Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Four of the six robots pass a performance assessment as the trial puts customer service, retail operations and embodied AI capabilities to the test in a working store.   Six AGIBOT G2 wheeled humanoid robots completed a 24-hour trial at an operating convenience store in Shanghai’s Xuhui District, performing a combined 1,730 tasks ranging from customer assistance and coffee preparation to shelf restocking and cleaning. The trial ran from 10 a.m. on November 2 to 10 a.m. on November 3 and was livestreamed to an audience of more than two million viewers across online platforms. Four of the six robots passed the final performance assessment. The event marked the conclusion of AGIBOT’s AI WAVE technology showcase, launched on October 22. Following a series of releases spanning robotics data, simulation, AI models, hardware and operational software, the convenience store trial brought these technologies together in a real-world setting to examine how robots perform everyda...

Rhoda pretrains its models on internet-scale video to build a strong prior on motion, physics, and physical interaction. | Source: Rhoda AI Earlier this year, Rhoda AI emerged from 18 months of stealth with $450 million in Series A funding. The company is working with customers in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce to deploy its direct video action, or DVA, model for robotics. “We’re focused on deploying in the real world, and that means you have to deal with the messiness of the real world. Every run can be different,” Jagdeep Singh, the co-founder and CEO of Rhoda AI, told  The Robot Report . “Every configuration can be different, and you need a really robust model. To build a robust model, you need a massive training dataset.” A large training dataset is exactly what allowed large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to rapidly progress in recent years. Physical AI has trailed behind those models because the same dataset doesn’t exist for the ph...

Claire chatted to Daniela Shchegelskaya from the University of Twente about getting robots to operate reliably in safety-critical environments. Daniela Shchegelskaya is an electronics and robotics engineer specialising in autonomous systems, control engineering, and Al-driven robotics for industrial and safety-critical environments. She works on deploying real-world autonomous robots beyond lab conditions, focusing on reliability, connectivity, and system-level design. At Elimpus, she works on the integration of Boston Dynamics’ Spot for inspections in live power substations, including autonomous navigation, network connectivity, remote diagnostics, data collection and system-level reliability. View Source

NVIDIA says it will continue to support customers amid its leadership changes. Source: NVIDIA After a tumultuous week that saw NVIDIA Corp.’s stock drop by about 18.5%, CEO Jensen Huang has stepped down. The company today said it has appointed Collette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer, as interim CEO and investor Harvey C. Jones as its first board chair. Huang, who is one of the most recognizable figures in AI, recently admitted to extramarital affairs including with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Megaspeed who is suspected of being a Chinese spy, and Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. “To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me,” Jensen Huang wrote in a statement on Nov. 8. “Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s board of directors has in...

Viam provides a software platform to ease robotics development. Source: Viam Returning from  RoboBusiness  and  RobOpsCon , I have never felt more optimistic about the robotics — I mean the physical AI — industry. Billion-dollar valuations and groundbreaking technology continue to outpace yesterday’s innovations at warp speed. At the same time, too many brilliant entrepreneurs are languishing in taking their ideas from the lab to market. These startups , led by domain experts, are on a mission to automate their industries. However, they get stuck in ROS purgatory, unable to turn pilots into revenue-generating bots. In 2020, Eliot Horowitz set out to create a better way to build and deploy smart machines. Drawing on his experience as co-founder and chief technology officer of MongoDB , Horowitz created Viam, a universal software abstraction layer for building and deploying hardware systems across enterprise fleets, or, as the company describes it, “The harness for physica...

Praxis-1 builds on Runway’s work as a founding member of the Cosmos Coalition, advancing open world models for physical AI. | Source: Runway Runway AI Inc. yesterday released Praxis-1, its world action model for robotics. The model is now available to developers with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license. Runway first announced Praxis-1 in September with launch partners including Noble Machines , Standard Bots , and Ultra . Since then, these companies have been running the model on their own hardware, including a legged humanoid , a six-axis industrial arm, and a dual-arm warehouse robot. “A strong base model goes a long way. Earlier, with Noble Machines, our previous model needed a lot of training to learn their warehouse task: picking up wooden planks one at a time and placing them in a container,” Andy Chen, the head of robotics at Runway, told The Robot Report . “Praxis-1, built with more compute and data, learned it from half an hour of examples and got ...