ROBOTS
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.
SONG rehearses the crowd before the robot walks your lobby
SONG's 3D Gaussian splatting simulator trains social-navigation robots on photoreal crowds — and turns every public splat-twin into a Swiss data-residency question.
Tesla built Optimus's factory before it showed the robot — and that inversion is the story
Tesla is converting a Fremont car line to build Optimus before revealing it — why the humanoid bottleneck moved from the demo to actuator supply and line rate.
One sparse factor, three passes: DiffPhD rewires the soft-body solver stack
DiffPhD, a GPU differentiable solver, stays stable at 100x stiffness contrast and runs 10x faster — bringing gradient-based form-finding to the AEC desk.
Astrobee: The Open-Source Robot Lesson for Every Site Crew
NASA's Astrobee free-flyer runs an open ROS stack students can program in orbit. Why a readable, resettable robot beats the sealed demo on any site.
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.
