Robotics

Ashish Kumar, the lead for Tesla's Optimus AI team, has announced his departure. The move marks another significant change for the high-stakes humanoid robot program, which saw its VP of Engineering leave just three months ago.

Humanoid robotics firm Figure has launched a massive data collection initiative, 'Project Go-Big,' aiming to create an 'internet-scale' pretraining dataset by capturing human video in real-world homes. The project, accelerated by a partnership with real estate giant Brookfield, has already enabled Figure's robot to learn navigation from human video alone.

UK-based robotics company Humanoid has unveiled its first robot, the HMND 01 Alpha, claiming a record-breaking development time of just seven months. An accompanying documentary provides a transparent look at the intense, and sometimes chaotic, process behind the industrial machine.

Google DeepMind has launched Gemini Robotics On-Device, an efficient vision-language-action model designed to run locally on robotic hardware. This development aims to reduce latency, improve robustness in varied environments, and enable advanced dexterous manipulation for a new generation of autonomous robots capable of fast task adaptation.

Apptronik, known for its Apollo humanoid, has announced Elevate Robotics, a new subsidiary dedicated to developing and commercializing industrial automation solutions that operate beyond human form factors and capabilities, aiming to redefine heavy-duty work.