DROIDS Newsletter

In this episode, I spoke with Tony Yang from Unitree to talk about what he calls the “home dog.” Quadrupeds may be the first robots that actually make sense in the home. They’re stable, already capable in real environments, and closer to practical use than humanoids. We unpack why this form factor matters and what it could mean for the future of companion robots. "Home dogs" are coming and soon. #...

Tesla doubles down on Optimus Gen 3, shifting Fremont from cars to humanoid robots and signaling a long‑term pivot from EVs to physical AI. Rivian spin‑out Mind Robotics raises a massive $500M to deploy non‑humanoid industrial robots this year, betting that boring, reliable automation still delivers the fastest ROI. We also break down the latest capability demos from Boston Dynamics’ Atlas and CES...

Industrial robotics is reaching an economic tipping point and reshaping factory strategies, while humanoid robots are edging closer to real deployments. In this episode of DROIDS, Diana breaks down Hyundai’s factory‑first Atlas roadmap, Honor’s push to turn phones and humanoids into a single AI ecosystem, and why 2026 is being framed as the year automation shifts from “nice‑to‑have” to “mandatory...

Stories about aging, for me, always begin with my own aging parent. She is in remarkable health. Intellectually sharp. She still corrects my German grammar with the patience of a retired schoolteacher. “Ganz genau,” she says when I finally get it right. She chose a secure senior community designed for safe living. She has a dog. She still meets friends at the senior center. The food is mediocre. T...

The Helix 02 video draws you in from the beginning with the sound. The gears moving as Helix approaches the dishwasher. There is no background music. No excessive production value. It is four minutes of Helix unloading a dishwasher and putting the dishes away, closing a cabinet, unloading the cups (which are plastic, hold onto that detail because it is important), stacking them and putting them aw...

NVIDIA just lobbed a heat-seeking missile at Tesla’s Full Self-Driving empire. It’s called Alpamayo , and it doesn’t just want to drive your car. It wants to reason through traffic like a real human—with verbal explanations, open-source weights, and a brain that learns from simulation. And it’s not a concept. It ships this year, in the new Mercedes-Benz CLA . As NVIDIA summed up the problem: AVs m...

For more than a decade, the humanoid robot Atlas has served as a symbol of what advanced robotics might one day achieve. Developed by the Massachusetts-based firm Boston Dynamics , the robot became widely known for demonstrations of agility and balance that circulated online, even as its commercial future remained uncertain. On Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Boston Dynamics...

I did not plan to stop in my tracks at the Humanoids Summit. But then a man wearing four robotic arms started high-fiving strangers. Summit goers stopped in awe, and he received rockstar treatment. People kept asking for selfies. The company is Psyonic . The founder is Aadeel Akhtar . What he was wearing was a costume, but it functioned as a wearable demonstration of a serious idea about how robot...

I met Vitaly Bulatov , co-founder of Ultimate Fighting Bots, at Humanoids Summit, standing next to a humanoid robot that regularly gets punched in the torso for a living. This alone sets expectations in a certain direction. Then he started talking. Bulatov is thoughtful, calm, and genuinely kind. Not the personality you expect behind a robot fighting league. Which turns out to be the point. On the...

I spent two minutes at the Humanoids Summit trying to unplug a cable. I was standing at the Lightwheel booth, holding a pair of game controllers, operating a robotic arm. The task sounded trivial: grab the connector, pull, unplug. I failed. Repeatedly. I don’t think I even came close. As a human, unplugging a cable is something you do without thinking. You grab it, wiggle a little, pull — done. Fo...

At RoboBusiness2025, I met Bren Pierce, CEO of Kinisi Robotics. This interview was recorded on October 16, 2025 “We’re starting with simple tasks to bootstrap our foundational model.” – Bren Pierce, CEO and Founder of Kinisi Robotics In an era where humanoid robots are drawing headlines for dancing, sprinting, or flipping switches with eerily human hands, Kinisi Robotics is charting a different co...

A Self-Driving Prompt “Start Self-Driving,” the Tesla urged with a prominent blue-grey button in the corner of the screen. “We should give it a go,” I encouraged as we headed home from the gym. “I’m not a fan of FSD,” my husband, who was driving, responded. “Wait until we’re on a straightaway,” I urged. “What harm could it do then?” But, once we reached a straight stretch of road, he tapped the bu...

When intelligence evolves faster than safety, humanity must stay one step ahead in the wild frontier of robotics. The latest research from leading robotics and AI experts has sparked urgent debate: Are large language models (LLMs) making robots unsafe for real-world, everyday use? A new study published in the International Journal of Social Robotics —and recently highlighted in tech news—suggests...

Editor’s Note: I could not get NotebookLM to properly pronounce NEO. (NEE-OH.) It’s not that difficult. But, it did manage every other possible pronunciation in the podcast. Other than the name butchering, the rest of the information in the pod is solid. NEO: The First Humanoid Butler? Not So Fast. 1X’s $20K home robot blends promise, privacy tradeoffs, and a human behind the scenes Welcome Your N...

At RoboBusiness this year, one of the panelists referenced Moravec’s Paradox — the idea that robots are great at tasks humans find hard like precision at scale. But, they struggle with tasks a toddler can do, like picking up a grape. The Wall Street Journal just ran a piece titled “ The ‘Hands Problem’ Holding Back the Humanoid Revolution .” It’s a phrase I’ve heard my son — a roboticist — use mor...

Every conference has that one panel where you can feel the stakes. For me, it was this one — the discussion on how the U.S. stacks up against China in robotics, and whether strategy can keep pace with scale. Inside the Santa Clara Convention Center theater, the room was filled with people who all had a vested interest in the state of robotics in the United States — engineers, founders, investors,...

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I’m a fan of Jim Fan . This clip from RoboBusiness 2025 shows why. His mix of humor and technical depth is rare—he can explain a decade of AI progress in one breath, and make the room laugh while doing it. Fan opened with a jab at AlexNet , the 2012 model that kicked off deep learning: “AlexNet was terrible.” He’s right—it confused cats and planes about...

Of Machines and Materials In a quiet lab at MIT, a subtle but powerful revolution in 3D printing has begun. It doesn’t come with dazzling AI robots or sentient chatbots. Instead, it’s all about plastic . But this is no ordinary polymer—this is plastic with a purpose. Plastic that knows where to be strong, where to be kind to the planet, and how to make robots better. This is SustainaPrint : a hybr...

A Galaxy of Builders In a galaxy not so far away — right here in the Bay Area — passionate fans are building their own droids. Since I’m part of a Star Wars costuming club myself, I see these amazing droids often. These droids are full-scale replicas, indistinguishable from the screen-used droids of Star Wars. They are perfect down to the last detail, to the point that Lucasfilm calls out the Bay...

Origins in BASIC Where It All Began with One Apple and a Lot of Typing I was lucky. In elementary school, I was in a gifted program, and our class had access to the school’s single Apple II . It wasn’t locked away in a lab. It sat in our classroom, free to use. We’d huddle in teams, cracking open the thick manual and typing out programs in BASIC line by line. Half the time, all that work only prod...

Silicon, Oil, and Grit A robot slinks into a freezing lake and swims upward like a flippered jellyfish. It’s silent, soft, and charged with 6,000 volts. No gears. No metal joints. Just three electrohydraulic flippers—like bionic fins—that bend and whip through water, pushing this little amphibian across two worlds. This isn’t concept art. It’s a working prototype by researchers at Shanghai Jiao To...

Picture a high-tech assembly hall: conveyors hum, robotic arms spin, and every second of uptime counts. Instead of trudging off to recharge, UBTECH’s Walker S2 breezes up to its swap station, ejects its spent 48 V battery, and clicks in a fresh unit—in under three minutes—then strides right back into action. No pause. No power cord. No productivity lost. Streamlined Assembly—Zero Downtime Factorie...

Urobot says hello—and analyzes your flow. At a hospital in Taiwan , patients are encountering an unexpected assistant in the restroom: a humanoid robot named Urobot , designed to analyze urine samples in real time . It’s a prototype aiming to streamline diagnostics and embed basic health screening into the flow of daily life. But as photos leaked online, one question bubbled to the surface: why do...

Google DeepMind has taken its powerful robot-controlling AI, called Gemini Robotics , and made a lightweight version that can run entirely on a robot itself , without needing internet or cloud access. This new version is called Gemini Robotics On-Device . Why it matters: Most advanced robot AIs need the cloud to work—meaning they rely on internet connections to process instructions and make decisi...

Your delivery driver now has bionic legs. A robot springs from a Rivian van and strides up your driveway. It’s carrying a package and maybe… your future? Amazon’s latest humanoid experiment is a bold bet: that bipedal bots can tackle the most chaotic leg of delivery—the part between the curb and your porch. Inside a modest-sized testing space in San Francisco—nicknamed the “humanoid park”—Amazon i...