#robotics

TechCrunch launches a dedicated track for physical-world AI applications at its October conference, featuring robotics, de-extinction, and edge computing leaders.

Analysis of Tesla earnings transcripts shows Elon Musk now spends nearly half his speaking time on AI, robotaxis, and Optimus—a dramatic shift from automotive focus.

Google DeepMind expands its Gemini Robotics AI model to control entire humanoid robots, enabling complex locomotion and dexterous manipulation tasks.

Gemini Robotics ER 2 enables robots to reason about physical tasks, collaborate across multiple units, and adapt in real time using continuous video feeds.

Gemini Robotics 2 enables humanoids to perform dexterous tasks and coordinate with other robots, with on-device inference for rapid adaptation to new embodiments.

A German robotics startup is recruiting home cooks and chefs to film their hand movements for AI training, offering free meals and cleaning services in exchange for first-person video data.

While robotic hands and AI breakthroughs dominate headlines, MIT Technology Review highlights the overlooked—and deliberately unsexy—developments reshaping the industry.

New robotics startup prioritizes human-robot interaction design over raw model capability, launching public experiments with 100+ proprietary robots.

Startups are pairing neuroscience headsets with robot training to tag real-world manipulation data with cognitive signals, betting this could accelerate physical AI development.

Nvidia Jetson chips will power rovers and satellites on the lunar surface, marking a major shift in space robotics toward edge AI processing.

Kalanick's manufacturing-focused startup Atoms closed a $1.7B Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Uber and Bain Capital.

Anthropic and Physical Intelligence held acquisition talks this spring, rekindling debate over AI labs' pivot toward embodied reasoning.

GPU-accelerated physics engines are becoming essential for robotics development, shifting simulation from a debugging tool to a core component of AI model training pipelines.

Hugging Face releases Grabette, a low-cost handheld gripper system that democratizes robot learning data collection without requiring expensive teleoperation rigs or lab infrastructure.

NVIDIA's Cosmos 3 Edge brings real-time world modeling to edge devices, enabling robots to reason about actions and predict outcomes without relying on data-center compute.

Jensen Huang secured deals across Japan's industrial ecosystem, positioning Nvidia as the hardware backbone for a $6.2B sovereign AI initiative targeting robots and manufacturing.

Alexandre LeBrun argues industry terminology lacks definition; focuses AMI Labs on world models for physical tasks.

A modular voice AI pipeline achieves sub-second latency by pairing Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 model with Cerebras inference acceleration, powering conversational robots and assistants.

Liquid AI's LFM-2.5 230M targets phones, Raspberry Pi, and robotics with sub-gigabyte footprints and millisecond latency.

Jay Li's Proception raises $11M to commercialize sensor-glove training for robotic hands, after settling Tesla litigation.

The startup claims a unified model that learns spatial reasoning from gameplay action labels can transfer to physical robot control with minimal fine-tuning.

Oregon State spinoff Agility Robotics merges with Churchill Capital Corp XI, targeting public trading with $300M+ in customer orders for next-generation bipedal units.

World model startup Odyssey, founded by autonomous vehicle veterans, secures unicorn status with backing from Amazon, AMD Ventures, and prominent angels.

Allen AI's new MolmoMotion model predicts object trajectories from video, text instructions, and marked 3D points—with applications in robotic manipulation and video generation.

A new startup is positioning itself as the data backbone for physical AI, offering collection tools and annotation systems that frontier labs cannot easily build themselves.

AWS's open-source Strands Robots SDK now unifies robot simulation, policy training, and hardware deployment through a single agent interface, eliminating the need for five separate tools.

Barcelona-based robotics startup Theker closes Europe's largest robotics Series A, betting on reconfigurable machines over single-task humanoids.

Theker, an AI robotics company, closes $85M Series B round with backing from LVMH and other institutional investors, signaling corporate appetite for autonomous systems.

Google DeepMind selects 15 early-stage robotics companies across Europe for intensive mentorship, AI model access, and technical support to commercialize physical AI applications.

Industry event at Aerospace Corporation campus features founders and investors discussing hard tech, autonomy, and venture trends in emerging categories.

Robotics firms are scaling physical AI training data by paying consumers and gig workers to record everyday tasks, raising privacy and labor questions.

An AI startup is launching a free cleaning service that records workers to gather training data for household robots.

TechCrunch's invitation-only investor conference lands in El Segundo on June 18, featuring founders and VCs debating autonomy, manufacturing, and the reshaping of hard tech.

First-person video collection is becoming a booming market for robot training data, but workers are earning minimal wages for highly specialized labor.

Project Open Hand partners with Chef Robotics to automate plating for medically tailored meals, addressing volunteer shortages in the Tenderloin.

Google hosted panel discussions on AI agents, quantum computing, robotics, and creative applications at I/O 2026's Dialogues stage.

A Wired journalist paired OpenClaw with a LeRobot arm, showing how large language models can now configure, train, and control physical robots without specialized expertise.

Project Genie can now generate interactive simulations anchored to real streets using 280 billion images from 20 years of Street View data collection.

Hugging Face publishes parameter-efficient fine-tuning guide for NVIDIA's 2B-parameter world model, enabling domain adaptation for robotic manipulation on consumer hardware.

A buy-one-get-one-half-off ticket deal for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 expires before midnight Pacific on May 8, as six programming stages signal where AI is actually deploying.

Runway's CEO argues the company's video tools are a foundation for general world models with applications in gaming, robotics, and beyond.

Cambridge startup Eka has built a robot arm that does what no commercial arm can — and its founders say scaling is all that stands between here and a revolution.

Defense startup Scout AI closes a nine-figure Series A to develop Fury, an AI model designed to command military assets and eventually autonomous weapons.