validate Physical AI inside Hitachi factories — picking, shape-varying parts, changeovers — then sell jointly from fiscal 2027, as industrial vendors race to productize the buzzword.
Atlas's new hand has 13 degrees of freedom, no pinkie and direct-drive joints designed for sim-to-real training, as Hyundai starts training Atlas in Georgia and Rohit Prasad becomes CEO.
The 735 g ADH-5-13 has 13 active degrees of freedom, fingertip tactile sensing, ±0.2 mm repeatability and modules that can be replaced without taking the hand apart.
Sharpa launched D01, a dexterous robot with body-wide electronic skin, W02, a hand about 30% smaller than its predecessor with 21 active degrees of freedom, and AE01, a 22-encoder haptic glove for teleoperation data.
Waymo is gradually routing some Austin Uber trips onto freeways after testing fully driverless freeway operation there since February 2026. It already offers freeway rides in four other cities.
After launching S1 — a robotics foundation model that copies a single video demo without fine-tuning — Skild showed Physical Self-Play: the same base policy trained against itself in Isaac Sim, then transferred to a humanoid.
Figure says its humanoid tidied rooms, folded towels and made beds in 30 unseen Bay Area homes with zero local data, backed by a $3.5B compute deal with Nscale.
PSYONIC and Universal Robots integrated the six-motor, 30-sensor Ability Hand with UR's new g-Series arms and PolyScope X, programmable from the teach pendant.
The Austin humanoid firm expanded its ~90,000 sq ft training hub and wheeled/bipedal Apollo 2 platforms with Google DeepMind, Mercedes-Benz and GXO sites feeding the commercial Apollo 3.