Oct 29, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 Robotics' Real AI Power

Plus: Optimus Goes Trick-or-Treating, DJI Lands First Ground Robot

Good Morning, Roboticists!

Robotics is finally showing its real AI power, not just in labs, but in the streets and homes.

BRAIN

NVIDIA Gives Robots Real AI Power

📌 What’s happening: At GTC 2025, NVIDIA unveiled IGX Thor, a Blackwell-based robotics processor built to run real-time physical AI at the edge. The chip delivers up to 8× the compute of its predecessor, IGX Orin, enabling robots and surgical systems to run models that previously had to stay in the cloud. Early adopters include Diligent Robotics, Hitachi Rail, Joby Aviation, and CMR Surgical, signaling cross-sector adoption from factory floors to operating rooms.

🧠 How this hits reality: IGX Thor collapses the cloud-to-edge hierarchy, enabling local reasoning, vision-language models, and safety loops without round-trip latency. For manufacturers, it means cobots that adapt in real time. For hospitals, it means surgical AI that thinks faster than the network. This is NVIDIA’s most direct move yet to make robots compute, decide, and stay safe on their own.

🤖 Key takeaway: Cloud AI may have just been evicted. Thor puts datacenter IQ inside the robot’s skull.

HUMANOID

Optimus Hits Times Square, Goes Trick-or-Treating

📌 What’s happening: Tesla rolled out its Optimus humanoid robot to hand out Halloween candy in front of the Nasdaq building. The robot, visibly tethered to a power line, picked up and distributed gummy bags to New Yorkers—occasionally dropping one, then correcting itself. It’s unclear if the demo was autonomous or tele-operated, though Tesla claims recent field appearances, like the Tron: Ares premiere, were unsupervised.

🧠 How this hits reality: This was not a candy stunt; it was a controlled stress test in one of the world’s most chaotic human environments. If the candy handouts were truly autonomous, Optimus’s ability to grasp, hand off, and recover from small motor errors in public marks a shift from lab-bound demos to real-world interaction loops. Surviving Times Square, after all, could mean surviving a factory line. For rivals chasing humanoid deployment milestones, that’s a costly new benchmark.

🤖 Key takeaway: Optimus handing out gummies is less cute than it looks; it’s Tesla’s quiet flex that embodiment now walks among us, cord and all.

HOMECARE

DJI Lands Its First Ground Robot Romo in Europe

📌 What’s happening: DJI has officially launched Romo, its first robot vacuum line, in Europe after a debut in China. The lineup—Romo S, A, and P—ranges from €1,299 to €1,899 and features transparent housings and a self-cleaning base. More than a home gadget, Romo is DJI’s first serious step into domestic robotics, translating its drone navigation stack into millimeter-level floor mapping.

🧠 How this hits reality: Romo’s hybrid vision system combines dual fish-eye cameras with solid-state lidar—hardware derived straight from DJI’s drone platforms—to detect 2 mm obstacles like cables or cards, outperforming Roborock’s 20 mm limit. This is DJI’s ground-control moment: a pivot from air to home autonomy, signaling that its spatial-AI and SLAM capabilities can outclass most consumer robotics stacks. For iRobot and Ecovacs, it’s not just another mop; it’s a new competitor with aerospace-grade perception entering their living rooms.

🤖 Key takeaway: DJI just grounded its flight tech and turned your floor into a proving ground for its next robotics empire.

QUICK HITS

Serve Robotics gains analyst confidence and expands its delivery footprint through a new partnership with DoorDash.
LimX Dynamics’ Oli humanoid showcases autonomous self-getting-up, marking another step toward human-like agility and motion intelligence.
European fashion e-commerce giant Zalando is speeding up warehouse automation through a new partnership with Polish robotics firm Nomagic.
Spacedock teams up with Space Robotics Workers to advance modular orbital construction through AI robotics.
Geekplus claims it launches the world’s first end-to-end unmanned picking system, marking a new era of fully intelligent warehouse automation.

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