Topic
Robotics
Technology Aurora Reports Q2 Loss, Details Per-Mile Pricing for Driverless Truck Services
Aurora Innovation reported a Q2 net loss of $270 million and restated per-mile pricing for its two autonomous trucking business models. The company will move customers from transportation-as-a-service to driver-as-a-service starting in 2027, with Hirschbach Motor Lines as the anchor.
Logistics Amazon speeds last-mile delivery, expands robotics fleet past 1 million
Amazon expanded same-day and overnight delivery to more than 40% of items in H1 2026 and grew Amazon Now to over 250 cities. The company also passed 1 million deployed robots and plans to double its robotic arm fleet in 2026, according to FreightWaves.
Logistics FedEx scales up Dexterity trailer-loading robots after multiyear validation at Hagerstown hub
FedEx is scaling up Dexterity Inc.'s AI-enabled trailer-loading robot at its Hagerstown, Maryland, hub after multiyear validation, according to FreightWaves. Pickle Robot Company and Ambi Robotics will pair unloading and palletizing systems, while FedEx continues a Berkshire Grey Scoop pilot. The moves aim to improve worker safety and network efficiency in physically demanding trailer operations.
FCC Bans Foreign-Made Robot Vacuums Over National Security Risks
The US Federal Communications Commission has banned the import of foreign-made advanced mobile robots, including robot vacuums, effective immediately. The ban, rooted in national security concerns over networked sensors and cameras, will prevent new models from receiving FCC approval if manufactured outside the United States. Current devices remain unaffected.
Technology For the First Time, Zoox Can Charge People for Rides in Its Steering-Wheel-Free Robotaxis
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) granted Amazon subsidiary Zoox a two-year exemption to deploy up to 5,000 steering-wheel-free robotaxis and charge for rides. Zoox will begin paid operations in Las Vegas, having already transported over 500,000 riders free of charge. The approval marks a milestone for autonomous vehicles built without traditional controls, subject to heightened oversight and safety reporting.
Technology Google DeepMind's Gemini AI Now Controls Humanoid Robots for Dextrous Tasks
Google DeepMind has released Gemini Robotics 2, an AI model that can control humanoid robots to perform complex physical tasks. The system combines vision language and action models, and has been demonstrated using Apptronik's Apollo 2 robot. Safety remains a key concern, with Google introducing a new benchmark called ASIMOV-Agentic.
Technology Private Chef Films Three-Course Meal to Train Robots for Household Cooking
Shift, a division of German startup Microagi, sent a private chef to cook a free three-course meal in the author's apartment while recording every hand movement with a hat cam. The egocentric video data is intended to train future humanoid robots in culinary skills. CEO Bercan Kilic sees this as part of a broader marketplace for AI training data and a step toward an age of abundance.
Technology SUIND raises ₹20.5 crore in seed funding to scale unmanned aerial systems for agriculture and beyond
SUIND, a developer of near-earth autonomous unmanned aerial systems (UAS), has raised ₹20.5 crore in a seed funding round led by Transition VC with participation from IIMA Ventures. The company will use the capital to scale commercial deployment of its Bumblebee spraying UAS and accelerate development of the Wasp aerial intelligence platform, focusing on vision-based autonomy for GPS-denied environments.
Technology Geek+ robots from China automate UK retail warehouses for Tesco, Asda and Next
Geek+, the world's largest supplier of autonomous mobile robots, has deployed over 2,000 units across 10 UK warehouse sites via partner MotionTech. Retail giants Tesco, Asda and Next are using the Chinese-built robots to increase picking speeds, improve storage density and reduce errors. The technology addresses persistent UK productivity challenges and labour shortages, though unions urge caution on job impacts.
Technology Aurora Races Toward Scale with New Driverless Hardware, Removing Last Observer
Aurora Innovation launched its second-generation autonomous truck hardware, designed for a 1-million-mile life and volume production. The new fleet operates without any human observer, deployed across 10 Sun Belt routes. Manufacturing partner Roush targets 1,000 trucks per year by year-end, and one customer plans to purchase 500 Aurora-powered trucks.
Technology Jibo's Successor: A Wearable AI Device That Turns Your Life Into Slop
Lingverse (formerly Ling AI) announced the iKairos, a wearable AI device that can be worn as a pendant or mounted at home. It aims to capture everyday moments and turn them into AI-generated images, continuing the legacy of the defunct Jibo robot. The company raised $29 million and plans to sell the device for $199-$249 with a subscription. Details on capabilities remain scant.
Nvidia Positions Vera Rubin CPU-GPU System as All-in-One AI Data Center Solution
Nvidia is expanding beyond GPUs with its Vera Rubin system, offering a combined CPU and GPU platform for AI data centers. The company claims a tenfold increase in tokens per watt and a "cable-free" design that reduces installation time from hours to minutes. OpenAI has deployed one Vera Rubin rack.
Smart Home Gadgets That Boost Curb Appeal Without Sacrificing Style
WIRED's Nena Farrell reviews outdoor smart home gadgets that blend functionality with design. Products include the discreet Level Lock Pro, sleek Nest Doorbell, Birdfy Nest Duo birdhouse with solar cameras, and Govee smart string lights.
Technology Humanoid Robot Startup Backed by Eric Trump Prepares Bots for Military Combat
Foundation Future Industries, a startup backed by Eric Trump, is developing humanoid robots for military combat, logistics, and reconnaissance. The company has government contracts worth millions and has tested its Phantom MK1 robot with Ukrainian forces. Experts remain skeptical about the feasibility of fully autonomous robot soldiers.
Technology Hyundai Robot MobED Passes World-First Autonomous Driving Test aboard Working Ship
Hyundai Motor and Kia's mobile robot platform MobED has completed the world's first onboard autonomous driving demonstration aboard a working vessel. The trial, conducted by Korean Register, HMM, and others, verified the robot's ability to navigate ship cargo areas without modifications, paving the way for safer inspections and material transport.
Technology Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow: The Prime Day Robot Vacuum to Buy for Smart Homes
The Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow is the recommended robot vacuum for Prime Day, beating the more expensive Saros 20 in real-world tests. It offers 20,000 Pa suction, a self-cleaning spinning mop, and superior obstacle avoidance at a lower price.
Technology AI Isn't Smarter Than a Baby—Yet: New Test Reveals Limits of Vision Language Models
Researchers at Meta, Stanford, and other institutions developed EgoBabyVLM, a test comparing vision language models to infant learning. Current VLMs fail when fed realistic baby-camera footage, highlighting the efficiency gap between human and AI learning. The findings suggest that building baby-like AI could reduce costs and improve robot learning.
Technology Waabi's autonomous software switches from Peterbilt to Volvo with zero retraining
Waabi announced that its Waabi Driver software, trained exclusively on a Peterbilt 579, successfully controlled a Volvo VNL Autonomous truck on highways and surface streets from the very first mile without any retraining or engineering changes. The test demonstrates a form of cross-platform generalization that has historically required over a year of work, potentially accelerating the commercial scaling of autonomous trucking.
Technology project44 CEO: AI Agents Without Context Are Just Guessing Faster
project44 CEO Jett McCandless argues that AI agents require rich contextual data to be effective. The company's Agentic Workflow Manager layers first- and third-party agents on top of shipment-level data to automate tasks like LTL dispatch reconciliation, processing 75,000 dispatches daily and matching over 2,000 that would otherwise require manual intervention.
Technology Tesla Says It’s Building a Wheelchair-Accessible Robotaxi
Tesla revealed plans for a wheelchair-accessible robotaxi during a DC City Council hearing. The company is developing the vehicle in Texas but provided no timeline. Currently no US robotaxi company offers fully accessible driverless rides.
Technology Uber's Autonomous Vehicle Strategy: Lobbying to Slow Robotaxi Adoption to Protect Its Business Model
Uber is lobbying for 'hybrid network' laws that would require human drivers to serve 85% of rides for three years in autonomous vehicle deployments. The strategy, outlined by CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, aims to make Uber the go-to platform for all robotaxi operators. Proposed legislation in New Jersey and Washington DC could force autonomous vehicle developers like Waymo and Tesla to partner with existing ride-hail apps.
Technology WIRED Tests Best Pet Cameras: AI, 360° Views, and Treat Dispensing for Remote Pet Monitoring
WIRED tested multiple pet cameras, including the Furbo Mini 360° and Petcube Cam 360, evaluating features like AI tracking, 360-degree pan-tilt, treat dispensing, and cloud storage. The article compares resolution, angle view, storage options, and audio capabilities across models.
Technology Beatbot AquaSense X Robot Cleans Pool and Then Cleans Itself, Ending Dirty Filter Burden
The Beatbot AquaSense X pool-cleaning robot, paired with the AstroRinse self-cleaning station, eliminates the chore of manually cleaning the robot's filter. The system uses a separate station that also charges the robot. Setup involves multiple steps and hose connections.
Technology Texas autonomous freight route a 'future-focused, risk management solution' for driver headcount
AVI-SPL began commercial autonomous freight operations on the Dallas-Houston corridor in June 2026, using Volvo's self-driving VNL Autonomous semi truck and Aurora's transportation management system. The initiative is framed as a forward-looking risk management strategy to combat driver shortages and improve sustainability through two-way cargo flows.
Technology At UN AI Summit, Robot Dogs and Teslas Share Space with Hard Questions on Compute Access
The UN's AI for Good Summit, organized by the ITU, brought together tech demos and panel discussions on harnessing AI for humanity. While officials touted AI's potential to solve global problems, humanitarian advocates and engineers warned of overreliance on big tech and vague goals, highlighting the widening compute divide as a development infrastructure crisis.
Technology 1X Neo Robot's Freaky Fast Fingers Bring Human-Level Dexterity to Home and Office
1X, a Norwegian-American robotics company, revealed its Neo robot's five-finger hands capable of 25 degrees of freedom, gripping odd shapes, and detecting slippage. The robot is partly teleoperated via Expert Mode, with early access pricing of $20,000 or $500 per month. The hands are IP68 waterproof, enabling the robot to wash itself.
Messi, Ronaldo, and Mo Salah Take Three Different Paths to Building Tech Wealth
Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are increasingly taking equity stakes in AI, health tech, and startup companies, while Mohamed Salah has largely stuck to a more traditional mix of commercial partnerships, property, and philanthropy. The shift reflects a broader trend among elite athletes seeking long-term wealth creation beyond playing careers.
Process-Verified Reinforcement Learning for Theorem Proving via Lean: A New Path to AI Reliability
A new arXiv preprint presents process-verified reinforcement learning for theorem proving, using the Lean proof assistant as a symbolic process oracle. By parsing proof attempts into tactic sequences and leveraging Lean's type-theoretic feedback, the method delivers dense, verifier-grounded credit signals. Experiments with STP-Lean and DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5 show tactic-level supervision outperforms outcome-only baselines on MiniF2F and ProofNet benchmarks.
Automatic Dialog Augmentation Boosts DialNav Navigation Success Rate by 89-100%
Researchers from an unnamed institution have proposed an automatic generation pipeline to address the data scarcity in DialNav, a framework for evaluating dialog-execution loops in embodied navigation. The pipeline creates the RAINbow dataset with 238K episodes, and combined with dual-strategy training and a localization model, achieves state-of-the-art success rates on Val Seen (+89%) and Val Unseen (+100%%) splits.
New Training-Free Method Enables Robots to Follow Personalized Commands Like 'Bring My Cup'
Researchers propose Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP), a training-free perceptual adapter that enables vision-language-action models to follow personalized commands by using reference images as visual prompts. VAP outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines on simulation and real-world benchmarks.
Playful Agentic Robot Learning: Autonomous Skill Acquisition Through Self-Directed Play
A research paper presents Playful Agentic Robot Learning, where robots autonomously propose and practice tasks to build a skill library. The RATs system achieves significant gains on downstream tasks without fine-tuning the underlying model.
Technology Many of My Favorite Dyson Products Are On Sale for Prime Day
Dyson products, including premium vacuums and hair styling tools, are heavily discounted during Prime Day 2026. Key deals include the Dyson Gen5Detect cordless vacuum at $660 and the Spot+Scrub AI robot vacuum/mop at $850. WIRED highlights the best purchases for vacuum and beauty categories.
This Pool Cleaning Robot Reinvents the Skimmer With a Tiny Tornado
The Bublue BuVortex V5 is a novel pool skimmer that creates a tiny whirlpool to suck in debris, unlike traditional catamaran-style skimmers. The device weighs 11.5 pounds and features a central cylinder for vortex generation. In a week-long test, it handled organic and synthetic leaves.
Technology Free Waymo Rides in California? A Regulatory Quirk Delays Expansion and Keeps Prices at $0
Waymo's new Ojai robotaxis are giving free rides in California because the state's Public Utilities Commission has not yet approved the company's application to expand its service area and add the vehicles to its fleet. The delay, tied to questions about emergency response and unaccompanied minors, means passengers ride without charge while Waymo waits for regulatory sign-off.
How Automation Erodes Human Control: Lessons from the Decline of the Manual Transmission
In a WIRED book excerpt, Ian Bogost explores how automation has quietly reduced direct human-machine interaction, using the near-extinction of manual transmissions as a metaphor. Data from CarMax shows stick-shift sales dropped from over 15% in 2000 to 2.4% in 2020, as automakers like Mercedes and Volkswagen phase out manuals. Philosopher Matthew Crawford argues that maintaining 'natural bonds between action and perception' is essential for autonomy and meaning.
Technology Can China Repeat Its Electric Vehicle Success with Robotaxis?
Chinese robotaxi companies like Baidu, WeRide, and Pony.ai are testing commercial services in Beijing, building on the country's massive EV industrial ecosystem. However, extreme weather and unique driving environments abroad may limit rapid global expansion, according to industry executives.
Technology Renting makes robots affordable for work and play, from hospitals to weddings
Robotics companies are offering rental and subscription models for robots, from hospital supply shuttles to humanoid entertainers. This 'robotics-as-a-service' approach lowers upfront costs, includes maintenance, and allows users to upgrade as technology evolves.
Technology Flexion Robotics' AI Turns Humanoid Robots Into Competent Office Interns for Logistics Automation
Flexion Robotics, a Swiss startup founded by ex-Nvidia researchers, has developed an AI system that trains humanoid robots to perform multistep tasks like retrieving parcels and navigating offices autonomously. The approach uses reinforcement learning in simulation and video-based skill matching, aiming to make humanoids viable for logistics and supply chain automation.
Technology South Korea Unveils $1 Trillion Chip and AI Investment Plan to Boost Manufacturing
South Korea has unveiled a plan for about $1tn (£760bn) in investments to build out chip manufacturing and AI capabilities. The so-called Three Mega Projects aim to develop semiconductor hubs, data centres, and robotics technology, with a focus on rejuvenating economies outside Seoul. President Lee Jae-myung announced the plans alongside leaders of Samsung and SK Hynix.
Technology Prime Day Robot Mower Deals: AI, Lidar, and GPS Tech Drive Savings Up to $800
WIRED's Simon Hill reports that many of his tested robot mowers are on sale for Prime Day, offering up to $800 off. Models feature AI camera systems, Lidar, GPS, and 4G connectivity for autonomous lawn care.
Technology China’s Top AI Experts Warn of Catastrophic Risks, Urge US Cooperation
At a major AI conference in Beijing, top Chinese and US experts call for urgent collaboration to address the growing cybersecurity and systemic risks of advanced AI. They warn that without joint effort, the technology could cause chaos.
Logistics Delivery Robot Backlash Grows: Bans and Protests Threaten Last-Mile Automation Plans
Delivery robots are facing increasing opposition from residents and local authorities in multiple US and Canadian cities. Chicago resident John Robertson launched a campaign with a 4,400-signature petition, while San Francisco, Toronto, and Glendale have imposed or considered bans. The backlash threatens the growth of autonomous last-mile delivery services.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Achieves Superhuman Racing with 50% Fewer Collisions
A new study demonstrates that multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) allows quadrotors to achieve superhuman racing performance. Agents trained via league-based self-play outperformed champion humans at over 22 m/s and cut collision rates by 50% versus single-agent baselines, suggesting a new path for safe autonomous systems in shared spaces.
New Framework Verifies Safety of Multi-Agent AI Communication for Autonomous Logistics
A new framework uses decision tree distillation to formally verify learned communication policies in multi-agent systems, targeting safety-critical autonomous logistics operations. The approach achieves 97.9% fidelity to neural policies and verifies 18 temporal logic properties with 88.9% satisfaction, including collision probabilities below 1% thresholds.
Movement Primitives Survey Maps Building Blocks for Robotics Automation
A comprehensive survey of movement primitives in robotics identifies elementary motion building blocks for autonomous systems. The paper reviews major frameworks, including spring-damper systems, probabilistic coupling, and neural network approaches, and examines applications and open challenges.
Tri-Info Method Predicts VLA Model Failures with 83% Accuracy Across Real-World Tasks, Researchers Report
Researchers propose Tri-Info, a method using information theory to detect failures in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. It matches top baselines in-domain and achieves 83% accuracy on real-world tasks, with interpretable diagnostics.
VOiLA Framework Uses Diffusion Models to Cut Sampling Cost by Three Orders for POMDP Planning
Researchers present VOiLA, a framework that learns POMDP models for online planning under uncertainty using conditional diffusion models. The approach reduces sampling cost by nearly three orders of magnitude, matches or exceeds Recurrent Soft Actor Critic with less than 10% of training data, and generalizes better to unseen environments. Real-robot tests achieved 10/10 task success using models trained solely on simulation.
Any2Any: Efficient Cross-Embodiment Transfer for Humanoid Whole-Body Tracking – New Paradigm Reduces Compute by 99%
Researchers propose Any2Any, a paradigm that transfers whole-body tracking models across humanoid embodiments with minimal adaptation. Using kinematic alignment and lightweight fine-tuning, it achieves competitive performance on new robots with only 1% of the compute and data required for full training.
PiDR: Physics-Informed AI Enhances Inertial Navigation for Autonomous Logistics Platforms
A new physics-informed deep learning framework, PiDR, improves positioning accuracy by over 29% for autonomous platforms relying solely on inertial sensors. Developed by researchers Sahoo and Klein, PiDR integrates inertial navigation principles into the training process to mitigate drift, offering a lightweight solution for real-time navigation in GNSS-denied environments. This has direct implications for autonomous logistics robots and vehicles operating in warehouses or other indoor/underground settings.
CRAX Benchmark Delivers 100x Speedup for Safe Reinforcement Learning Research
Researchers have introduced CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX), a fast safe reinforcement learning benchmark that leverages hardware acceleration to achieve up to 100x speedups over CPU-based alternatives. Built on MuJoCo XLA, it includes six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks across three difficulty levels. Evaluation of six popular safe RL methods reveals trade-offs between performance and safety, with curriculum learning improving results.
Physical Atari Platform Offers Low-Cost Robotics Testbed for Reinforcement Learning Research
Researchers have developed Physical Atari, a platform combining a robot (Robotroller) with an Atari gaming system to study real-time reinforcement learning (RL) on physical robots. The system costs under $1,000 and uses off-the-shelf components and 3D-printed parts. It has been validated in weeks-long continuous experiments without mechanical failure, demonstrating that RL algorithms can learn directly on robots but suffer performance drops from small distribution shifts.
Frequency-Aware Flow Matching Enhances Robotic Action Generation for Industrial Automation
A new method called Frequency-Aware Flow Matching (FAFM) addresses discretized action chunk limitations in robotic manipulation by using discrete cosine transform (DCT) and temporal derivative regularization. It produces temporally consistent, smooth actions without adding network parameters, improving success rates across benchmarks and real-world robots.
Neuromorphic RL Framework Delivers 11,281x Energy Savings for Warehouse Robot Pathfinding
Researchers propose SDQN-RMFS, a neuromorphic reinforcement learning framework for pathfinding in robotic mobile fulfillment systems. It converts an ANN policy to a spiking neural network via knowledge distillation, achieving up to 11,281x energy savings and nearly two-fold latency reduction versus a GPU baseline while maintaining decision quality.
New AI Model Lets Robots Grasp Objects Like Humans Using RGB-D Data
Researchers introduce HUG, a flow-matching AI model that generates diverse human grasps for any object from a single RGB-D image. Trained on the 1M-HUGs egocentric dataset of 1 million frames from human grasp demonstrations, HUG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 23% and 34% on a challenging benchmark, enabling zero-shot grasping for multi-fingered robots.
Dual-Agent Framework Translates Natural-Language Lab Protocols Into Robotic Execution
Researchers from an unnamed institution propose a dual-agent framework that translates natural-language microplate-based biological protocols into executable robotic commands. The system uses a Parser Agent and a Heterogeneous LLM Validation Agent with a self-correction loop, evaluated across 7 parsers and 3 validators on ELISA and Bradford assays.
See-and-Reach: Researchers Propose 3DG-VLN for Precise UAV Vision-Language Navigation Within Field of View
Researchers introduce UAV-VLN-FOV, a target-visible navigation task that isolates the see-and-reach stage for UAVs, and propose 3DG-VLN, a vision-language waypoint prediction framework that uses dynamic 3D direction cues. The framework achieves a 13.82% improvement in success rate over baselines on a new benchmark of 2,717 trajectories.
RoboSSM Introduces State-Space Models for Scalable In-Context Imitation Learning in Robotics
RoboSSM is a new method for in-context imitation learning (ICIL) that replaces Transformer-based architectures with state-space models (SSMs). The approach uses Longhorn, a state-of-the-art SSM, enabling linear-time inference and strong extrapolation to longer prompts. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show improved generalization to unseen and long-horizon tasks compared to Transformer-based ICIL methods.
Co-policy Framework Enables Real-Time Human-Robot Musical Co-Creation with Semantic Understanding
A research paper presents Co-policy, a framework for human-robot musical co-creation that separates semantic intent grounding, constrained musical variation, and visuomotor execution. It uses a fine-tuned Qwen-vl planner and a Gaussian-Mixture Visuomotor Policy to enable low-latency, physically grounded responses in real-time performances.
Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI
A new article argues that data standards for humanoid robotics are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. The authors, who are developing ISO/WD 26264-1, highlight that humanoid robot data must preserve physical coherence to be reusable, and that non-cumulative data is a key bottleneck. Standards can address this by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable.
Reward as an Agent: A New Framework for Robust Exploration in Embodied World Models
A new reinforcement learning framework introduces Reward as an Agent to provide robust verification and DynDiff-GRPO for diversified exploration. The method mitigates reward hacking and achieves significant accuracy gains across multiple open-source world models, demonstrating that broader exploration can scale with reliable verification.