As part of giving its Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster attraction at Hollywood Studios a Muppets makeover (goodbye, Aerosmith) Walt Disney World imagineers created an audio-animatronic version of Scooter. To ensure the robot moved like a puppet they used a motion capture studio to record the actual Muppets’ movements performed by a puppeteer.
The robot vacuum company just launched its first robot lawnmower designed for US yards. The RockNeo Q110H combines RTK and VSLAM navigation and costs $1,299. It’s designed for small- to medium-sized yards and handles 45% slopes.
I’m currently testing models from Mammotion and Dreame for a robot lawnmower battle royale take-two, and I’ve been impressed by the improved mobility and navigation of these new bots.
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Its PowerDetect UV Reveal now comes in four colors — brown, green, blue, and ivory. The earthy neutral palettes feature metallic accents and look surprisingly good — for a robot. I’ve been testing the blue one, and I like how it blends in with my kitchen cabinets.
As robot vacuums become more capable, they are also getting bigger, so it’s encouraging to see manufacturers putting more thought into how they fit in with your decor.
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Robots have been an important part of Disney’s theme parks for decades, but instead of entertaining guests, this industrial arm is being used to carve intricate marble statues while human sculptors add fine details. The use of marble is more cost-effective, according to Disney, and better suited to surviving Florida weather.
The smart lighting company best known for its modular RGB lighting panels has been acquired by OneRobotics, the parent company of Switchbot. According to a filing on the Hong Kong stock exchange, the purchase will take two years to complete.
Nanoleaf just announced a pivot to robotics and AI, an area in which the smart home company Switchbot is heavily involved, launching its first humanoid household robot at CES this year.
Tech companies want to film you doing chores as training data for the next generation of household robots. If you’re not a fan, and don’t mind living in chaos, there’s always another way to participate.
Electric Mayhem:
Poison their data: put dirty dishes in the clothes dryer, mop your ceiling, apply a translucent film of mayonnaise to your windows, dance with your vacuum, become ungovernable!
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Despite first being destined for Hyundai factories, the production version of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot looks no less capable than the one that debuted over two years ago. A new video demonstrates some impressive moves with a soccer ball, including a celebration dance worthy of any highlight reel.
Today, the company announced that on May 27th, it will reveal when its Cyber X bionic quad-track stair-climbing system will launch and, presumably, how much it will cost. The robot that can transport a robot vacuum up a flight of stairs will arrive alongside three new X60 Pro series robots, the most intriguing of which features Dreame’s first dual-joint bionic robotic arm that can extend a mop pad into tight corners and under furniture.
The right robot for your home has less to do with specs and everything to do with your floors, rugs, clutter, and general tolerance for robot nonsense.
Bears are a serious problem in Japan, and Ohta has been fending them off for a decade with Monster Wolves — solar-powered animatronics with glowing eyes that make loud noises. But the company can’t keep up with demand. Farmers and rural workers are waiting up to three months for delivery.
[Popular Science]
Honor says it’ll launch in Q3, meaning July-September, though we’re still expecting it to be a China exclusive. The news was announced at the Cannes Film Festival, where Honor celebrated its partnership with professional cinema camera manufacturer Arri. The Robot Phone will be the first to include “core elements of Arri image science.”
The Narwal Freo Z10 Turbo uses a laser mapping system instead of a camera to navigate your home, but it includes a base station that empties dirt and sterilizes the mopping pads, and a mode that deep cleans carpets with boosted suction and multiple passes. It will be available on May 18th for $899.99 and discounted to $599.99 until the end of the month.
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If the pointy-toothed grin of Labubu dolls wasn’t unsettling enough, a group of MIT grad students has turned 12 of them into a rolling robot capable of following you around. There’s more details about Labububot here, but the video should be all you need to keep you wide awake tonight.
Sean Hollister let a hacked robot lawnmower run him over in the name of journalism, but it took a Verge commenter to find the right language that really sets the stakes.
MattMaher_M7Innovations:
There’s investigative journalism, and then there’s ‘get-run-over-by-a-lawnmower-to-prove-a-point’ journalism. Thank you Sean, for almost chopping off your chicken nuggets to give us the gif of the century.
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Influencers and vaporware collided with some interesting-looking robot vacuums, a laundry robot, and a rocket at Dreame’s US launch event.
The company announced the latest version of its humanoid Atlast robot at CES 2026 with an immobile prototype on stage and CG animations. But despite the new Atlas being destined for Hyundai factories, a new video from Boston Dynamics reveals the robot is just as agile, flexible, and capable as previous versions.
Sam Altman considered a similar structure to Google’s Alphabet, which separates its core search business from ventures like Verily (health) and Waymo (self-driving cars), The Wall Street Journal reports. OpenAI has been cutting back on side quests ahead of a potential IPO and could revive spinout plans later on, the report says.
Colin Angle revealed his latest creation this week: a dog-sized robot ‘Familiar’ designed for human connection, not chores.
The deal for the company, Assured Robot Intelligence, closed on Friday, according to Bloomberg. The publication reported last year that Meta was starting to work on humanoid robots.
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The Spot + Scrub Ai nails navigation and mopping, but a third-party motor undercuts its $1,200 Dyson price tag.
Ahead of The Mandalorian and Grogu hitting theaters on May 22nd, Hasbro has announced a new animatronic version of Grogu packed with motors, sensors, and the ability to shuffle around on its own two feet. CNET’s Bridget Carey visited Hasbro HQ for an early look at the toy including how it simulates using the Force.
Japan Airlines will start trialling Unitree robots for moving luggage and cargo in May, with the experiment running until 2028. The airline is also planning to use the robots for cleaning aircraft cabins and eventually hopes to deploy them permenantly to help cope amid Japan’s labor shortage and rising tourism.
Project Luna — a round screen with a swiveling head that reminds me of Samsung’s “AI OLED Turntable” — offers a glimpse of what’s to come from Samsung’s design, according to chief design officer, Mauro Porcini. Samsung teased the bot in a YouTube Shorts, and now Fast Company has some exclusive details.
It finished the 21.1-kilometer race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. The world record was set just a month ago by Jacob Kiplimo, at 57 minutes and 20 seconds. More impressively, when this race was held last year, the winning robot finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes — a stunning improvement.
Correction April 19th: An earlier version used the wrong unit of measurement. A half-marathon is 21.1 kilometers, or 13.1 miles.
Just press play. Trust me. Also see this! And maybe this. I would absolutely pay for tickets to watch this live.
European Mammotion owners took to Reddit to complain that their expensive machines have been offline for three days. Mammotion says a fix is in the works, but hasn’t said what happened. One Redditor claims the outage stems from a bug in the Mammotion Home Assistant integration he had built. We’ve reached out to the company for the full story.
Google said Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 is “our safest robotics model to date,” enabling robots to reason and understand their environments with “unprecedented precision.” That includes reading instruments like pressure gauges, which Boston Dynamics demonstrates with its dog-like robot, Spot.
It didn’t take long for the latest Disney Imagineering innovation to freeze up (hah) and fall backwards in front of a small crowd of children at Disneyland Paris. Even his magnetically attached carrot nose decided to “Let It Go.”
A talented team at Saunders Machine Works in Ohio has spent the last eight years machining and building a functional replica of Johnny 5 from the 1986 film, Short Circuit. They recently shared a video of their impressive robot on Instagram showing off all of its motors and joints finally working. It’s just one lightning strike away from being alive.
