ROBOTS
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.
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.
