Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

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 ...

A range of developers, including RLWRLD, Skild AI, and Flexion, are already using NVIDIA’s latest technology. | Source: NVIDIA NVIDIA Corp. today introduced GR00T 2, its updated open frontier world action model, and Isaac Lab 3.0, the latest version of its open-source robot learning framework. The company made these announcements at the Conference on Robot Learning, or CoRL, in Austin, Texas. NVIDIA also gave a look at how its partners, like Ambi Robotics , Bosch Research, Dexmate, Dyna Robotics , FieldAI , Flexion , Noitom Robotics, Siemens , Skild AI , RLWRLD , UC Berkeley , Walden Robotics , and the University of Washington, are using these technologies. In addition, NVIDIA hosted the MSIT-NVIDIA AI Startup Partnership Forum at COEX. There, the company announced an investment in South Korean startup Point2, with additional investments planned in Motif Technologies, RLWRLD, and Upstage. This week is a precarious time for NVIDIA. Yesterday, the company ‘s board opened a...

Bridging the divide between deterministic physics-based control and policy-driven adaptation, Boston Dynamics has deployed a hybrid locomotion architecture on a wheeled variant of its Atlas humanoid . The “experiment” combined classical model-based motor control with whole-body reinforcement learning to maintain dynamic stability across unstructured, real-world terrain. In the video, Andy Wu, controls engineer for Atlas at Boston Dynamics, highlights some recent experiments that he executed by attaching wheels to Atlas’ legs. Boston Dynamics is saying “a wheeled Atlas isn’t a product. It’s a research testbed.” Wu’s intention was to push the actuation to its limits. Another goal of the experiment was to understand unstructured environment adaptability. Wu addresses the limitations of purely model-based control when navigating unpredictable, real-world conditions that are difficult to model or simulate. Through a whole-body reinforcement learnin...

Wi-Fi connectivity needs to be reliable for real-time mobile robot management. Source: Synaptics An autonomous mobile robot or AMR may cross dozens of Wi-Fi coverage zones during a single shift. Each transition creates a small but potentially consequential communications problem: How does the robot find its next access point without interrupting the connection it is already using? The answer matters because AMRs , industrial inspection robots, warehouse automation, and healthcare service robots increasingly depend on continuous connectivity for  sensor data, telemetry, and control. In a conventional Wi-Fi architecture, the primary communication radio must periodically stop transmitting and receiving application traffic while it searches for alternative access points. That creates a tradeoff among connectivity, latency, power consumption, and roaming performance. A dedicated scan architecture separates network discovery from application traffic. The robot can monitor its wireles...

The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation. This month we ask whether humanoids are the future of robotics. How has the technology evolved recently, and what can we expect in the years to come? Joining the conversation this time are: Joydeep Biswas (University of Texas at Austin), Sanmay Das (Virginia Tech), Rina Dechter (University of California, Irvine), Ioannis Erripis (AIhub), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Ella Scallan (AIhub), and Marija Slavkovik (University of Bergen). Lucy Smith: There have been huge advancements in humanoid robots over the past couple of years. Today’s topic is particularly timely, as RoboCup 2026 recently took place. I thought it would be interesting to start with an overview of recent developments at RoboCup. Joydeep Biswas: This all started snowballing a couple of years ago, and we suddenly started to see this huge inflection on the capabilities. New humanoid robots were showing up at RoboCup that did...