Dec 1, 2025 3 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 Tesla’s Rebels

Plus: Takes Over the Dirtiest Job, The Pompeii Robot

Good Morning, Roboticists!

Tesla’s rebels don’t just quit; they reroute the future.

HUMANOIDS

Tesla’s Rebels Built a Robot That Starts Where Musk Stopped Thinking

📌 What’s happening: A group of ex-Tesla engineers from the Autopilot and Optimus teams have resurfaced as Sunday Robotics, the startup behind Memo, a compact home robot trained for delicate, repetitive hand work like folding socks and stacking dishes. Co-founder Tony Zhao, once an Autopilot intern, and several senior Tesla AI engineers who built the original manipulation stack, are now pursuing the same goal but from the opposite direction: instead of chasing a full humanoid, they’re perfecting its fingers first.

🧠 How this hits reality: These aren’t deserters; they’re reductionists. Where Musk applies “first principles” to rockets and revenue, they’re applying it to friction, torque, and grip. Memo is what happens when you stop dreaming about human replacement and start engineering grasp reliability. The team trimmed ambition down to contact physics and endurance, and in doing so, may have found the only scalable entry point to real domestic robotics.

🤖 Key takeaway: They left Tesla to follow first principles all the way to the fingertips.

DINING

Armstrong’s Robot Takes Over the Dirtiest Job in the Kitchen

📌 What’s happening: San Francisco startup Armstrong Robotics has raised 12 million USD to scale its AI-powered dishwashing robots now running 24/7 in real restaurants. Each system wields three 7-DoF arms, thirty sensors, and a vision network trained on millions of greasy, reflective, liquid-covered dishes. It identifies, grabs, and scrubs everything from stacked plates to magnet-clumped silverware without human babysitting.

🧠 How this hits reality: Forget ROI spreadsheets for a moment. The real breakthrough is that Armstrong’s system actually survives a restaurant kitchen with all its heat, oil, chaos, and broken glass. Most robots can handle clean assembly lines; this one handles human mess. If it keeps running through that environment, it’s not just automating a task, it’s proving embodied AI can handle the unpredictability of the real world. That’s the milestone industrial robotics has been chasing for decades.

🤖 Key takeaway: When a robot thrives in chaos, the question isn’t just profit; it’s what’s left for humans.

ARCHAEOLOGY

The Pompeii Robot Gives Archaeology a Second Pair of Hands

📌 What’s happening: At Pompeii, the EU-funded RePAIR project has completed a live test of its dual-arm restoration robot. Developed by Ca’ Foscari University, the system combines AI-driven visual recognition, 3D reconstruction and ultra-soft grippers that can identify and reassemble fresco fragments buried for centuries. During the test, researchers let the robot work on replica ruins under real archaeological lighting, dust, and debris, conditions that no lab robot had ever faced.

🧠 How this hits reality: RePAIR’s real breakthrough isn’t speed alone but judgment. It isolates AI “hallucinations” by keeping humans in the loop and validating every match geometrically before any touch. Combined with ultra-sensitive force control, it avoids damage while accelerating restoration by orders of magnitude. If deployed widely, archaeology could shift from manual puzzle-solving to robotic reconstruction, digitizing cultural heritage without losing its authenticity.

🤖 Key takeaway: Archaeology may just become the first field where robots restore faster than they revolutionize.

QUICK HITS

Chicago residents are urging the city to halt Coco and Serve’s delivery-robot pilot over safety incidents and accessibility concerns.
Advantech and D3 Embedded are integrating compute and industrial-grade sensing to boost AMRs with stronger vision and real-time autonomy.
Gravis Robotics raised $23M to scale its learning-based autonomous excavation platform across several countries.
HKUST and Unitree unveiled the world’s first full-size humanoid robot capable of interactive basketball play with humans.
TKO CEO Ari Emanuel wants UFC fights featuring Musk’s Optimus robots, impressed by their rapid progress.

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