China’s robot traffic police can do almost everything except stop you
China’s robot traffic police can do almost everything except stop you

China’s robot traffic police can direct cars, scold jaywalkers, and give a lost tourist directions to the nearest metro station. What they cannot do is stop anybody, and that limitation is written into the design rather than left to the machine’s discr…

Unitree’s founder says robots are nearing a ‘ChatGPT moment’
Unitree’s founder says robots are nearing a ‘ChatGPT moment’

Wang Xingxing spent Thursday morning at the World Robot Conference in Beijing telling the room that humanoid robots are approaching their “ChatGPT moment”. He spent another part of the same appearance explaining why that moment might still be a decade …

Waymo pioneer Sebastian Thrun is building a stealth robotics startup
Waymo pioneer Sebastian Thrun is building a stealth robotics startup

Sebastian Thrun, one of the pioneers of self-driving cars, is building a new robotics startup called Dulo. The company is still in stealth, and Thrun revealed little about it, Business Insider reported. Rya Jetha wrote that he named the venture at the …

IEEE Presidents’ Scholarship Honors Teen Innovators
IEEE Presidents’ Scholarship Honors Teen Innovators

About 16 percent of the global population—more than 1 billion people—live with some form of disability, according to the World Health Organization. Many of the disabilities affect independence and mobility.Three high school students working on inventi…

Unitree, China’s humanoid robot champion, lists in Shanghai on 19 August after record demand
Unitree, China’s humanoid robot champion, lists in Shanghai on 19 August after record demand

Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou company that has done more than anyone else to turn Chinese humanoid robots into a spectator sport, is due to begin trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on 19 August, according to Reuters. The listing makes it the first gene…

Serve Robotics partners with Grubhub, becoming the shared robot layer for US food delivery
Serve Robotics partners with Grubhub, becoming the shared robot layer for US food delivery

Serve Robotics, the sidewalk-delivery company that spun out of Uber, has added Grubhub to its roster of partners, a move that quietly turns it into something close to the neutral plumbing of America’s food-delivery robot business. Through a deal with W…

LG’s humanoid robot arrives in 2027, running Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T
LG’s humanoid robot arrives in 2027, running Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T

LG will unveil a bipedal humanoid robot in the first quarter of 2027, built on Nvidia’s Jetson Thor processor, Isaac GR00T foundation model and Halos safety system. The two signed the agreement at Nvidia’s Santa Clara headquarters on 13 August. LG will…

Who really needs a cocktail robot?

Bartesian’s cocktail makers would be best described like a Keurig or Nespresso machine, but for alcoholic drinks.

The man who built Qwen has a new lab, and the Shanghai government is an investor
The man who built Qwen has a new lab, and the Shanghai government is an investor

The researcher who led Alibaba’s Qwen models has started his own company. Junyang Lin announced Pragmatik Labs on X on Tuesday evening, five months after walking out of Alibaba. The lab is based in Shanghai and works on what Lin calls next-generation a…

DeepSeek made AI cheap. Now it is raising $8bn and buying robots
DeepSeek made AI cheap. Now it is raising $8bn and buying robots

DeepSeek spent early 2025 proving that a good AI model did not have to cost a fortune. This week it has been busy proving it can spend one. In a handful of days, the Chinese lab reopened a multi-billion-dollar fundraising. It took a stake in the countr…