DROIDS Newsletter

A Festival Encounter Sparks a Vision At the bustling VegFest food festival in Santa Cruz, where the scent of sizzling jackfruit mingled with the chatter of kombucha fans, my son Alexander W. Torres —fresh from his robotics grad lab—froze mid-bite. His eyes had locked onto a squat, rugged machine parked nonchalantly beside an old green bus. “That’s an ag bot,” he said, handing me his plate without...

🧃 Preview Day: Free Mugs and First Looks The parking lot was packed. We know it well—it’s the same plaza as Illusive Comics, where we’ve suited up with the 501st Legion on Free Comic Book Days. A friendly security guard waved us in and handed us each a collectible mug. It wasn’t even noon and the nerd joy was already brewing. Inside? Aisles of GPUs, CPUs, SSDs, and peripherals, all glistening und...

Welcome to the Dreamscape A small, wide-eyed robot closes its eyes. A glowing bubble floats above its head, filled with images of laundry, soft toys, and a robotic arm folding shirts in a sunlit bedroom. This isn't a Pixar short. It's a test project built using Google Veo, inspired by a very real breakthrough in robotic learning: NVIDIA's new DreamGen framework. (To clarify, I read a paper by Jim...

The Brain Awakens: Beomni’s AI Core While headlines fixate on the form—yet another biped in a growing crowd of humanoid contenders—Beyond Imagination’s real play is upstairs. Beomni’s AI “brain” isn’t just coded intelligence; it’s designed to think, adapt, and perform complex tasks with a level of generality that echoes the ambitions of AGI itself. Unlike single-purpose factory bots, Beomni’s arch...

In a landmark move poised to redefine Sweden’s technological landscape, a consortium of leading Swedish enterprises—AstraZeneca, Ericsson, Saab, SEB, and Wallenberg Investments—has partnered with NVIDIA to establish the nation’s most advanced AI infrastructure. Announced on May 24, 2025, this initiative aims to construct a sovereign AI supercomputer, marking a significant stride in Sweden’s digita...

It’s a crisp Tuesday morning, and the Tesla mobile service technician shows up at 8:32 AM—just two minutes into his time window. He’s smiling, friendly, and remembers both my husband and me from a previous visit. In that moment, I’m reminded why we’ve kept our Teslas. Service that comes to you, without upsells or stress. It’s seamless, personal, and quietly revolutionary. And then—like a software...

At the 2025 Milken Institute Global Conference, Alexis Ohanian, Reddit cofounder and investor, spotlighted the transformative potential of robotics in the home-particularly in promoting gender equality in caregiving and domestic labor. Ohanian drew a compelling parallel: just as washing machines revolutionized household work in the 20th century, affordable household robots could soon help rebalanc...

Thailand has taken a futuristic step in law enforcement with the debut of its first AI-powered police robot, officially named "AI Police Cyborg 1.0," at the country's renowned Songkran festival in Nakhon Pathom province this April 2025. Towering above human officers in its crisp police uniform, this technological sentinel represents the Royal Thai Police's ambitious integration of artificial intel...

If you grew up in the 80s, there was no escaping Olivia Newton-John’s catchy hit tune: “ Let’s Get Physical. ” It was everywhere —and suddenly everyone was wearing headbands and leggings, whether this was a good fashion-choice or not. Thankfully, this fashion craze did not survive into the AI era. But the phrase stuck. Sort of. These days, the word "physical" has less to do with spandex and more t...

In the realm where imagination meets innovation, Disney’s BDX droids are breaking the mold—melding expressive storytelling with advanced robotics to create free-roaming characters that are uncannily lifelike. At the NVIDIA GTC keynote, I watched the crowd leap to its feet (annoyingly, since I was sitting behind them) the moment one of these bots appeared. They’re absolute magic. And people know it...