ROBOTS
Who Held the Controller? A Cage-Fight Humanoid and the BIM Model Robots Will Read
REK's remote-controlled humanoid kicked an influencer across a cage. A site robot asks who held the controller, and why your IFC doors set robot routes.
The teleop tax, paid down: 12 minutes of an installer's hands
A McGill sim buys a prefab window installer's tacit skill in 12-15 minutes of supervision at the contact-failure boundary — the teleop tax, paid down.
The hand that reports back: why 1X put its motors in the forearm
1X's NEO hand runs a 5:1–15:1 tendon drive so every grasp reports force back — and why that makes your as-built IFC the coordinate frame robots will ask for.
The robot that beat Usain Bolt still can't plug in a cable
Tiangong ran 100m in 8.86s at Beijing's 2026 robot games — then robots caught fire. Why stop distance and manual override matter more than sprint records on site.
The 2,000-franc hand that pops instead of breaking: ETH's ORCA and the repairable robot
ETH Zurich's open-source ORCA hand delivers 17-DoF dexterity for under 2,000 CHF, with poppable joints you reprint instead of replace. Why repairable wins.
StructureGS: when a Gaussian splat learns where the hinge is
StructureGS adds oriented bounding boxes to 3D Gaussian Splatting so scanned parts stay separable — why AEC teams should demand articulated deliverables.
Rehearsal without concrete: MIT's SceneSmith and the sim gap my fleet still pays for
MIT CSAIL's SceneSmith generates robot training worlds from text with GPT-5.2 agents. From the site floor: why your IFC model is the map robots actually need.
Teaching site robots to feel: touch inferred from cheap egocentric video
TouchAnything and the EgoTouch dataset infer contact and force from RGB video alone — what it means for teaching contact-rich site robots in AEC.
Asimo Retired, the G1 Shipped: What Japan's 80,000-Hour Robot Data Commons Bets On
Asimo retired unsold; the $16k Unitree G1 shipped. Inside Japan's 80,000-hour VLA data commons — and the openBIM-style bet on prototypes versus platforms.
A Site Robot's GPS Problem: Coarse-to-Fine Floorplan Localization Hits the Slab
A new arXiv method drops ray-matching for image-conditioned pose diffusion, holding sub-meter indoor localization on S3D and ZInD without lookup tables.
