🤖 Home Robots Learn To Float
Good Morning, Roboticists!
First robots learned to walk. Now they want cameras, feelings, homes, and a place on the furniture.
Home Robots Learn To Float
TL;DR: Researchers at Keio University, with collaborators including the MIT Media Lab, built a quiet helium-based soft floating robot for indoor companionship. Inspired by characters like Tinker Bell and Mew, the prototype glides gently through homes, using buoyancy and soft materials to make human-robot contact safer and less mechanical. Read more →
Cameras Start Growing Legs
TL;DR: Insta360 has officially formed a robotics team, with founder Liu Jingkang saying its first household-focused robot is planned for the second half of 2027. The company is aiming at a "Cameraman" photography robot that can frame shots, track subjects, and turn camera work into a mobile robotic experience. Read more →
Robots Learn Cause And Effect
TL;DR: Robbyant, an embodied AI company within Ant Group, introduced LingBot-VA 2.0, a video-action world model built natively for robotics. Instead of adapting digital video generation tools, the model predicts how robot actions change physical environments, helping machines reason through cause, effect, and next moves in real time. Read more →
Ground Robots Aim Upward
TL;DR: First Hydrogen said it is advancing AI capabilities for its autonomous UGV platform, focusing on defense, security, counter-drone support, navigation, and field operations. The modular ground system is being designed with articulated leg-wheel assemblies, hot-swappable mission modules, and amphibious capability for difficult terrain and infrastructure protection. Read more →
Walking Was Too Small
TL;DR: MERL released a new paper on MOBIUS, a bipedal robot that can walk, crawl, climb, and roll without changing hardware. Built with gripper-equipped arms, legs, reinforcement learning, and a high-level planner, the platform shows how one body can switch locomotion modes for tougher urban exploration and manipulation tasks. Read more →
Humanoids Raise For Scale
TL;DR: LimX Dynamics raised nearly $200 million in pre-IPO funding, bringing its six-month fundraising total to about $400 million. The humanoid robotics company plans to expand manufacturing, global delivery, and its "big brain and small brain" stack for autonomous robots across research, education, inspection, industry, and construction. Read more →
Robot Retail Gets A Giant
TL;DR: Lumos Robotics signed a three-year strategic partnership with JD.com covering product co-creation, technical collaboration, channel expansion, and industrial robot deployment. The companies aim to push Lumos' full product line past 1 billion yuan in cumulative JD.com sales while bringing embodied intelligence products into more consumer and industrial settings. Read more →
Robots Need Their Own Base
TL;DR: JD.com and Guangdong officials broke ground on JD Property's first global RoboBase project in Guangzhou. The 190,000-square-meter hub is planned for R&D, manufacturing, pilot testing, headquarters, and exhibition space, with completion expected in late 2028 and full capacity targeted by 2030. Read more →
Touch Becomes The Missing Sense
TL;DR: Xense Robotics raised around 100 million yuan to advance embodied tactile intelligence for robots. The Shanghai startup is building tricolor optical tactile sensors, visuo-tactile data collection systems, and a Vision-Tactile-Language-Action model, aiming to help robots understand contact, force, texture, and grip adjustments in real-world tasks. Read more →
The Brain Moves Onboard
TL;DR: Booster Robotics unveiled a new humanoid platform built around whole-body control, onboard NVIDIA Thor compute, and an open development stack. The T2 Pro promises up to 2,070 TFLOPS for real-time perception, planning, and control, aiming to move humanoids from scripted demonstrations toward continuously working machines. Read more →
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