Nov 13, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 “TARS” Wins IEEE Award

Plus: World’s First Robotic Manicure, First Brain Aneurysm Robotics

Good Morning, Roboticists!

The boundaries of what robots can do—and where they can meaningfully operate—just widened again.

INNOVATION

A Carnegie Mellon Engineer Builds the First TARS-Style Robot

📌 What’s happening: Nimble.ai engineer Aditya Sripada and collaborator Abhishek Warrier unveiled TARS3D, a blocky, stainless-steel-ATM-looking robot inspired by Interstellar’s TARS. Unlike every past cosplay attempt, this one isn’t a puppet with wires edited out. It uses four independently articulated telescoping pillars, seven degrees of freedom, and deep reinforcement learning to switch between tip-toe walking and eight-spoke rolling. Their paper, which outlines the control logic and gait design behind TARS3D’s dual-mode movement, became a finalist at the IEEE Humanoids Conference, the closest thing robotics has to an Olympic qualifier.

🧠 How this hits reality: Beneath the movie homage lies a sharp insight that multimodal locomotion doesn’t need complexity to be versatile. With just seven joints, TARS3D walks, rolls, and transitions fluidly between modes, using deep reinforcement learning to find efficient gaits beyond analytic design. Its real-world uses remain open-ended, but the engineering breakthrough is clear — a low-DOF, energy-aware robot proving that agility comes from geometry, not anatomy.

🤖 Key takeaway: When a block can both walk and roll, it reminds us that progress in robotics doesn’t come from imitating humans; it comes from understanding motion itself.

BEAUTY

10Beauty Unveils the World’s First Fully Robotic Manicure System

📌 What’s happening: Boston-based startup 10Beauty has launched the world’s first end-to-end robotic manicure system, now live at Ulta Beauty in Braintree, Massachusetts. After six years of development, the machine can autonomously complete every step of a salon-grade manicure — from polish removal and filing to cuticle care and painting — inside a sealed, hygienic pod. It’s currently performing four to five appointments a day as customers learn to interact with a service robot for the first time.

🧠 How this hits reality: For the beauty industry, this is more than a gadget — it’s a quiet labor shift. Nail services, one of the last frontiers of manual, repetitive work, just met its automation moment. If 10Beauty scales across Ulta, Nordstrom, and hotels as planned, we could see “beauty tech” evolve from retail décor to genuine robotic labor substitution. The hygiene pod design also sidesteps one of the industry’s chronic issues: tool sanitation and infection risk.

🤖 Key takeaway: When a robot can buff, file, and polish with salon precision, beauty stops being “handcrafted” — and starts getting automated.

SURGERY

XCath’s Brain Robot Crosses the Skull Barrier

📌 What’s happening: Houston-based XCath just pulled off the second-ever intracranial robotic surgery in human history and the first to actually treat brain aneurysms. Using its EVR endovascular robot, surgeons in Panama guided catheters through brain vessels with sub-millimeter precision, placing flow-diverting stents and intrasaccular devices to repair three aneurysms. The system, capable of both local and remote (telerobotic) control, represents the world’s first triaxial neurovascular robot to achieve real intracranial treatment.

🧠 How this hits reality: This isn’t a Da Vinci arms race; it’s the start of neurovascular automation, a field where every millimeter decides between recovery and disability. EVR’s success suggests a future where top-tier aneurysm care no longer depends on geography or elite human steadiness. From Houston to Panama, the prototype just proved that remote brain surgery isn’t sci-fi anymore — it’s bandwidth and regulatory approval away. Hospitals, med-tech firms, and insurers now have a new benchmark: precision as a service for the brain.

🤖 Key takeaway: When a robot can steer through a brain artery and save a life, “steady hands” stop being a human skill — they become a network feature.

QUICK HITS

HBK’s new 6-DoF sensor system gives robots a true sense of touch, enabling physical intelligence across industrial, logistics, and medical automation.
Xsens launches its next-gen motion capture system and humanoid software to translate human movement into robot-ready motion data in real time.
Android creator Andy Rubin has launched a Tokyo-based humanoid robotics startup called Genki Robotics that is currently developing prototypes in stealth.
Nymbl Ventures reports that AI and robotics drove built-environment tech funding to 4.4 billion dollars in Q3, shifting capital toward more proven solutions.
IMPLANET and 8i Robotics are advancing clinical evaluation in Europe for a surgeon-supervised spine surgery robot.

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