The AI revolution is powering the robotics revolution—and now you can play!

Hugging Face, the “GitHub for AI models,” just announced a programmable, 3D-printable robotic arm that can pick up and place objects, starting at a mere $100. The arm features improved motors that reduce friction while allowing the arm to sustain its own weight and can be trained via an AI technique called reinforcement learning.

Time to get the order in and start playing…

Link to article and instructions.

Despite the seemingly negative headline, this is an incredible feat of engineering.

More than 20 two-legged robots competed in the world’s first humanoid half-marathon in China on Saturday […] The first robot across the finish line, Tiangong Ultra – created by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center – finished the route in two hours and 40 minutes.

That last statement is much more important—not the attention-grabbing headline that the robots didn’t win against their human opponents:

Alan Fern, professor of computer sciences, AI and robotics at Oregon State University, told CNN he was 'actually very impressed' that the robots managed within the time limit, saying he 'would have bet that none of them would finish.'

Link to article and video.

What happens when you create a rather powerful robot dog (the Unitree Go1), which is being used in all kinds of real-world applications – from surveillance and security to disaster recovery and beyond – and put a backdoor for easy corporate access?

Unitree did pre-install a tunnel without notifying its customers. Anybody with access to the API key can freely access all robot dogs on the tunnel network, remotely control them, use the vision cameras to see through their eyes or even hop on the RPI via ssh.

Not concerning at all…

These robot dogs are marketed at a wide spectrum of use-cases, from research in Universities, search and rescue missions from the police to military use cases in active war. Imagining a robot dog in this sensitive areas with an active tunnel to the manufacturer who can remotely control the device at will is concerning.

Link to report.

In case you missed it, GenAI promises to be a boon for robotics. One of the significant challenges in robotics is providing robots with a comprehensive understanding of the real world, which is often quite messy. By using multi-modal GenAI models, robots can gain a better understanding of their environment and respond more effectively.

Microsoft Research released Magma, a foundational model for multimodal AI agents:

Magma is a significant extension of vision-language (VL) models in that the former not only retains the VL understanding ability (verbal intelligence) of the latter, but is also equipped with the ability to plan and act in the visual-spatial world (spatial intelligence) and to complete agentic tasks ranging from UI navigation to robot manipulation. […] Magma creates new state-of-the-art results on UI navigation and robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming previous models that are tailored specifically to these tasks.

Link to Research Paper.

Turns out, robotics is hard – even for wunderkind Boston Dynamics.

Waltham-based Boston Dynamics laid off 45 employees last week, representing a reduction of five percent of the company’s workforce, The Boston Globe reports.

Link