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Iván Hernández Dalas: Groceryshop 2026 shows that retail robots are ready to scale, use AI

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Groceryshop 2026 provided an opportunity to assess the state of retail robotics. Source: Georges Mirza It has been more than a decade since I first helped to bring robots to live retail center stores. Long gone are retailers’ concerns about robots taking jobs, scaring kids, accidentally bumping into shoppers, or simply disrupting the grocery shopping experience. It is good to see how much the industry has advanced; we have come a long way. Now that we are seeing scale, we can start using near-real-time shelf insights across more retail solutions . In this AI age of disruption, there is no excuse for not prioritizing and benefiting from these insights. Is the broader retail solution space ready to advance and make this data actionable? I attended Groceryshop 2026 last month to find out. Simbe continues to scale with Tally robot The major announcement came from Simbe Robotics , which has now completed the rollout of 3,000 Tally robots globally across retailers and countries. With...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Why humanoid robot demos still fail the generalization test

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The Robot Report Podcast · Why humanoid robot demos still fail the generalization test Jeanine Sinanan-Singh, director of GenAI research at Appen. In Episode 265 of The Robot Report Podcast, our guest is Jeanine Sinanan-Singh, director of generative AI Research at Appen. She discusses the continuing importance of humans in the loop for training robots. Sinanan-Singh works on agentic evals, RL environments, and dataset design for post-training frontier AI models. She also explains why impressive demonstrations don’t necessarily prove that robotic behavior can be generalized. Sinanan-Singh previously founded a pharmacy automation startup built on a 3D-printing platform to manufacture personalized medications. A Harvard graduate with prior experience at Microsoft and Surge, she is a frequent voice on AI evaluation and reasoning. Show timeline 8:10 – News of the week 29:06 – Jeanine Sinanan-Singh , director of GenAI Research at Appen News of the week Bost...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Boston Dynamics gives more insight into its redesigned humanoid hand

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Boston Dynamics said its new hand is still capable of handling over 100 lb. | Source: Boston Dynamics Last week, Boston Dynamics Inc. gave a look at its new humanoid robot hand. The four-fingered hand has 13 degrees of freedom, or DoF, and is directly actuated. The company said it designed it for mass manufacturing. Lots of things immediately stand out about the hand. Notably, Boston Dynamics has dropped the pinky finger and reduced the size of the gripper . Less obviously, the company said it built the new hand for high-fidelity simulation to enable sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL). To learn more about the new hand,  The Robot Report spoke with Alberto Rodriguez , the director of robot behavior for Atlas at Boston Dynamics. What did Boston Dynamics learn from its humanoid trials that it applied to the new hand? Rodriguez: Having a product roadmap for Atlas has been a key enabler when it came to making hard decisions like what is the right level of complexity that we sh...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Robot Talk Episode 165 – Robots behind the research, with Kushant Patel

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Claire chatted to Kushant Patel from Brookhaven National Laboratory about robots that work in scientific facilities, such as particle accelerators. Kushant Patel builds software that helps robots and instruments perceive, map, and move through the physical world. After completing a Master’s in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo, he spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley teaching quadruped robots to map and inspect nuclear material, and a year at the University of California, Davis building closed-loop brain-computer interfaces. At Brookhaven National Laboratory, he is developing control systems for advanced synchrotron beamlines. View Source
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Iván Hernández Dalas: SafeWorld emerges from stealth to build, deploy robot safety simulation technologies

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SafeWorld said its platform can work in a range of industries with a range of robot embodiments, including robots arms, humanoids, mobile robots, and more. | Source: SafeWorld SafeWorld this week emerged from stealth with $12.2 million in seed funding. The startup aims to make safety testing on AI-powered robots easier with its simulation technology. “Our point of view is that if you’re going to have more capable robots, it just makes sense that you need to have more capable ways to test and to validate those robots,” Kyle Wong, co-founder and CEO of SafeWorld, told  The Robot Report . “Otherwise, you’re not going to deploy those robots.” “We already have been using robots for maybe 100 years,” said Ding Zhao, co-founder of SafeWorld and director of the Safe AI Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. “We started the company today because, when AI came, it actually brought automation to the next level. The robots, for the first time, were allowed to go out of the c...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Helm.ai reaches $70M in signed commercial contracts for its foundation models

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Helm.ai said it has commercial partners spanning perception, full-stack autonomous driving, automated data labeling, and generative simulation. | Source: Helm.ai Helm.ai today said it has signed $70 million in commercial contracts for its foundation models for physical AI over a 12-month period. These contracts spanned global automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, and industrial automation companies. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company considers the automotive industry as its flagship deployments, which involve deep partnerships. But, it also has partnerships with customers in mining and construction . “Those kinds of projects coming to that level of maturity are super exciting for us, because it demonstrates that there’s a real demand for the technology that we’ve built,” Vladislav Voroninski, founder and CEO of Helm.ai, told The Robot Report . “ It’s clearly crossing that threshold into actually being deployed in the real world,” “Also, as a company, we’r...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: AWS launches open-source Physical AI Toolchain for robotics

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) today launched an open-source Physical AI Toolchain designed to help roboticists move from collecting data to training, simulating, validating and deploying AI models on their robots. The toolchain brings together AWS services and NVIDIA’s Physical AI software stack into a single development workflow. The goal is to address one of the biggest challenges facing companies developing AI-powered robots: connecting the many pieces required to turn a trained model into a system that can reliably operate in the real world. “We’re trying to make this easy button, if you will, so that people can actually focus on the problem that they’re trying to solve rather than having to worry about all of the infrastructure,” Sri Elaprolu, director of Frontier AI Science and Engineering at AWS, told The Robot Report . The Physical AI Toolchain is not a direct replacement for RoboMaker, a  cloud-based robotics simulation platform that was shut down in 202...
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