Nothing says “things definitely happened this year” quite like a list. The below list, as structured, goes on to clarify that at least 10 or more things definitely happened this year, and we have the video evidence to back it up.
As mentioned in a previous edition of the newsletter, we’re wrapping up the end of Automated Pod’s first calendar year with a special video countdown. We’ve sifted through the initial batch of nominees and whittled the list down to 10, each of which will be featured on that episode.
But as the countless little league coaches and No Fear t-shirts have mockingly reminded me: there can only be one true winner. That, reader, is where you come in. We’re simply asking you to pick a favorite from the following robot videos. The one that gets the most votes wins. There’s no reward, really – except, I suppose, getting played at the end of the episode and doing your part to help our YouTube watch time (thanks, by the way).
Yes, it's a lot of physical AI and humanoids. I tried very hard to make sure it wasn't all humanoids, and generally attempted to avoid anything that strayed too far into car commercial territory. But it's 2025, so there are a lot of humanoids.
Joining us for this extremely informal awards show is TRI’s senior manager – Robotics Technology Adoption, Erin McColl. She’ll help lend some commentary and maybe even bring a couple of favorites of her own. (I think I mentioned that in the original email, Erin, but apologies if you’re just finding out about this via a newsletter.)
Voting deadline is Monday 12/8. Thank you, and may the best video accrue a commensurate number of votes!
“Humanoids right now feel very, very similar to self-driving circa 2017,” Adrian MacNeil notes, around halfway through our video chat, “where there is just this massive proliferation of companies.” Foxglove’s CEO is somewhat uniquely positioned to offer such insight, having left his role as Cruise’s director of engineering in 2021.
It was a fortuitous exit. Three years later, GM would effectively shutter the autonomous taxi division it acquired in 2012, pulling funding, restructuring, and incorporating what was left into other self-driving efforts. By then, MacNeil’s next effort was off to the races, on the heels of a $15 million Series A.
That MacNeil and cofounder, Roman Shtylman, had recently built similar systems at Cruise certainly contributed to Foxglove’s running start. In fact, the self-driving firm’s former CEO, Kyle Vogt, is among the robotics platform’s early backers and has since spoken at its Actuate conference.
The magic word in all of this is “infrastructure.” Accordingly, MacNeil’s Cruise title was “director, Infrastructure Engineering,” while Foxglove dropped the i-word a half-dozen times in last month’s press release announcing the company’s recent $40 million Series B. The Bay Area firm’s pitch revolves around laying the foundation required to power physical AI’s immense data demands.
In a moment when robot launch videos are indistinguishable from car commercials, Array is different. As I write this, you won’t find video of the product online. I know, because I looked. And then yesterday, I jumped on a call with Locus’s CEO and marketing VP to confirm the company had failed to upload a video alongside a multi-stage product announcement.
As noted in a recent issue of the newsletter, Array’s marketing campaign has been antithetical to the Hollywood-style humanoid releases that have begun dominating mainstream press outlets over the past year and change. Maybe you were among a small group of potential customers who caught a preview of a demo robot behind the scenes at LogiMat or ProMat. More likely, you had to squint and tilt your head slight to decipher the single, dark press image released by the Massachusetts firm.
“We wanted to make sure that we fully introduced it to the right clients ahead of time, like DHL,” vice president of product marketing, Kait Peterson tells me on the call. “But also, the market's incredibly competitive. We know we have something really special.”
Two more images have since been released. One was essentially a slight variation of the first at a more head-on angle. The most recent arrived earlier this month, as Locus announced DHL as Array’s first customer. The robot pictured had the loud yellow and red branded wrapper to match.
It was supposed to be a sabbatical — six months to get a taste of real-world challenges, away from the university life. Half a year spent trading one institutional grind for another, out of the metaphorical frying pan, into the proverbial fire. The wherewithal to carry on arrived on the floor of Amazon’s now-defunct Re:MARS, a self-proclaimed “global AI event for machine learning, automation, robotics, and Space.”
“When I was at this conference, it was just like being in Disneyland,” Grace Brown explains on the latest episode of Automated. “I was like, ‘my God, all these robots that I've always read about and watched videos on.’ But then when I was interacting with some of the companion robots, I realized that these are companies that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, all of the technical challenges that they were facing with like reliability, with like latency, engagement, like they weren't that much further along than what I was.”
Having already devoted much of her downtime to building the robot that would become Abi, the then-University of Melbourne engineering undergrad was determined to spend a full six months on the project.
“I just wanted to dedicate more time to making [Abi] more sophisticated, but then to also understand like how could I build a product and bring it to market?” Brown says. “What's actually required to start a business? It was always meant to be like a six-month stint of self-learning and self-discovery of how to do all of this.”
Humanoids’ (the form factor) path to market will be a marathon. At the moment, however, it seems many parties have opted to sprint. An increasing number have been highlighting development cycles as a way to distinguish themselves among an increasingly crowded field. Humanoid (the company) led with that info as it announced the bipedal version of its HMND 01 Alpha robot, earlier this week. From the release, “Built from initial design to working prototype in just five months, compared with the industry average of 18 to 24 months, Alpha achieved stable walking only 48 hours after final assembly, a milestone that typically takes weeks or even months.”
Such metrics are, clearly, ways to distinguish the young and relatively small company from the pack, but to my mind there are a few other, more notable pieces to this news. First, as China and the United States continue to dominate the landscape, London-based Humanoid stands among a glancingly small number of European companies exploring the form factor (you also have Neura, PAL, Devanthro, and 1X — though they recently moved their primary HQ to Palo Alto). Second is the company’s commitment to modularity, having first revealed a version of the robot effectively sporting an AMR as a base. Third is the continued drift toward the home market, following 1X and Figure – though Humanoid is currently more in the latter’s camp, keeping its options open. HMND 01’s first “domestic applications” are targeted at care facilities for older adults. Click the below link if you want to read me prattling on about why the home is where the hard is.
Keep your eyes peeled for UMA. The newly-announced Parisian startup was cofounded by Hugging Face vets Remi Cadene and Simon Alibert, along with the Robot Studio’s Rob Knight, and Google Brain/DeepMind’s Pierre Sermanet. They just announced AI pioneer and recent Meta ex-pat Yann LeCun as an early investor and advisor. Here’s Sermanet discussing the project over on LinkedIn:
I was never satisfied with the status quo of top-down data collection, where researchers decide a few tasks to collect data on. Instead, I believed that we should let the data speak: tasks should be automatically discovered bottom-up (scalable and general) from cheap and continuous data collection, with a sprinkle of more expensive data and labels. In 2022, I explored long-horizon reasoning for robotics using scalable automatic labeling augmentations for VQA tasks and studied the economics of different data collection schemes. Most recently, I developed approaches to scalably discover laws of robotics from real data (images, hospital reports, sci-fi literature) in a broad and bottom-up fashion, which improved robot behavior over top-down approaches like Asimov’s laws. All these experiences nourished my vision for UMA as Chief Scientist, I’m incredibly excited to put everything together and so grateful I get to contribute to this incredible moment in human history.
The company is designing AI and hardware systems, including humanoids and “general-purpose mobile” robots. The team plans to launch its first several pilot programs targeting manufacturing and logistics at some point next year.
My ticket to Tokyo must have gotten lost in the mail this year. Instead, I’m stuck reporting on iREX updates from the Automated Bunker in snowy Hudson Valley, New York. One of the conference’s more exciting headlines dropped Wednesday from Hyundai. The Korean car giant is finally set on releasing a commercial version of the MobED (Mobile Eccentric Droid) platform it debuted way back at CES 2022. If you’ll recall, that was a big event for the car maker, coming six months after it acquired an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank. The autonomous platform will come in two flavors. There’s Basic for research and development and Pro, a commercial version with a “follow me” mode that will look cool carrying around your golf clubs and such.
I recently read a couple of treatises declaring that “funding news is dead.” To that I say, “Yo, start-ups, hit me up” (news@automated.org). Venture capital was one of the cornerstones of coverage during my time at TechCrunch, and I’ve carried that over to Automated. It’s not that I’m passionate about regularly reporting on more money changing hands than I will see in five lifetimes, it’s more that these stories offer a snapshot of a startup entering a new stage of life. Take this $23 million raise for Gravis. The Zurich-based firm has developed a control kit that retrofits heavy machinery like excavators and wheel loaders into autonomous systems. The company says the funding will go toward scaling and fulfilling orders, noting that it has already made deliveries to the U.K., U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
A spokesperson for the Department of Commerce tells Politico, “We are committed to robotics and advanced manufacturing because they are central to bringing critical production back to the United States.”
From Robot Report, more troubling news on iRobot's path to potential bankruptcy as its Shenzhen-based contract manufacturer picks up the Roomba maker's sizable debt.
Will you be in the Yay Area next week? Come watch me moderate a stacked panel at the NVIDIA Nebius Robotics & Physical AI Awards and Summit in Mountain View on 12/9. Register here, using my name (Brian Heater) as the promo code. Ours is the opening spot at The Pioneer Frontier: Architecting Truly Autonomous Systems feat Jonathan Hurst (Co-founder, Agility AI), Kevin Black (Physical Intelligence), and Lindon Gao (Co-founder/CEO, Dyna Robotics).
Suddenly the interviewer becomes the interviewee, as Chris Luecke asks me questions about asking questions about robotics on this week's Manufacturing Happy Hour.
A fun one for A3 members. We'll be recording the first-ever live episode of Automated at the A3 Business Forum in Orlando on January 21. Excited to catch up with GM’s Autonomous Robotics Center, Mikell Taylor.
The latest bit of lovable weird from Yukai Engineering is now up on Kickstarter. The Japanese robotics startup that brought you Qooba the tail wagging cat pillow brings you Miramu, a colorful little Ewok-like robot that lives on your handbag and "spontaneously turns to you, and its innocent gaze instantly lights up your heart, and your day."
Now Playing on Automated Pod
Grace Brown (Andromeda) - For Grace Brown, a humanoid robot future is a hopeful future. Andromeda’s Abi is designed to build connections in an increasingly isolated world, focused on older adults in care facilities.
Tessa Lau (Dusty Robotics)- Founder and CEO Tessa Lau discusses the ups and downs of Dusty's early days, and what it means to go from engineer to executive.
Dianne Eldridge (Google AI) - The Google AI leader knows how to cut to the heart of the matter when discussing industry, society, and her personal journey.
The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) is North America’s largest automation trade association representing more than 1,400 organizations involved in robotics, artificial intelligence, machine vision & imaging, motion control & motors, and related automation technologies.
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