ROBOTS
The robot arm that put its motors in the basement
Disney Research's fluid transmission delivers 4.5 Nm at 120 grams by moving the motors to the torso — and moves robot-cell safety from software into hardware.
Arduino is a Qualcomm company now — what that changes on a studio bench
Arduino is now a Qualcomm company. What that changes on a studio bench — and how arduino-cli, sketch.yaml pinning and sha256 manifests keep builds reproducible.
Matador Lost Its Head — and the Only Thing Left to Watch Was the Software
A T800 humanoid lost its head at Shenzhen's URKL tournament — 32 teams, one chassis, $1.44M belt. The real story is the safety envelope the policy ignored.
GAF: the 4D robotics plugin your atelier should commission, not license
Gaussian Action Field extends 3D splatting into a 4D robotic-manipulation engine. Why Swiss ateliers should commission it, not license its wrapper.
The blurry-mean trap: why your AV (and BIM) model can score well and still be wrong
An arXiv diffusion world model shows SSIM and cosine metrics reward useless blur — the evaluation lesson every AEC ML pipeline needs. Plus a 3-line Python check.
When the camera blinks: a robot that retrieves its way through sensor dropout
A new arXiv method, RL4IL, handles missing camera or language inputs by retrieving donor demonstrations — RAG for robot hands, and an AEC reliability lesson.
Japan's teleoperated construction giant, read from the floor: amplify, don't replace
Jinki Ittai's giant construction humanoid is teleoperated, not autonomous — what that means for European sites, EU machinery law, and the torque math vendors skip.
The planner that braked for a building: CADET audits the shortcuts your robot already learned
CADET audits and repairs causal confusion in deployed end-to-end driving planners with no retraining — and why post-hoc AI auditing matters for AEC.
A Robot With No Hard Parts: Topology Optimization Designs a Soft Fish Tail
TO-SoFiT uses topology optimization to co-design a hydraulic soft fish tail with programmable, pressure-tunable undulating locomotion — and public code to try.
A $700 Open Drone-Watcher and What a Site Robot Reads Into It
DroneShield-AI puts frontier sensor fusion and graph-attention swarm analysis on $700 open hardware — and the same machinery reads your IFC model and site mesh.
