Robot

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.

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.

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.

Roughly 50 staffers at Fauna — the startup behind the three-and-a-half foot tall bipedal machine called Sprout — will now be joining the e-commerce giant. While Bloomberg reports that Amazon isn’t planning to deploy the robot in its operations, leaked documents have already revealed Amazon’s goal to replace 600,000 future workers with automation.

Coco Robotics, which makes autonomous delivery robots, announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with Niantic Spatial, the AI spinoff of the Pokémon Go developer. Niantic’s geospatial AI model, which was trained on images from AR scans in Pokémon Go, will help Coco’s robots find their way to your house.

After acquiring Arduino last October Qualcomm has announced a new single-board computer called the Ventuno Q. Pricing and availability aren’t known, but it will be powered by a Dragonwing IQ8 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 40 TOPS NPU. It’s designed for building robots and machines that function autonomously in response to input from connected sensors.

Honor’s gimbal-equipped smartphone is here at MWC, and unlike at CES, it’s actually turned on. I got to see the phone unfold, look around, and dance to Imagine Dragons, and Honor has promised me I should see a few new demos on its booth tomorrow.

Honor’s press pass for its MWC press conference is a cute tease for the planned reveal of more details on the Robot Phone. Less cute? The pre-recorded applause being piped through the auditorium at regular intervals.

The Chinese smartphone company says it will reveal a humanoid robot at MWC this week, which I’m told will focus on domestic tasks. It’s a big change for the company, even with the Robot Phone also on the way, but makes more sense when you know it has an IPO in its future.

The shift comes just a few months after Amazon launched Blue Jay in October, calling it “an extra set of hands” for warehouse employees. Blue Jay wasn’t designed for the smaller, more flexible same-day delivery centers Amazon is focusing on now, though, including micro-fulfillment centers in the back of Whole Foods stores, as Business Insider reports.

Cardi had a little fun with a pint-sized humanoid in San Francisco. She ran her hands over its tiny silver body, got a little flirty, and then seemingly was caught off guard by its weight. She put her arms around its neck, it tilted forward, and they both hit the pavement.

DOJ documents released last week contain a $3 million funding request from roboticist David Hanson to build an “attractive female android,” complete with a “working gorgeous robot face and body.” The proposal includes a rough sketch of the “gynoid,” noting “the final design will be done collaboratively with you.”