humanoid
Persona’s founders are certain the world can use another humanoid robot
At this early stage, Persona’s pitch doesn’t stray far from the various humanoid firms with which it’s set to compete.
Out of an abundance of caution, the car took two minutes to turn a corner.
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Humanoid robots are learning to fall well
The savvy marketers at Boston Dynamics produced two major robotics news cycles last week. The larger of the two was, naturally, the electric Atlas announcement. As I write this, the sub-40 second video is steadily approaching five million views. A day prior, the company tugged at the community’s heart strings…
Sanctuary AI often isn’t mentioned in the same breath as humanoid robotics firms like Boston Dynamics, Agility, Figure and 1X, but the Canadian company has been operating in the space…
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Understanding humanoid robots
Robots made their stage debut the day after New Year’s 1921. More than half-a-century before the world caught its first glimpse of George Lucas’ droids, a small army of silvery humanoids took to the stages of the First Czechoslovak Republic. They were, for all intents and purposes, humanoids: two arms,…
Pilot season has officially begun for the world of humanoid robotics. Last year, Amazon began testing Agility’s Digit robots in select fulfillment centers, while this January, Figure announced a deal…
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Humanoid robots face continued skepticism at Modex
If your robotics startup is looking to raise, there’s close to a 100% chance you’re going to get two questions from potential investors: 1) How are you incorporating generative AI? and 2) Have you consider building a humanoid? The first is easy enough to answer. If you’re running a robotics…
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Figure rides the humanoid robot hype wave to $2.6B valuation
Today Figure confirmed long-standing rumors that it’s been raising more money than God. The Bay Area-based robotics firm announced a $675 million Series B round that values the startup at $2.6 billion post-money. The lineup of investors is equally impressive. It includes Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Amazon Industrial Innovation…
The robotics industry loves a good, healthy debate. Of late, one of the most intense ones centers around humanoid robots. It’s been a big topic for decades, of course, but…
OpenAI-backed 1X raises another $100M for the race to humanoid robots
The race to perfect the humanoid form factor will be one of 2024’s defining tech stories. Last year saw the category heat up, as companies like Tesla, Apptronik and Figure…
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Should auld acquaintance be robot
This is always a strange week for us. Save for the occasional disastrous patent dispute, things are (thankfully) almost uncannily quiet in the week separating Christmas and New Year’s Day. You see a lot of reflective posts go up during this time, not only because the calendar year is coming to…
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Top robotics names discuss humanoids, generative AI and more
Last month, I took an extended break. In a bid to keep my robotics newsletter Actuator (subscribe here) up and running, however, I reached out to some of the biggest names in the industry. I asked people from CMU, UC Berkeley, Meta, Nvidia, Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute…
[A version of this Q&A first appeared in TechCrunch’s weekly robotics newsletter, Actuator. Subscribe here.] Over the next few weeks, TechCrunch will be running a series of Q&As with some…
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Humanoid robots face a major test with Amazon’s Digit pilots
Announced amid a deluge of news at this week’s Delivering the Future event in Seattle was word that Amazon will begin testing Agility’s Digit in a move that could bring the bipedal robot to its nationwide fulfillment centers. It’s baby steps as these things go, and such early-stage deals don’t…
In May of this year, TechCrunch ran a piece titled “Figure’s humanoid robot takes its first steps.” The story was a firsthand account of my visit to the startup’s South…
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This is Apptronik’s humanoid robot, Apollo
The rise of humanoid robots didn’t happen overnight, but a kind of perfect storm has accelerated the phenomenon over the past year and change. The foundation, of course, is decades of research. Toiling away in research facilities and R&D departments laid the ground work for a new generation of technology.…
Intel Capital backs Figure’s Humanoid robot to the tune of $9 million
Bay Area-based robotics firm Figure this week announced that its humanoid officially took its first steps — a milestone it hit a few days shy of of the company’s first…
I spent a bit of time at Figure’s Sunnyvale offices during a recent visit to the South Bay. The firm is currently in that semi-awkward phase where it’s ready to…
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Apptronik readies its humanoid robot for a summer unveil
Jeff Cardenas pulls out his MacBook. Apptronik’s co-founder and CEO has a slideshow he wants to show, running down the Austin startup’s seven-year history. It does, indeed, take a bit of contextualizing. Like many fellow robotics firms, the company was fueled by government contracts in its earliest days. First up…
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Figure’s humanoid robot takes its first steps
Toward the rear of the office, an engineer is working on a metal hand. It looks human enough — roughly the same size with four fingers and a thumb. The Figure team is methodically testing every piece of their robot skeleton before piecing them all together to watch the prototype…
I’m not sure I’d call this the golden age of humanoid robots, but they sure have been coming out of the woodwork since Tesla announced its intentions to build one…
Archer’s co-founder is bootstrapping an all-purpose humanoid robot
The quest to build the perfect humanoid robot is heating up, as Figure — a startup currently operating in stealth — is developing a multi-purpose bipedal ‘bot it plans to…
Long gone are the days when a consumer electronics company could simply announce a phone and call it a day. At this morning’s big launch event in Beijing, Xiaomi followed…
Toyota has a new, third-generation humanoid robot bears the charming name “T-HR3” and is designed to be a helpful and safe assistant to humans. It also features a so-called “master…
The Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan has developed a humanoid it plans to send to RoboCup Japan Open 2011, a soccer tournament for robots that will be held in…
Japan must have a solid number of customers willing to pay a ton of money for home-use robots, because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of them actually available for…
Most of the robots we cover on CrunchGear have been built for research or entertainment purposes, but some of them do become available for the general public at some point.…
Meet Nippon Institute of Technology's cool humanoid (video)
It’s another humanoid from Japan, it doesn’t have an official name yet, but it’s pretty cool: This new robot [JP] is the result of a collaboration between various Japanese companies…
Japan has produced many humanoids in the past years, but making them move in one way or the other is usually a challenge. Kyoto-based Robo Garage has unveiled Ropid [JP]…
Japan-based Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and robot venture Vstone have announced the joint development of a mini humanoid [JP] that’s able to handle objects dexterously through a remote…