Robot

The Tesla CEO and X CTO / owner writes that “I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” and proposed building products (like Grok?) outside of Tesla instead.

Its new AI Agent may have Rosey the Robot aspirations — but do you need a robot with “personality” to control smart home devices and clean up after your cat?

The company revealed the bot ahead of its appearance at CES 2024, which it’s touting as an “all-around home manager and companion.”

The latest Tesla Bot is a little bit lighter, walks faster, and balances better with improvements throughout, including in the function of its neck, feet, and hands. But is it the “friend” Elon Musk says will cost “much less than $20,000” and allow for “a future where there is no poverty?” Probably not.

A couple weeks ago, I flew out to Hollywood to check out Serve Robotics, a company that’s using a fleet of shopping cart-sized robots to make Uber Eats deliveries. We spoke to the people who are working behind-the-scenes to make robot delivery happen, including supervisors, field agents, and even the CEO. We even interviewed the guy behind the viral TikTok account where he just yells at the robots.

EU regulators have set a February 14th deadline to decide on the $1.7 billion deal first announced over a year ago. The previous deadline was December 13th. Amazon wants to acquire the robotic vacuum company that can map the inside of your home to help make ambient intelligence a reality. So far, the EU doesn’t seem to love the idea.

At about noon local time, Oregon State University warned the campus of a bomb threat targeting Starship autonomous food delivery robots. About an hour later, officials gave the all-clear.

Here’s how Amazon described its test of Agility Robotics’ bi-pedal Digit robot in a press release yesterday:

Disney recently showed off bipedal droids that look exactly like something you’d see in a Star Wars movie, and now Disney’s Imagineers are testing the droids at Disneyland, as reported by Disneyland News Today. I love them!!

Anybody have some money they can lend me for this? I’ll pay you back after I save the galaxy over the course of 49 episodes.

A new video shows off the company’s Optimus robot running through some calibration cycles for its limbs before successfully putting matching colored blocks with their corresponding trays. It’s a menial task that the Tesla Bot has done before, but this time a human tries to confuse it. The bot then relieves stress with some yoga poses. You know, bot stuff.

The Dreame Roboticmower A1, a new robot lawnmower, can tackle yards as large as half an acre, which is good news for us Americans with big yards.

Developer Charlie Diaz has created a miniature prototype complete with functional robotic arms. His guide uses a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, an 8BitDo bluetooth remote, and a 3D printer. Diaz originally tried a full-sized costume, but found that its legs “contacted the ground and got stuck, preventing the walking motion”.

Today I learned there’s a piano-playing animatronic puppet that’s been roaming around San Francisco serenading the locals with Vanessa Carlton’s hit single A Thousand Miles.

At a time when two of Hollywood’s three big labor unions are striking over — among other things — the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools that stand to threaten their livelihoods, the latest trailer for Gareth Edwards’ The Creator just hits... you know, different.

After lingering too long in arm wrestling YouTube, so now the site’s algorithm now thinks it’s all I care about. As an unironic fan of Over the Top, a sweaty Sylvester Stallone film about a truck driver who joins an arm-wrestling tournament to win the love of his son, I’m not sure it’s wrong.

Last week, Will Cogley published a video showing how he fused a vintage TV with animatronics and Alexa to create something infinitely more charming than Amazon’s Astro.

Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Small Artifacts Lab are working on a “wearable robot” called Calico. It appears that you sew a magnetic track onto your clothing, which Calico uses to run up and down your body.

When we wrote about Engineered Arts’ Ameca android last year, the company said it wants to integrate chatbot functionality, and since then it has done so, using one of the most prominent chatbots, ChatGPT-3 (GPT-4 was too slow). In his conversation with The Verge, Engineered Arts CEO Will Jackson said: