Is the key to autonomous cars that don’t run over pedestrians and crash into telephone poles a humanoid robot behind the wheel? A group of researchers at the University of Tokyo think so, and they lay out their argument in a newly published technical paper this week. The researchers, one of whom consults for Toyota, […]
Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?
You could easily walk the entire Automate floor without spotting a single humanoid. There was a grand total of three, by my count — or, rather, three units of the same nonworking prototype. Neura was showing off its long-promised 4NE-1 robot, amid more traditional form factors. There was a little photo setup where you could […]
Humanoid robots are learning to fall well
The savvy marketers at Boston Dynamics produced two major robotics news cycles last week. The larger of the two was, naturally, the electric Atlas announcement. As I write this, the sub-40 second video is steadily approaching five million views. A day prior, the company tugged at the community’s heart strings when it announced that the […]
A humanoid robot is on its way from Mobileye founder
Mentee Robotics hasn’t been in stealth, exactly. The Israeli firm caught a small wave of press at the tail end of 2022, following Tesla’s initial humanoid robotics announcement. As that was the year of the startup’s founding, it didn’t have much to show off at the time. Even so, the firm caught some headlines because […]
Collaborative Robotics is prioritizing ‘human problem solving’ over humanoid forms
Humanoids have sucked a lot of the air out of the room. It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans. Ultimately, however, both the efficacy and scalability of such designs have yet to be proven out. For a while now, Collaborative Robotics founder Brad Porter […]