The Technology Partener
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. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who announced the partnership Tuesday during his keynote at the company’s GTC conference in San Jose,…
Google DeepMind is launching two new AI models designed to help robots “perform a wider range of real-world tasks than ever before.” The first, called Gemini Robotics, is a vision-language-action model capable of understanding new situations, even if it hasn’t been trained on them. Gemini Robotics is built on Gemini 2.0, the latest version of…
Ahead of Tuesday’s earnings, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the carmaker will begin selling its Optimus humanoid robot in 2026. In fact, Optimus has already started performing tasks autonomously, like handling batteries, in one of Tesla’s facilities, according to its earnings report. “Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla…
Engineers in Japan are trying to get robots to imitate that particularly human expression — the smile. They have created a face mask from human skin cells and attached it to robots with a novel technique that conceals the binding and is flexible enough to turn down into a grimace or up into a squishy…
Most coverage of humanoid robotics has understandably focused on hardware design. Given the frequency with which their developers toss around the phrase “general purpose humanoids,” more attention ought to be paid to the first bit. After decades of single-purpose systems, the jump to more generalized systems will be a big one. We’re just not there…
Humanoid robots are one of those dreams that sometimes feel like we’re on the precipice of realizing. Boston Dynamics has its Atlas robot, and Tesla is pursuing robotics, while companies like Mercedes, Amazon, and BMW are or will be testing robots for industrial use. But those are all very expensive robots performing tasks in controlled…
Let’s say you want to train a robot so it understands how to use tools and can then quickly learn to make repairs around your house with a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver. To do that, you would need an enormous amount of data demonstrating tool use. Existing robotic datasets vary widely in modality — some…
