Nov 24, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 105 Kilometers, No Fall

Plus: Google Builds the Brain, Figure Comes Court

Good Morning, Roboticists!

The gap between hype and hard mileage is narrowing—and sometimes collapsing in real time.

HUMANOIDS

AgiBot’s A2 Walks 105 Kilometers Without a Fall

📌 What’s happening: From Suzhou’s Jinji Lake to Shanghai’s Bund, AgiBot’s A2 humanoid robot walked 105 Kilometers (65 miles) over three days, earning a Guinness World Record for the longest journey ever completed by a humanoid robot. Standing 1.75 meters tall and weighing 55 kilograms, A2 ran on 28 precision motors and a quick-swap battery system that allowed human operators to change packs mid-stride. With GPS, LiDAR, and infrared navigation, it crossed national roads, bridges, and busy urban streets without a single misstep.

🧠 How this hits reality: The feat wasn’t about grace—it was about grit. In a field where most humanoids collapse after a demo, A2 endured 72 hours of motion through unpredictable terrain, day and night, proving that long-duration locomotion is now an engineering solution, not a science-fiction wish. AgiBot didn’t just show stability; it validated the discipline behind real-world uptime: thermal balance, energy cycling, and sensor resilience.

🤖 Key takeaway: The A2 didn’t sprint, it survived—and in robotics, lasting three days on your feet means you’ve finally learned to stand.

HUMANOIDS

Google DeepMind Hires Boston Dynamics Veteran to Give Gemini Its Body

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. Photo by: Getty Image

📌 What’s happening: Google DeepMind has brought on Aaron Saunders, the former CTO of Boston Dynamics, as VP of hardware engineering. Saunders helped build the acrobatic and legged machines that made Boston Dynamics famous. His move marks DeepMind’s most concrete step yet toward merging AI brains with physical bodies. CEO Demis Hassabis says the plan is clear: turn Gemini into an operating system for robots, the way Android became the backbone of smartphones.

🧠 How this hits reality: Google isn’t chasing another viral demo; it’s chasing platform dominance. By hiring the engineer who taught machines to balance, flip, and walk, DeepMind is signaling it wants to control the entire robotics stack — from the Gemini “brain” down to the actuators. The goal is simple but audacious: make Gemini the Android of embodiment, a plug-and-play brain that any manufacturer can license. If it works, tomorrow’s humanoids won’t run on custom code; they’ll boot from Google.

🤖 Key takeaway: Google just rehired Boston Dynamics by proxy. And this time, it plans to ship the brain, not the legs.

INFIGHTING

Figure AI Faces Internal Rift as Ex-Safety Chief Sues Over “Lethal” Robot Warnings

📌 What’s happening: Before Figure AI’s humanoid robots could walk into factories, the company walked into court. Former head of product safety Robert Gruendel has filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired after warning executives that a malfunctioning prototype had sliced a steel fridge door and could “fracture a human skull.” He accuses CEO Brett Adcock and senior engineers of downplaying safety issues and gutting his roadmap just as the startup closed a funding round that pushed its valuation to $39 billion. Figure calls the claims “falsehoods” and says Gruendel was terminated for poor performance.

🧠 How this hits reality: The case reads less like a safety report and more like a boardroom fracture. At Figure, the tension between engineering caution and fundraising urgency finally snapped. With billions in new capital and no product yet in customers’ hands, the company’s biggest test isn’t mechanical stability — it’s internal alignment. When a startup valued like a unicorn still argues over whether its robot is safe to be in the same room as a person, the story stops being about innovation and starts being about control.

🤖 Key takeaway: Figure’s robot hasn’t taken its first real step, yet its creators are already fighting over who tripped first.

QUICK HITS

Uber Eats is rolling out Starship’s sidewalk delivery robots in the UK, with plans to expand across Europe and the U.S. in the coming years.
Global fragrance and flavor giant IFF has deployed the Colibri smart-dosing robot in Singapore to rapidly and precisely produce fragrance samples.
Singapore’s SBS Transit opened a digital village at Punggol Coast, showcasing the R2-D2-like MR-2 robot alongside a 360° screen and an AI assistant.
Swiss researchers have created a sand-grain-sized magnetic microrobot that can navigate through blood vessels to deliver drugs with high precision.
Dexterity has partnered with Beckhoff to supply automation and safety technologies for developing its Mech superhumanoid robots.

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