On a sunny morning in June, I walked to work with a quadruped robot beside me. I’ve never gotten more attention from strangers.
A bunch of people snapped pictures of my robot dog. Several people asked me questions. Was it mine? (Yes.) Did I build it? (No.) Was it being used for surveillance? (No.)
Biological dogs kept a safe distance from my mechanical companion. Some growled or barked at it.
© Nat Purser
ESP32 boards are incredibly versatile tools. You can use them for a huge range of purposes, and they can also be an extremely cheap way to help you get started in a new creative tech hobby.
XPENG’s IRON humanoid robot has walked off its automated assembly line as the company targets mass production and commercial deployments in 2027.
The post XPENG’s IRON Walks Off the Assembly Line: Is Mass Production Next? appeared first on TechRepublic.
XPENG’s IRON humanoid robot has walked off its automated assembly line as the company targets mass production and commercial deployments in 2027.
The post XPENG’s IRON Walks Off the Assembly Line: Is Mass Production Next? appeared first on TechRepublic.
A Redmond, Wash., robotics software startup founded by former Microsoft researchers says its platform can now handle much of the work of getting a robot up and running in a factory, warehouse or other industrial setting, a job that used to take a team of engineers.
General Robotics said Wednesday that advances in GRID, its robot intelligence platform, have cut the process of onboarding a new robot from about a month to as little as two hours. The company calls the approach “Auto Engineering,” with each onboarded robot and diagnosed failure feeding back into the system and speeding up the next deployment.
“Before this moment, it would take us a team of experts to go and execute on behalf of our customers,” said General Robotics CEO and co-founder Ashish Kapoor in an interview. “Clearly non-scalable, clearly very expensive, and clearly will take a long time.”
With Auto Engineering, he said, “we can magnify and accelerate each engineer’s capability.”
Founded in 2023, the company has grown to about 50 employees, primarily engineers. It has raised nearly $34 million, most recently in an April round led by Construct Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Accenture Ventures, Nvidia and Valo Ventures. PitchBook put the size of the round at $25 million; the companies didn’t disclose terms at the time.
Kapoor said General Robotics has roughly a dozen customers — large enterprises across manufacturing, logistics, energy and defense — and revenue in the millions of dollars.
Customers include HTX, the science and technology agency of Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, which Kapoor said has been working with General Robotics for about a year and a half.
The company’s platform works with robot types including industrial arms, humanoids, quadrupeds, wheeled robots and drones, according to the company.
General Robotics is operating in a competitive and well-funded sector. Physical Intelligence, which builds foundation models for robots, has raised more than $2 billion. Nvidia — an investor in General Robotics, and the maker of the Isaac Sim simulation software built into GRID — is developing its own robot models and deployment tools.
Robot makers build good hardware, Kapoor said, but often lack the expertise to put it to work in a specific setting like a shipping terminal. “That last layer is missing.”
Before co-founding the company, Kapoor spent 17 years at Microsoft, ultimately as general manager of its autonomous systems and robotics research group in Redmond, where he created the open-source drone simulator AirSim. General Robotics co-founders Sai Vemprala (CTO) and Shuhang Chen came from the same Microsoft team.
GeekWire covered the launch in 2023, when it was Scaled Foundations and billed itself as “ChatGPT for robots.” It had five employees at the time, focused on aerial robotics and drones, with backing from Khosla and E14 Fund. It later renamed itself General Robotics.
German unmanned ground vehicle maker ARX Robotics is expanding into Poland, the company announced September 9, its fourth national market as it grows across Europe. ARX plans to invest tens of millions of euros in Poland over the coming years, starting with a Polish legal entity followed by a permanent headquarters and dedicated training and […]
China’s military is exploring humanoid robots for urban combat as the country’s commercial robotics industry dominates global shipments and manufacturing.
The post China Is Turning Its Humanoid Robot Boom Toward the Battlefield appeared first on TechRepublic.
China’s military is exploring humanoid robots for urban combat as the country’s commercial robotics industry dominates global shipments and manufacturing.
The post China Is Turning Its Humanoid Robot Boom Toward the Battlefield appeared first on TechRepublic.
Erin Kennedy has been building robots for over a decade now, with a focus on smaller bots that interact with, or maybe even clean up, the outdoor environment. Still other bots are made to interact with people, and when the people are outside in the park, that’s where your robot needs to go.
Whatever the reason, Erin’s talk at Hackaday Europe 2026 is an invitation to take your projects out into the outdoors. But the great wide world outside of your lab is not necessarily the most friendly place for a little bot, and the other half of this talk is about practical design tips and lessons learned to help it survive.
She structures the talk around different environments, which gives her an opportunity to focus on her bot cleaning up plastic trash on the beach, but also to point out the absolute horrors that sand can work on robot motors. She goes through a number of strategies for dealing with this, including going slow, keeping the motors as high up as you can, and designing the body of the robot to be full of holes and shed sand.
Taking to the water, she demos Otter Force One, which aims to capture invasive sea urchins. But underwater means under pressure, and she gives us some good tips on how to get the cables out while keeping the water in – double-o-ring cable glands potted with marine epoxy. I especially love the Nalgene-bottle-on-a-string with a radio that can be deployed to help retrieval. Her lessons-learned section is as deep as it is understated, including underwater hazards from low visibility to accumulated silt messing up your presumed center of gravity. Over the long term, rubber leaks and barnacles accumulate. Double seals, durable hooks, tether ropes, and bright colors are your friends. Underwater bots have it hard.
Erin’s air-inspired bots are the wildest. Some are just whimsical, like the flappy square bird, or beautiful like the butterfly bots. But her Atmosphinder bot uses the wind for actual propulsion. It’s a rolling wheel with sails that aims to explore long distances on Mars. Whether it’s going to get there or not, it’s got a bunch of great design elements for anything you have that’s going to have to roll. “Magic toboggans” make great plastic sails. But beware, while you can turn off a motor, you can’t turn off the wind. Be prepared to stake your bot down before or after its mission.
Whatever the environmental challenges of taking your bot outside, it’s the non-laboratory environment that’s the most challenging, and rewarding. Erin tells the story of when a bird settled down in the shade cast by Bowie, or when the wind blew all of the Aruco markers away. But people and animals are just as delightful and unpredictable as the weather, and that’s an extra level of adventure. If you’re going far, bring hydration for the humans and spare batteries for the bots. Rolling with the changes seems to be the key to having a good time outside with your bots.
And of course, bringing your robot outside is a great opportunity to share what you’ve been working on with the offline world. We absolutely love the mission: normalizing robot hacks among the general public by hanging out with your bot in the park is right up our alley. She has had tremendous success with random encounters – folks just coming up and asking about what it’s doing. Making your bot seem friendly and/or beautiful seems to go a long way here. Don’t neglect the aesthetics.
We left Erin’s talk absolutely inspired to build something that can make it through the rough environment that lies just outside our basement. It reminded us of our old days experimenting around with BEAM robotics, another bio-inspired practice aimed at the outdoors. With 3D printable parts and cheap geared motors, you don’t even have to break the bank to build your own Mars neighborhood rover. Watch this talk and get inspired!
It's easy to think of robot lawn mowers as robotic vacuums for grass, but Sunseeker wants you to think of them as much, much more important than that. I had the opportunity to see the company's upcoming 2027 robomower lineup at IFA 2026, not to mention learn that CEO Terry Ma has grand ambitions beyond trimming your backyard.
Xiaomi showcased CyberOne at IFA after reporting a 98% success rate in an EV factory trial, highlighting the promise and limits of humanoid robots.
The post Xiaomi Says CyberOne Hit 98% in Factory Trial Before IFA Demo appeared first on TechRepublic.
Xiaomi showcased CyberOne at IFA after reporting a 98% success rate in an EV factory trial, highlighting the promise and limits of humanoid robots.
The post Xiaomi Says CyberOne Hit 98% in Factory Trial Before IFA Demo appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Aug. 31–Sept. 4.
The post Powerful AI, Cyberthreats, and Industry Upheaval Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Aug. 31–Sept. 4.
The post Powerful AI, Cyberthreats, and Industry Upheaval Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.
Robotics jobs in the Pacific Northwest are multiplying faster than universities can train people to fill them. The University of Washington thinks it has an answer — or at least a start.
This fall, UW’s College of Engineering will launch its first robotics graduate programs: a Master of Science in Robotics and a Graduate Certificate in Applied Robotics.
The university capped enrollment at 35 students for the inaugural cohort. More than 30 people had already signed up for an information session before applications even opened. It’s an early signal, engineering leaders say, of pent-up demand from regional powerhouses racing to hire engineers who can operate at the intersection of AI, software and hardware.
Program leaders say that skill set is rooted in a traditional, narrowly focused engineering degree that hasn’t kept pace with the rapid evolution of technology. UW is betting that the fix lies at the intersection of AI and hardware, echoing an industry buzzword called “physical AI.”
“Robotics is no longer confined to a single discipline,” said Xu Chen, a UW engineering professor and director of the Boeing Advanced Research Collaboration, who played a large role in the committee that designed the new programs. “The future will need a wide variety of robotics knowledge, and that’s what we built these programs to deliver.”
Applications opened Sept. 1 and will close Sept. 10, with UW aiming for a roughly one-week turnaround before notifying applicants. For its inaugural year, the university is intentionally keeping things small: 25 seats in the master’s program and 10 in the certificate track, which is designed for working professionals who want robotics training without leaving their jobs.
Chen said the small first cohort is by design, not a limitation. The goal, he emphasized, is to get the fundamentals right before scaling up. He expects the programs to roughly triple in size within three to five years.
“Companies are seeing newer potential in robotics as advanced computing and the wave of AI technology mature,” Chen said. “They see that their workforce will benefit from a modern robotics program, and that need is really what drove this.”
Getting there will take machines, and lots of them. UW is purchasing robots and computing hardware for its initial course offerings while also leaning on industry donations: robots, GPUs, and computing infrastructure among them, according to Chen.
Amazon and Microsoft anchored the effort early; the list of partners has since grown to include NVIDIA, Boeing, Dassault Systèmes — the French software company behind design tools like SolidWorks — and at least one smaller robotics manufacturer.
“The industry board was incredibly supportive from the start,” Chen said. “We’ve had almost a year of continuous meetings and collaboration with them and with representatives across our own engineering departments.”
The broader structure of the program is meant to make it easier for students from different corners of engineering, such as electrical, mechanical and computer science, to land in the same classroom and eventually choose their own path deeper into robotics through electives.
The program is also drawing on UW’s existing research muscle in the region. It taps directly into the Boeing Advanced Research Collaboration, which Chen directs, along with robotics labs inside the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. That gives students a line into the same research infrastructure that already feeds Seattle’s aerospace and e-commerce giants.
The university’s ambitions extend well past this fall’s launch. Chen said UW has already mapped out longer-term plans for an undergraduate robotics degree and, eventually, a Ph.D. program, with the two new offerings serving as the foundation.
For now, the clearest sign of the program’s ambitions arrived this summer in an unlikely form: a pack of robot dogs let loose on UW’s campus.
“Seattle’s hills make it a uniquely difficult place for robots to move around, which is exactly why it’s a great place to study it,” Chen said.
Both students and faculty got a chance to operate the robots directly, Chen said. It was a hands-on moment that underscored how much more accessible robotics technology has become in just the last few years.
“It was exciting to see the students so happy to see the robots,” Chen said. “That’s the kind of energy we want to build this program around.”
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