Hugging Face, an AI company known for its open-source language models, has acquired Pollen Robotics, a French startup developing affordable humanoid robots, with plans to sell Pollen's Reachy 2 robot and enable developers to enhance its capabilities, bringing advanced robotics into homes.
While early adopters of AI in manufacturing initially faced productivity declines from replacing human workers with robots, over time surviving firms that embraced AI outperformed in sales growth, productivity, and employment, while older and larger companies struggled to adapt and reap AI's long-term benefits.
Agility Robotics secures $400 million funding at $1.75 billion valuation as its 5-foot-9-inch humanoid robot Digit gains enhanced battery life, autonomous charging, and improved grasping capabilities while competing for warehouse automation dominance against rivals in the rapidly expanding humanoid robotics market.
Agility Robotics raised a staggering $400 million to scale its humanoid robot Digit, fueling the race to automate physically demanding tasks across industries with its bipedal robot designed for real-world utility like package delivery and warehouse work alongside humans.
Researchers developed an end-to-end neural network trained with reinforcement learning, enabling robots to learn human-like walking in simulation and seamlessly transfer this capability to real hardware without additional tuning, achieving robust and natural locomotion across multiple robots.
NVIDIA unveiled groundbreaking innovations in robotics, including the Isaac GR00T N1 open humanoid robot foundation model, collaborations with Google DeepMind and Disney Research on Newton physics engine, and open-source frameworks and datasets to accelerate robot development and training.
MagicLab's advanced humanoid robot impressively strode outdoors for 4 minutes, exhibiting human-like gait and terrain adaptability, paving the way for its deployment in industrial settings like inspections, material handling, and warehousing.
Figure unveiled BotQ, a groundbreaking robot factory capable of mass-producing up to 12,000 humanoid robots annually, leveraging redesigned robot architecture, optimized manufacturing processes, integrated robots and AI, and a hybrid workforce to revolutionize scalable and cost-effective humanoid production.
In Bangladesh's garment factories, automation and surveillance technologies aimed at boosting productivity are straining workers, predominantly women, by imposing higher production targets and job insecurity, despite claims of higher wages from factory owners.