Nov 14, 2025 3 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 Plug & Play

Plus: Take Over the Battery Graveyard, Industrialize Robotics Data

Good Morning, Roboticists!

If yesterday was about building robots, today is about giving them the data, the pipelines, and the infrastructure to finally go to work.

NEW LAUNCH

Unitree Turns Robot Training into Plug-and-Play

📌 What’s happening: The new G1-D isn’t just a wheeled humanoid — it’s a full “data-in, model-out” platform that captures, trains, and runs models on-device. Unitree packaged the whole cycle into one system, letting users collect data, fine-tune models, and deploy them directly without building their own infrastructure.

🧠 How this hits reality: Robot learning has long been gated by cost and complexity. G1-D lowers that barrier: small labs, startups, even hobby teams can now train their own robots using real-world data loops. It democratizes embodied AI the way Jetson boards once did for perception — making it faster and cheaper to turn prototypes into useful machines.

🤖 Key takeaway: Unitree just made robot training as accessible as robot building — and that could speed up the entire field.

BATTERY

Robots Take Over the Battery Graveyard

📌 What’s happening: CircuBAT, a switzerland national research consortium, unveiled a robotic line that turns EV battery recycling into a safer, semi-automated workflow. Robots handle the hazardous steps — opening packs, separating modules, exposing cells — while humans step in only where judgment is still needed. An expert system then evaluates each cell’s health, routes viable ones to second-life storage, and sends the rest to automated recovery stations. The result is cleaner material yields and far fewer chances for anyone to be standing next to something that can spark, pop, or leak.

🧠 How this hits reality: This is the part of the EV transition automakers never wanted to own. Real circularity requires predictable, automated throughput — not hand tools, protective suits, and low-yield scrap. A robotic loop like this turns battery waste from a regulatory liability into a materials pipeline, stabilizing supply chains and shaving costs off both new cell production and grid-storage deployments. It also gives governments something they can actually mandate: proven, scalable recycling instead of wishful PowerPoints.

🤖 Key takeaway: The EV industry didn’t get better batteries; it got smarter robots to clean up the mess.

TRAINGING

Foxglove Raises Forty Million to Industrialize Robotics Data

📌 What’s happening: Foxglove just raised forty million to scale the data and observability backbone that has quietly become the industry’s default and turned into the logging, visualization, replay, and ML plumbing used by Amazon, NVIDIA, Anduril, Dexterity, Shield AI, and most of the humanoid startups now chasing factory pilots. In robotics, that’s the moment a developer tool graduates into a dependency.

🧠 How this hits reality: Robotics keeps pretending every startup can build a Waymo-grade data stack with twenty engineers and free coffee. They can’t. Foxglove is becoming the off-the-shelf backbone that collapses tooling sprawl, cuts debugging cycles, and lets small teams ship field-ready robots. In a market where hardware burns cash and LLM-powered “robot brains” hog the spotlight, Foxglove is the unglamorous part: the plumbing that decides whether a fleet actually improves, or just keeps hallucinating sensor data.

🤖 Key takeaway: Robotics keeps chasing flashy demos, but the real leverage lives in the data stack. Foxglove is quietly becoming the part every “full-stack” robot company actually depends on.

QUICK HITS

OIA opened a Dallas solutions hub that showcases its AI driven warehouse and picking robotics for companies to evaluate real-world applications.
PIMS performed Islamabad’s first robotic adrenalectomy, marking Pakistan’s entry into a new era of modern robotic surgery.
Boston Dynamics CEO says AI is accelerating robot intelligence and safety, predicting home robots could emerge within the next five to ten years.
China’s first government-backed humanoid robot shop opens in Wuhan, offering ready-to-buy and customizable robots priced from about $10,000 to $70,000.
KIST’s transformable and context-aware modular robotic furniture OnOBOT won the Demonstration Grand Prize at RO-MAN 2025.

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