<p>As robotics has advanced, industry has steadily adopted more robots to automate many kinds of grunt work. More than 540,000 new industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2023, taking the number of total industrial robots active to above 4 million, per IFR. Industrial robots typically excel at repetitive tasks, but they find it challenging to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A few years ago, Chef Robotics was hurting. But founder<br /> Rajat Bhageria turned it around by doing something that early-stage founders fear to do.</p>

<p>Samsung said on Wednesday that it&#8217;s adding Google&#8217;s Gemini AI to its home robot Ballie through a partnership with Google Cloud. Users will be able to ask the robot different queries to get answers from Gemini, said the companies. Samsung aims to tap into Gemini’s multimodal capabilities for its robot. The Korean tech giant said [&hellip;]</p>

<p>When there are damages to energy infrastructure, such as electricity pylons or gas pipelines, expensive helicopters are frequently used to inspect them. Drones have begun to replace some of those inspections, but the flight-time for these can be limited. Now a new company has produced a drone with a very long range to fill this [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The Bot Company, the robotics startup founded by former Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, has raised $150 million in a round led by Greenoaks, according to Reuters, citing unnamed sources. Vogt founded the startup with Paril Jain, who led the AI tech team at Tesla, and former Cruise software engineer Luke Holoubek. Vogt did [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Norwegian robotics startup 1X plans to start early tests of its humanoid robot, Neo Gamma, in &#8220;a few hundred to a few thousand&#8221; homes by the end of 2025, according to the company&#8217;s CEO, Bernt Børnich. &#8220;Neo Gamma is going into homes this year,&#8221; Børnich told TechCrunch in an interview at Nvidia GTC 2025. &#8220;We [&hellip;]</p>

<p>As generative AI moves increasingly into the physical world through robotics, vehicles, and drones, the need to map cloud-based AIs to real-world environments can lead to a huge mismatch. Rerun, a Stockholm-based dev tools startup, which builds a data stack for this emergent kind of &#8220;physical AI,&#8221; has secured $17 million in seed funding to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Robots are part of an exciting new frontier in tech, but here&#8217;s the challenge: Robots rely on arrays of sensors, external signals like GPS and Wi-Fi, and customized software to navigate their environments. Further, robotics often involves expensive, ready-made hardware solutions that include built-in software and sensors designed for specific tasks, like estimating relative motion. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Nvidia is collaborating with Disney Research and Google DeepMind to develop Newton, a physics engine to simulate robotic movements in real-world settings, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at GTC 2025 on Tuesday. Disney will be among the first to use Newton to power its next-generation entertainment robots, like the Star Wars-inspired BDX droids — one [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang&#8217;s keynote Tuesday at the company&#8217;s GTC 2025 conference stuck with tradition and was chock-full of announcements. But the company also snuck in a little history lesson. During the automotive portion of his speech, Huang referred to AlexNet, a neural network architecture that gained widespread attention in 2012 when it won a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>General Motors is turning to Nvidia to help bring AI to the physical world in an expanded collaboration designed to touch every aspect of the automaker’s business, including factories, robots, and self-driving cars.&nbsp; Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who announced the partnership Tuesday during his keynote at the company’s GTC conference in San Jose, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Nvidia is releasing what it&#8217;s calling an AI foundation model for humanoid robotics. Announced at GTC 2025 in San Jose, the model, dubbed Groot N1, is a &#8220;generalist&#8221; model, trained on both synthetic and real data. In a video introducing Groot N1, Nvidia says it features a &#8220;dual-system architecture&#8221; for &#8220;thinking fast and slow,&#8221; inspired [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Waymo now has more than 300 driverless vehicles zipping passengers around San Francisco, but while they follow traffic laws, parking is another matter entirely. According to city records cited by The Washington Post, these rolling robots racked up 589 citations totaling $65,065 in fines last year for parking violations that ranged from blocking traffic to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, made it clear on Wednesday that he believes the company’s decision to abandon its autonomous driving program was a mistake. Said Kalanick at the Abundance Summit in L.A., &#8220;Look, [new management] killed the autonomous car project we had going on. At the time, we were really only behind [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google DeepMind, Google&#8217;s AI research lab, on Wednesday announced new AI models called Gemini Robotics designed to enable real-world machines to interact with objects, navigate environments, and more. DeepMind published a series of demo videos showing robots equipped with Gemini Robotics folding paper, putting a pair of glasses into a case, and other tasks in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The intersection of robotics and AI continues to attract attention from investors and Big Tech alike. The latest indicator? Dexterity, a startup specializing in industrial robots with &#8220;human-like&#8221; finesse, has raised $95 million at a post-money valuation of $1.65 billion, per Bloomberg. The investment, which includes backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sumitomo Corp., highlights [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Faced with an aging population and labor shortages, Japanese businesses are increasingly relying on service robots to supplement their workforce, according to Bloomberg. Research firm Fuji Keizai projects the country’s service robot market to nearly triple by 2030, to ¥400 billion ($2.7 billion). Potentially driving that growth: The Recruit Works Institute projects that the country [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Uber executive Sachin Kansal has a reputation for dogfooding — the tactic of using one&#8217;s own products and services to root out problems and make improvements. As he ascended Uber&#8217;s executive ladder over the past eight years, Kansal ratcheted up 700 trips delivering food or people to their destinations. Lengthy reports, often dozens of pages [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Researchers have developed small robots that can work together as a collective that changes shape and even shifts between solid and “fluid-like” states — a concept that should be familiar to anyone still haunted by nightmares of the T-1000 robotic assassin from “Terminator 2.” A team led by Matthew Devlin of UC Santa Barbara described [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Figure is planning to bring its humanoids into the home sooner than expected. CEO Brett Adcock confirmed on Thursday that the Bay Area robotics startup will begin &#8220;alpha testing&#8221; its Figure 02 robot in the home setting later in 2025. The executive says the accelerated timeline is a product of the company&#8217;s “generalist” Vision-Language-Action (VLA) [&hellip;]</p>