The other day, I sat down with Adar Hay, the CEO of Jiga, to talk about supply chains and moving projects from prototyping to production. The outcome of this chat is this article, which also restarts our push for original robotics content. We have one more article lined up, and I'm excited to see where this journey takes us!
Studying Human Attitudes Towards Robots Through Experience
The team at the Robotics and AI Institute set up an experiment where they let the general public control a Spot quadruped. Even though the controller was quite simple, it’s quite interesting to see that even little kids could control it thanks to the platform design.
GEN-1: Scaling Embodied Foundation Models to Mastery
The Generalists AI team showcased this piece, claiming their new model GEN-1 can achieve 99% success rate on some simple tasks. I really wonder how these numbers would hold up in a real-world deployment, which brings us to the next feature…
PhAIL – Is physical AI ready for real work?
PhAIL by Positronic is a leaderboard that showcases the performance of open VLA models on predefined tasks. The leaderboard should give you a good idea of what to expect from these models in terms of success rate and speed. I would love to see some commercial models there too and I’m hopping Positronic can make it happen!
A Dot a Day Keeps the Clutter Away
If you have a workshop, you might love this little hack to declutter (it can very well apply to other ways of life). All you need is some dot stickers and a workflow to put them up on some boxes.
(RoboVac) Building a home robot to autonomously clean our house
Indraneel R. Patil made an interesting robot vacuum project. The idea was that the project cost should not exceed $500. The end result is the first robot vacuum I’ve seen with Ackerman steering. The approach of using a CNN with behavior cloning seems to have some way to go before it’s 100% ready, but it still looks like a lot of fun!
The Software-First Robotics Founder
I liked this article by Diego Prats, who discusses a new wave of founders in our industry with backgrounds in software might have a different way of thinking and start asking questions. This is an opportunity to build new sets of tools and welcome new ways of thinking to hardware-based projects.
UnifoLM_WBT_Dataset
Unitree Robotics released a dataset of Unitree G1 performing some simple home tasks; from putting clothes in a washing machine to picking up pillows.
Shield AI raises $2B for defense drone development, to acquire Aechelon
Shield AI last week said it is raising $1.5 billion in Series G funding at a $12.7 billion post-money valuation and $500 million in fixed-return preferred equity financing. The autonomy systems and defense drone provider plans to use a portion of the proceeds to acquire Aechelon Technology Inc., a simulation software company.
Our Sponsors
- Anyscale gives you a platform to run and scale all your ML and AI workloads, from data processing to training and inference.
- Foxglove is a purpose-built, modular platform for robotics teams to collect, organize, and learn from vast quantities of multimodal data, creating the data flywheel to safely scale from development to distributed fleets
- HelloRobo distils robotics tech into simple, usable interfaces
- Jiga connects hardware teams directly with vetted manufacturers for reliable capacity from prototype to production, combining the speed of digital manufacturing with the trust of a long-term supplier relationship
Events
- Robotics & Physical AI day (Mashup): Apr 15 - Apr 15, 2026. Malmö, Sweden
- Open Hardware Summit: May 22 - May 23, 2026. Berlin, Germany
- ICRA 2026: Jun 01 - Jun 05, 2026. Vienna, Austria
- 2026 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: Jun 22 - Jun 24, 2026. Houston, Texas, United States of America
- Robotics: Science and Systems: Jul 13 - Jul 16, 2026. Sydney, Australia
- Actuate 26: Aug 18 - Aug 19, 2026. San Francisco, California, United States of America
- Open Source Summit: Oct 07 - Oct 09, 2026. Prague, Czechia
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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