Robot

Disney is showcasing some of the incredible technology and design developments that go into its theme parks in its “We Call It Imagineering” YouTube series.

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

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?”

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.

The robots are expected to hit the sidewalks of Tokyo starting at the end of March, marking Uber’s first international expansion of its autonomous delivery service. The six-wheeled delivery robots are manufactured by Cartken, an Oakland-based AI company, and operations will be supervised by Mitsubishi Electric. Delivery robots are growing more popular, but they still require a team of human workers to make the system work.

By which I mean it’s literally learning to pick up objects and slide them onto shelves, like the 30-pound car struts seen in the video below.

The Ingenuity helicopter mission achieved powered flight on another world, brought Zigbee and Linux to Mars, and survived close calls, lasting 33 times longer than originally planned.

The Tesla CEO and X CTO / owner writes that “I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” and proposed building products (like Grok?) outside of Tesla instead.

Its new AI Agent may have Rosey the Robot aspirations — but do you need a robot with “personality” to control smart home devices and clean up after your cat?

The company revealed the bot ahead of its appearance at CES 2024, which it’s touting as an “all-around home manager and companion.”

The latest Tesla Bot is a little bit lighter, walks faster, and balances better with improvements throughout, including in the function of its neck, feet, and hands. But is it the “friend” Elon Musk says will cost “much less than $20,000” and allow for “a future where there is no poverty?” Probably not.

A couple weeks ago, I flew out to Hollywood to check out Serve Robotics, a company that’s using a fleet of shopping cart-sized robots to make Uber Eats deliveries. We spoke to the people who are working behind-the-scenes to make robot delivery happen, including supervisors, field agents, and even the CEO. We even interviewed the guy behind the viral TikTok account where he just yells at the robots.

EU regulators have set a February 14th deadline to decide on the $1.7 billion deal first announced over a year ago. The previous deadline was December 13th. Amazon wants to acquire the robotic vacuum company that can map the inside of your home to help make ambient intelligence a reality. So far, the EU doesn’t seem to love the idea.

At about noon local time, Oregon State University warned the campus of a bomb threat targeting Starship autonomous food delivery robots. About an hour later, officials gave the all-clear.

Here’s how Amazon described its test of Agility Robotics’ bi-pedal Digit robot in a press release yesterday:

Disney recently showed off bipedal droids that look exactly like something you’d see in a Star Wars movie, and now Disney’s Imagineers are testing the droids at Disneyland, as reported by Disneyland News Today. I love them!!

Anybody have some money they can lend me for this? I’ll pay you back after I save the galaxy over the course of 49 episodes.

A new video shows off the company’s Optimus robot running through some calibration cycles for its limbs before successfully putting matching colored blocks with their corresponding trays. It’s a menial task that the Tesla Bot has done before, but this time a human tries to confuse it. The bot then relieves stress with some yoga poses. You know, bot stuff.