DoorDash’s international arm Wolt has already been experimenting with Coco’s fleet of sidewalk robots in Helsinki, Finland. Now, DoorDash is linking up with sidewalk robot maker Coco to expand automated food deliveries to the US. It’s live in Los Angeles and Chicago with nearly 600 merchants set up to drop your lunch and other goods into the bellies of cute little icebox-looking bots.
In a press release, senior director of DoorDash Labs, Harrison Shih, says the Coco partnership is part of the company’s goal of becoming a “multi-modal” platform. “Not every delivery needs a 2-ton car just to deliver two chicken sandwiches,” said Shih.
Besides standard human driver deliveries and Coco bots, the company is also trying drone deliveries with Alphabet’s Wing in the US and Australia. DoorDash has so far completed over 100,000 deliveries worldwide with Coco under its initial pilot phase.
Operating delivery robots isn’t without its difficulties. Companies like Serve Robotics, which also works with Uber Eats, have teams to monitor and help their cute little sidewalk couriers if they get stuck, or rescue them after people vandalize or try to steal from them.
Samsung said on Wednesday that it’s adding Google’s Gemini AI to its home robot Ballie through a partnership with Google Cloud. Users will be able to ask the robot different queries to get answers from Gemini, said the companies. Samsung aims to tap into Gemini’s multimodal capabilities for its robot. The Korean tech giant said […]
Though Blumhouse’s first M3ganfeature was a near-perfect blend of techno-horror and ridiculous comedy, the sequel looks like it’s going to blow its predecessor out of the water.
Set a couple of years after the first film, M3gan 2.0 once again centers roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) — two of the few people who managed to survive M3gan’s (Amie Donald / Jenna Davis) initial murder spree.
As an advocate for stricter regulations on the very same kind of artificial intelligence she helped create, Gemma knows how dangerous it would be if she were to bring M3gan back. But when a defense contractor uses Gemma’s code to create an even more advanced killer robot called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), who immediately sets out to conquer the world, Gemma has no choice but to give M3gan a second chance at life.
While the first M3gan was definitely silly, this trailer’s use of “Oops!… I Did It Again” and its focus on M3gan flying through the sky in a wingsuit make clear that writer Akela Cooper and director Gerard Johnstone are fully leaning into the franchise’s camp. Blumhouse’s other recent AI panic horrors haven’t exactly sparked joy, but M3gan 2.0 feels like it’s going to be one hell of a good time when it hits theaters on June 27th.
There are 31 servo motors powering Robosen’s self-transforming Bumblebee toy. | Image: Robosen
Robosen’s partnership with Hasbro continues with a new Bumblebee self-transforming robot toy launching this summer. Powered by 31 servo motors, Bumblebee transforms from a bright yellow bot to a classic Beetle with a scaled-down design officially licensed by Volkswagen that can be driven using a smartphone and Robosen’s app. They even brought back Dan Gilvezan, who voiced Bumblebee in the ‘80s Transformers cartoon, to record over 200 lines of new dialogue.
Standing almost 15-inches tall in robot mode, Bumblebee responds to 48 voice commands but can also be controlled through Robosen’s mobile app over Bluetooth which includes a simplified block-based programming language letting you create long animated sequences.
Bumblebee shuffles along on two feet using a “new and more fluid bipedal walking algorithm,” according to Hasbro, and features a custom-designed rear axle servo-motor and steering mechanism for improved maneuverability in vehicle mode.
If you’ve got deep pockets, all four of Robosen’s Transformers toys can interact with each other and play out battle sequences, reacting to blaster hits and punches from other bots all while exchanging one-liners.
This isn’t Robosen’s first Bumblebee toy. In 2023, just ahead of the Grimlock reveal, the company released a cheaper $399 version of Bumblebee that offered similar features to this new version, including walking on two feet, but without the ability to transform into a Beetle.
The Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra is just $999.99, which is a whopping $700 discount on the cleaning machine.
Spring cleaning season is here, which is probably why we’re seeing retailers slash prices on top-tier robot vacuums like the Dreame X40 Ultra and Eufy X10 Pro Omni. Yet it’s the deal on the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra — our favorite robot vacuum overall — that stands out the most. Right now, you can buy the excellent robovac / mop hybrid for $999.99 ($700 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and directly from Roborock at this new all-time low price.
Boasting 10,000Pa of suction power, the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra delivers exceptional vacuuming performance with a pair of rubber roller brushes that can suck up dirt impressively well. It also comes with camera-equipped AI obstacle avoidance, so you don’t need to worry about it getting tangled up in clutter. The S8 Max V Ultra can additionally lift itself up to scrub your floors, courtesy of a sonic mop that vibrates up to 4,000 times a minute. That allows it to easily clean up spills, while its flexible mop arms allows the robovac to reach corners and baseboard edges for an even more thorough clean.
Aside from being a terrific vacuum and mop, the Roborock S8 Max V Ultra also offers its own on-device voice-assistant so you don’t need to use an app or buy a third-party speaker to make voice commands. That said, you can if you’d like to, given the robovac is also one of the first on the market to support Matter, making it compatible with major smart home platforms.
After 11 years, Boston Dynamics has said goodbye to its humanoid robot Atlas — but only the hydraulic version. In a video posted on YouTube, the robotics company says it’s time for Atlas to “kick back and relax” in retirement, letting the new all-electric Atlas take the reins.
The new Atlas comes with a big design change. Not only is it all-electric but it’s also outfitted with a ring light on its rounded head, along with rotating body parts that allow for improved agility and dexterity. Hopefully, this new bot will have similarly impressive dance moves to its predecessor.
Here’s a recap of Atlas’ entire history at Boston Dynamics.
Help out at home or steal your job, which path do you choose? | Image: 1X Technologies (left), Fourier (right)
Nvidia has announced that Isaac GR00T N1 — the company’s open-source, pretrained but customizable foundation model that’s designed to expedite the development and capabilities of humanoid robots — is now available. “The age of generalist robotics is here,” says Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. “With Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI.”
During his GTC 2025 keynote today, Huang demonstrated 1X’s NEO Gamma humanoid robot performing autonomous tidying jobs using a post-trained policy built on the GR00T N1 model. “The future of humanoids is about adaptability and learning,” says 1X Technologies CEO Bernt Børnich. “While we develop our own models, NVIDIA’s GR00T N1 provides a significant boost to robot reasoning and skills. With minimal post-training data, we fully deployed on NEO Gamma — advancing our mission of creating robots that are not just tools, but companions capable of assisting humans in meaningful, immeasurable ways.”
Other companies developing humanoid robots who have had early access to the GR00T N1 model include Boston Dynamics, the creators of Atlas; Agility Robotics; Mentee Robotics; and Neura Robotics.
System 1, as Nvidia calls it, is described as a “fast-thinking action model” that behaves similarly to human reflexes and intuition. It was trained on data collected through human demonstrations and synthetic data generated by Nvidia’s Omniverse platform.
System 2, which is powered by a vision language model, is a “slow-thinking model” that “reasons about its environment and the instructions it has received to plan actions.” Those plans are passed along to System 1, which translates them into “precise, continuous robot movements” that include grasping, moving objects with one or two arms, as well as more complex multistep tasks that involve combinations of basic skills.
While the GR00T N1 foundation model is pretrained with generalized humanoid reasoning and skills, developers can customize its behavior and capabilities for specific needs by post-training it with data gathered from human demonstrations or simulations.
Nvidia has made GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios available for download through Hugging Face and GitHub.
Update, March 19th: Updated comment from 1X Technologies CEO Bernt Børnich.
It is hard to describe how utterly joyless and devoid of imaginative ideas The Electric State is. Netflixâs latest feature codirected by Joe and Anthony Russo takes many visual cues from Simon StÃ¥lenhagâs much-lauded 2018 illustrated novel, but the filmâs leaden performances and meandering story make it feel like a project borne out by a streamer that sees its subscribers as easily impressed dolts who hunger for slop.Â
While you can kind of see where some of the money went, itâs exceedingly hard to understand why Netflix reportedly spent upward of $300 million to produce what often reads like an idealized, feature-length version of the AI-generated âmoviesâ littering social media. With a budget that large and a cast so stacked, you would think that The Electric State might, at the very least, be able to deliver a handful of inspired set pieces and characters capable of leaving an impression. But all this clunker of a movie really has to offer is nostalgic vibes and groan-inducing product placement.
Set in an alternate history where Walt Disneyâs invention of simple automatons eventually leads to a devastating war, The Electric State centers Michelle (Millie Bobby …
On Wednesday, Google DeepMind announced two new AI models designed to control robots: Gemini Robotics and Gemini Robotics-ER. The company claims these models will help robots of many shapes and sizes understand and interact with the physical world more effectively and delicately than previous systems, paving the way for applications such as humanoid robot assistants.
It's worth noting that even though hardware for robot platforms appears to be advancing at a steady pace (well, maybe not always), creating a capable AI model that can pilot these robots autonomously through novel scenarios with safety and precision has proven elusive. What the industry calls "embodied AI" is a moonshot goal of Nvidia, for example, and it remains a holy grail that could potentially turn robotics into general-use laborers in the physical world.
Along those lines, Google's new models build upon its Gemini 2.0 large language model foundation, adding capabilities specifically for robotic applications. Gemini Robotics includes what Google calls "vision-language-action" (VLA) abilities, allowing it to process visual information, understand language commands, and generate physical movements. By contrast, Gemini Robotics-ER focuses on "embodied reasoning" with enhanced spatial understanding, letting roboticists connect it to their existing robot control systems.
Robotics firm iRobot, originator of the robotic vacuum Roomba facing stiff competition from lower-priced competitors, told investors Tuesday that there was "substantial doubt" about the company's survival "as a going concern" in the next year or so.
Investors took iRobot at its word, and its stock price had fallen nearly 40 percent as of 10:20 am Wednesday from the day before. The dire accounting language and market reaction are nothing new for tech firms, but iRobot's annual report suggests deeper issues than investor confidence. The company saw revenue drop 47 percent in the fourth quarter, it is actively seeking to renegotiate its largest loans, and it has launched a "formal strategic review" to consider refinancing, sale, or other alternatives.
The shaky world of consumer robotics
iRobot's fortunes have changed dramatically since 2022, when Amazon announced a $1.7 billion bid to buy the struggling but prominent firm.
Google DeepMind is launching two new AI models designed to help robots “perform a wider range of real-world tasks than ever before.” The first, called Gemini Robotics, is a vision-language-action model capable of understanding new situations, even if it hasn’t been trained on them.
Gemini Robotics is built on Gemini 2.0, the latest version of Google’s flagship AI model. During a press briefing, Carolina Parada, the senior director and head of robotics at Google DeepMind, said Gemini Robotics “draws from Gemini’s multimodal world understanding and transfers it to the real world by adding physical actions as a new modality.”
The new model makes advancements in three key areas that Google DeepMind says are essential to building helpful robots: generality, interactivity, and dexterity. In addition to the ability to generalize new scenarios, Gemini Robotics is better at interacting with people and their environment. It’s also capable of performing more precise physical tasks, such as folding a piece of paper or removing a bottle cap.
“While we have made progress in each one of these areas individually in the past with general robotics, we’re bringing [drastically] increasing performance in all three areas with a single model,” Parada said. “This enables us to build robots that are more capable, that are more responsive and that are more robust to changes in their environment.”
Google DeepMind is also launching Gemini Robotics-ER (or embodied reasoning), which the company describes as an advanced visual language model that can “understand our complex and dynamic world.”
As Parada explains, when you’re packing a lunchbox and have items on a table in front of you, you’d need to know where everything is, as well as how to open the lunchbox, how to grasp the items, and where to place them. That’s the kind of reasoning Gemini Robotics-ER is expected to do. It’s designed for roboticists to connect with existing low-level controllers — the system that controls a robot’s movements — allowing them to enable new capabilities powered by Gemini Robotics-ER.
In terms of safety, Google DeepMind researcher Vikas Sindhwani told reporters that the company is developing a “layered-approach,” adding that Gemini Robotics-ER models “are trained to evaluate whether or not a potential action is safe to perform in a given scenario.” The company is also releasing new benchmarks and frameworks to help further safety research in the AI industry. Last year, Google DeepMind introduced its “Robot Constitution,” a set of Isaac Asimov-inspired rules for its robots to follow.
Google DeepMind is working with Apptronik to “build the next generation of humanoid robots.” It’s also giving “trusted testers” access to its Gemini Robotics-ER model, including Agile Robots, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and Enchanted Tools. “We’re very focused on building the intelligence that is going to be able to understand the physical world and be able to act on that physical world,” Parada said. “We’re very excited to basically leverage this across multiple embodiments and many applications for us.”
Figure is planning to bring its humanoids into the home sooner than expected. CEO Brett Adcock confirmed on Thursday that the Bay Area robotics startup will begin “alpha testing” its Figure 02 robot in the home setting later in 2025. The executive says the accelerated timeline is a product of the company’s “generalist” Vision-Language-Action (VLA) […]
Apptronik, an Austin-based maker of humanoid robots, on Tuesday announced a new pilot partnership with American supply chain/manufacturing stalwart, Jabil. The deal arrives two weeks after Apptronik announced a $350 million Series A financing round aimed at scaling up production of its Apollo robot. The Jabil deal is the second major pilot announced by Apptronik. […]
On Wednesday, Clone Robotics released video footage of its Protoclone humanoid robot, a full-body machine that uses synthetic muscles to create unsettlingly human-like movements. In the video, the robot hangs suspended from the ceiling as its limbs twitch and kick, marking what the company claims is a step toward its goal of creating household-helper robots.
Poland-based Clone Robotics designed the Protoclone with a polymer skeleton that replicates 206 human bones. The company built the robot with the hopes that it will one day be able to operate human tools and perform tasks like doing laundry, washing dishes, and preparing basic meals.
The Protoclone reportedly contains over 1,000 artificial muscles built with the company's "Myofiber" technology, which builds on the McKibbin pneumatic muscle concept. These muscles work through mesh tubes containing balloons that contract when filled with hydraulic fluid, mimicking human muscle function. A 500-watt electric pump serves as the robot's "heart," pushing fluid at 40 standard liters per minute.
Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock Thursday revealed a new machine learning model for humanoid robots. The news, which arrives two weeks after Adcock announced the Bay Area robotics firm’s decision to step away from an OpenAI collaboration, is centered around Helix, a “generalist” Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. VLAs are a new phenomenon for robotics, leveraging […]
The Roomba Combo i5 can vacuum and mop for just $189, which is a 40 percent discount.
Looking for a robot vacuum or mop that won’t set you back a few hundred dollars? Right now, Verge readers can pick up the Roomba Combo i5 — the upgrade to our top budget pick, the Roomba i3 Evo — from Wellbots for a new low of $189 ($160 off) with offer VERGE160. The Roomba Combo j5, which is nearly identical to the i5, is also down $239 ($290 off) at Wellbots when you use promo code 210VERGE. Both deals run through the end of tomorrow, February 15th.
Like the aforementioned Roomba i3 Evo, both robot vacuums offer wide, dual rubber brushes that do a terrific job of sucking up dirt and debris from both hardwood and carpets. They’re also packed with features that speed up and simplify the cleaning process, even if they lack the optional auto-empty dock. For instance, both offer vSLAM mapping tech and room-specific cleaning, which lets you program them to clean specific rooms at specific times. You can also control them using either an app or your voice, thanks to their support for virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant. And, like all Roombas, they’re relatively easy to repair, so you don’t have to worry about buying a new model each time you run into an issue.
Additionally, both the Combo i5 and j5 offer basic mopping capabilities, though you’ll need to swap out the rear dustbin for one that includes a water tank and a reusable pad when it’s time to do so. The Combo j5 offers a few other enhancements — including AI-powered obstacle avoidance, which is typically reserved for higher-end Roombas like the Roomba Combo j9 Plus. The step-up model also allows for keep-out zones and no-mop zones, two features the i5 and i3 Evo lack.
A few more deals and discounts
You can currently pick up the 8BitDo Pro 2 Bluetooth Gamepad starting at $38.39 ($11 off) at Amazon, which is an all-time low. The excellent wireless controller features drift-free Hall effect sticks and boasts two customizable paddles, along with three custom profiles and USB-C for relatively fast charging. It also supports Bluetooth connectivity, meaning you can pair it with consoles like the Nintendo Switch, PC, Android, and plenty of other devices.
The Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam is available for $59.99 ($20 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, and Ring, which is $10 shy of its best price to date. It features a rotating head that automatically tilts and offers 360-degree panning, ensuring you can see every corner of your room. The wired 1080p HD camera also features support for two-way talk, color night vision, a built-in siren, and a manual privacy shutter that blocks all audio and video. You can also get motion alerts with person detection and recorded video if you opt for a Ring Protect Plan, which starts at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Read our hands-on impressions.
JBL’s Tour Pro 3 are on sale for $249.95 ($50 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and directly from JBL, which matches their lowest price to date. The wireless earbuds offer good sound and noise cancellation, though it’s the included charging case that differentiates them the most. The latter features a 1.57-inch touchscreen display that lets you see who’s calling or the current song, along with other info; it also doubles as a Bluetooth transmitter, so you can pair the earbuds with in-flight entertainment systems or other wired sources.
Meta is planning to design the hardware and software for humanoid robots, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the outlet that a newly formed team within Meta’s Reality Labs division will start by working on “humanoid robot hardware” capable of completing household chores.
Bloomberg notes that Meta has broader goals of making “the underlying AI, sensors and software for robots that will be manufactured and sold by a range of companies.” That means the company might not make a Meta-branded robot to start. It’s in discussions with robotics companies like Unitree Robotics and Figure AI about its plans, Bloomberg reports.
“The core technologies we’ve already invested in and built across Reality Labs and AI are complementary to developing the advancements needed for robotics,” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, wrote in a memo seen by Bloomberg. “We believe that expanding our portfolio to invest in this field will only accrue value to Meta AI and our mixed and augmented reality programs.”
Tesla already showed off humanoid robots of its own, while other tech giants have begun to dip into the robotics industry. Recent research conducted by Apple gave us a glimpse at a Pixar-style lamp that interacts with users through voice commands and gestures. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that the company is exploring “both humanoid and non-humanoid robots for its future smart home ecosystem.” Nvidia also has big ambitions for the future of robotics.
As Meta continues to dive deeper into AI with a $65 billion investment, it’s also ramping up its efforts to sell its smart glasses. Bloomberg reports that Meta has hired John Koryl, the former CEO of The RealReal — a site where users can buy and sell luxury items — to serve as its vice president of retail.
Apptronik, a University of Texas spin-out that was quietly building humanoid robots before it became quite so fashionable, on Thursday announced a $350 million Series A round of financing. B Capital and Capital Factory co-led the round, which also featured participation from Google, whose DeepMind division is partnering with Apptronik to deliver embodied AI for […]
Apple is exploring both humanoid and non-humanoid robotic form factors, according to a new scoop from longtime Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The intel comes on the heels of a research paper from the iPhone maker that explores human interactions with “non-anthropomorphic” robots — specifically a Pixar-style lamp. While Apple’s research paper highlights elements that could […]
