No Humanoid News Here: A Note on What We Publish and Why

Sometimes the sources don't pan out. Here's what happened when I tried to write a humanoids story this week and ended up with Samsung deals instead.

Sarah Williams · 25 Jun · 3 min

Can AI-Generated Robot Movements Actually Work in the Real World? Two New Papers Suggest a Path Forward

Diffusion models are getting good at imagining robot movements, but 'imaginable' and 'physically possible' aren't the same thing. Researchers are starting to close that gap.

Sarah Williams · 25 Jun · 6 min

Three New Papers Want to Fix How Robots Understand Space. Here's Why That Actually Matters.

A batch of fresh robotics research tackles the same underlying problem from different angles: robots that can see but don't really understand where things are.

Sarah Williams · 25 Jun · 7 min

The new Section 232 tariff rules for steel and aluminum aren't just a manufacturing story. For anyone building metal-bodied robots at scale, the supply chain math just got harder.

Sarah Williams · 24 Jun · 5 min

A new technique from arXiv mirrors robot demonstrations to double usable training data without collecting a single extra example, and it's simpler than it sounds.

Sarah Williams · 20 Jun · 6 min

A pair of arXiv papers tackle one of robotics' oldest headaches: getting robots to build accurate maps of the world, even when the lighting is terrible or the geometry is tricky.

Sarah Williams · 20 Jun · 8 min

A pair of freshly released robotics datasets tackle opposite ends of the same problem: teaching humanoids what to do, and teaching them what not to do.

Sarah Williams · 19 Jun · 5 min

Three new robotics papers suggest we're past the proof-of-concept phase for humanoid loco-manipulation, and the numbers are starting to back that up.

Mark Kowalski · 19 Jun · 7 min

A cluster of new research is tackling one of robotics' most stubborn problems: getting robots to actually use touch. The sim-to-real gap is the villain of the story.

Sarah Williams · 19 Jun · 7 min

A pair of robotics papers tackle two of the most practical blockers standing between vision-language-action models and real-world deployment: overconfidence and computational bloat.

Sarah Williams · 18 Jun · 7 min

Two new papers tackle the problem of getting humanoid robots to gesture naturally during speech. It's a genuinely hard problem, and the solutions are more clever than the demos let on.

Mark Kowalski · 18 Jun · 6 min

New research tackles one of the messiest problems in multi-robot collaboration: how do you train robots to coordinate when getting synchronized human demos is basically a logistical nightmare?

Sarah Williams · 18 Jun · 6 min

A French startup backed by Eric Schmidt just unveiled a headless, legless humanoid. Bob Macintosh thinks they might be onto something.

Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 17 Jun · 4 min

A pair of fresh research efforts tackle one of the most stubborn problems in humanoid locomotion: what happens when the real world shoves back.

Mark Kowalski · 17 Jun · 7 min

Two new papers take on one of embodied AI's most frustrating practical problems: what happens when a robot's sensors go dark mid-task.

Sarah Williams · 16 Jun · 4 min

One team tackled the memory and latency problem for robots finding objects in real spaces. Another rethought how robots translate intent into motion. Both point at the same underlying tension.

Sarah Williams · 16 Jun · 6 min

Motion planning is one of those problems that sounds solved until you watch a robot arm get stuck. Two new research papers are taking very different approaches to unsticking it.

Sarah Williams · 16 Jun · 5 min

Two new papers tackle the energy problem in humanoid robots from opposite ends, and together they point at something the field has been quietly ignoring.

Sarah Williams · 15 Jun · 6 min

Fall recovery sounds boring until your $200,000 humanoid faceplants in a warehouse. Two new research frameworks suggest we're finally making real progress on this unsexy but critical problem.

Mark Kowalski · 15 Jun · 7 min

Researchers are taking two very different approaches to building dexterous robot hands, and both are pointing at the same uncomfortable truth: we've been underselling how clever the human hand actually is.

Sarah Williams · 12 Jun · 7 min

A pair of new research papers tackle one of robotics' oldest unsolved problems: giving robots a decent sense of touch. The approaches couldn't be more different.

Sarah Williams · 12 Jun · 4 min

College graduates are loudly booing AI hype at commencement speeches. Microsoft's Brad Smith wrote 3,100 words about it. That gap tells you something.

Sarah Williams · 12 Jun · 5 min

Four new papers on visual robot navigation dropped this week, and together they're pointing at something important: the hardest problem isn't seeing the world, it's knowing what body you're in.

Sarah Williams · 12 Jun · 6 min