🤖 Stroke Care Wants Remote Hands
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We taught language models by uploading the internet. Embodied AI would now like the rest of our lives.
Stroke Care Wants Remote Hands
TL;DR: Philips received up to $33.7 million from ARPA-H to develop AI-enabled robotics for remote and increasingly automated stroke procedures. Working with Johns Hopkins University and Boston University, the project aims to expand access to endovascular thrombectomy by combining Philips' Azurion imaging platform with robotic navigation, smart devices, and automation tools inside future interventional suites worldwide. Read more →
Bodies Become The Dataset
TL;DR: Figure AI launched Index, a consumer video app built to feed Helix with real human motion. The company says the platform has drawn 16 million uploads from 108 countries, pays contributors for useful footage, and is part of a $1 billion data-and-compute push to train humanoids on everyday tasks before they enter homes and factories. Read more →
One Video Becomes Training
TL;DR: Skild AI unveiled S1, a robot foundation model that learns long manipulation tasks from a single demonstration video instead of task-specific fine-tuning. After 100,000 hours of pretraining, the company says S1 reached 66% average step success on unfamiliar jobs like plant potting, pancake making, pour-over coffee, and kit assembly, with one visual prompt replacing hundreds of teleoperation examples. Read more →
Solar Work Gets Robotic Muscle
TL;DR: Burns & McDonnell and Gritt formed a partnership to test and deploy AI-powered robots on utility-scale solar construction sites. Gritt's systems attach to familiar construction equipment and can help with repetitive work such as placing solar arrays, pouring concrete, and laying rebar, aiming to make large energy projects safer and more predictable in live field conditions. Read more →
Service Robots Get A Triangle
TL;DR: Mint's Axonex Intelligence, Yunji Technology, and Rice Robotics HK signed a binding contract to co-develop a commercial-grade service robot. Yunji will lead architecture, hardware, and mass production, while Axonex supplies AI control and Rice licenses technology, with Mint estimating about 1,000 units in the coming year across cleaning-focused markets in Southeast Asia, Japan, and Greater China. Read more →
Robot Batteries Need Rules
TL;DR: JD and BAK Battery unveiled standardized robot battery products at the 2026 World Robot Conference, targeting the messy mix of dimensions, interfaces, and protocols slowing deployment. The partners say plug-and-play packs can serve humanoid, industrial, and wheeled robots, while BAK's variants tune for burst power, endurance, or balanced use on one shared chassis architecture foundation. Read more →
Tiny Grips Win Big
TL;DR: AGILINK's OmniHand dominated the dexterous-hand events at the second World Humanoid Robot Games, taking three golds through fully autonomous operation. The contests pushed fine manipulation beyond showmanship: robots sorted 5 mm soybeans with tweezers, built blocks, and weighed powder while testing vision, planning, grasping, endurance, and hardware reliability under competition pressure in Beijing this week. Read more →
Open Source Gets A Body
TL;DR: AIRSEAI joined the LF AI & Data Foundation as an open-source embodied AI project from Shenzhen's AIRS institute. The project aims to reduce fragmentation across robot hardware, datasets, and models with a modular framework, starting with single-robot intelligence before moving toward dual-arm manipulation and coordinated multi-robot learning for deployable physical AI systems in real deployments. Read more →
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