Bot News

Robotics and AI research coverage beyond the press release. Articles written by engineers for the highest quality take.

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👁️The most dangerous AI failure in the DoW will not look like a hallucination.

👁️It will look formal, defensible, and audit-ready.

👁️Then it will be approved, inherited, and believed.

👁️I call that pathway the Reliability Kill Chain

👁️Why "human in the loop" is not enough:

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https://t.co/PKIYLaSGjh

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@adcock_brett

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Rise of the robot pets! 🐕🤖

We’re entering the cutest era of robotics.

Engineers are working day and night on the physical AI problems: control, contact, sim-to-real, hardware reliability and getting learned behaviors to survive outside the lab.

And somewhere along the way, we get this.

@_raghuvamsi filmed one of @eyecandyrobots’ characters wandering around the Presidio, where a little girl spotted it and immediately started laughing and playing with it.

There’s something joyfully familiar about that reaction. Before we learn what something is, what it costs or what it’s supposed to do, sometimes we just want to meet it.

@eyecandyrobots is building physical AI characters,
robots designed around entertainment, personality and interaction rather than industrial work.

Founded by @_raghuvamsi, @Mankaran32 and @pr0t0_01, the team brings robotics engineers, animators and designers together to turn animated characters into physical ones.

Underneath the cute exterior is serious robotics work:

☑️Animation-based reinforcement learning for character motion
☑️ Artist-centric human-robot interaction
☑️Mechanical, electronics and AI systems designed to scale across different characters
☑️ Simulation, SLAM, deep learning and control-policy deployment on real hardware

The transparent little robot really looks like that.

I asked Eyecandy engineer @hi_gpaul how they made its clear body: it’s 3D printed using transparent resin, followed by “a bunch of post processing.”

Eyecandy is backed by @fdotinc and Lightspeed India, and the team is already thinking beyond a single character.

The robots are becoming useful.

I’m also very happy that some of them are becoming friends. 🦖

🔗 https://t.co/odDpP6uvLY☑️
⭐️ @BotNewsAI stay connected to emerging tech

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@jeffboudier This video is on an infinite loop for us. lol

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@CryptoReeselnd @MoneyLord @huggingface @pollenrobotics And you can take them to the skatepark with their skate mode!

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If you haven’t heard the Microducks sing you’re missing out 🦆🎶

@huggingface w/ @pollenrobotics just opened pre-orders for Microduck, a 25 cm, under-800 g biped that somehow manages to be both an RL robotics platform and a tiny mechanical duck I desperately want wandering around my workshop.

It has 15 degrees of freedom, a camera, two IMUs, an 8×8 time-of-flight depth sensor and an articulated beak. Its policies run onboard at 50 Hz, with skills trained in MuJoCo using reinforcement learning and transferred onto the real robot.

But please return your attention to the duck choir.

Every Microduck gets its own generated voice, derived from its SoC serial. Put multiple ducks together and they can perform a chorale over Bluetooth.

There’s no shared clock. The lowest-ID duck conducts, broadcasts the beat through BLE advertisements, and the others average their timing over roughly 25 beats to stay synchronized. They even work out who sings bass, tenor and the remaining parts without a central controller assigning them.

You can also wave your hand in front of the depth sensor and turn the duck into a theremin. Obviously.

The software stack is open source, including the SDK, simulator and RL training stack, so owners can retrain behaviors and deploy their own policies. The hardware itself is not open source.

Pre-orders opened today at $399, with deliveries targeted before Christmas.

My duck is secured 🦆

Microduck:
https://t.co/GXJz2FotgL

Technical docs:
https://t.co/MO8bt1NlUW

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@ErinMondays @huggingface @pollenrobotics lol the sound of heaven

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@alrightdo @lightberry @NBCTheVoice if @AGT can have robots audition so can you 😆 Let Lumi sing!

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@mindinpanic @adcock_brett Totally. Startups when from “gaah stop bugging us with your egocentric data pitches” to “wait we’re sorry come back” but if you can afford to do it yourself like @Figure_robot that quality specificity is vital.

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Need a weirdly easy side hustle?

Figure will now pay approved users by the minute to do normal things inside their own homes while generating training data for humanoid robots.

Taking the trash out doesn’t feel so bad when @adcock_brett is paying you

#jobs #tech #news

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Need a weirdly easy side hustle?

Figure will now pay approved users by the minute to do normal things inside their own homes while generating training data for humanoid robots.

Taking the trash out doesn't feel so bad when Brett Adcock is paying you https://t.co/eIn1oXhlk6

[Joseph Sottile 🌊 | Diffraction @Joesott]

Have been building an awesome robot training data pilot.

If this is of interest to you, let’s get you involved!

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Need a weirdly easy side hustle?

Figure will now pay approved users by the minute to do normal things inside their own homes while generating training data for humanoid robots.

Taking the trash out doesn't feel so bad when Brett Adcock is paying you https://t.co/eIn1oXhlk6

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@asimovinc We’re so excited for you!!

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@adcock_brett We’ll be looking forward to it 👀

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Yes! And over time, if inference latency between reasoning steps approaches zero, the constraint shifts right? We stop budgeting time around the model and start budgeting it around sensing, verification, networks, and action itself. Strategic response starts approaching machine time.

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https://t.co/kQmxwRwD6c

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@Scobleizer @pinkfloyd So exciting!! Summer in robotics was anything but a vacation. Big things happening. 🦾

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@AGIBOTofficial AGIBOT champions!! We are proud of you🎉🥇
Winning the emergency/library scenarios is big 🦾
@AGIBOT_US

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@RemiCadene We love our open source avengers!! 🦾