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Robot Archive

Archives for March 2024

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Humanoid robot providers are eyeing up manufacturing jobs.

According to this Financial Times report, AI and robotics providers have some lofty expectations regarding how popular their technology will be in manufacturing environments.

One company claims that 14 percent of manufacturing and automotive jobs will be automated in the next four years, and Goldman Sachs projects that the humanoid robot market could reach $38 billion by 2035 — at least if robots like Tesla’s Optimus can become as capable as their makers are claiming they will be.

A graph showing the forecast global humanoid robot market size in billions.
This graph from Goldman Sachs includes anticipated demand for humanoid robot specifications that simply don’t exist yet.
Image: Goldman Sachs Research
Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for ‘low skill, repetitive’ tasksMercedes is trialing humanoid robots for ‘low skill, repetitive’ tasks
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
No, this isn’t CG.

This is Figure’s humanoid robot, which can now use OpenAI’s large vision language model (VLM) to provide reasoning and language understanding. The video shows how the bot can identify and interact with the objects on the counter in front of it when given a prompt, like “Can I have something to eat?”

Emilia David
Emilia David
Covariant launches the first version of its ‘robot brain’ AI that learns by watching and listening.

The New York Times writes about this startup developing AI software to help sorting robots interact with the physical world. With videos or text input (users can talk with them like a chatbot), the robot can “learn” how to function in factories without long strings of instructions.

Founded by former OpenAI researchers, Covariant’s work is the latest in a wave of robots integrating with AI foundation models.

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