Depending on topic, guest lineup, and your own familiarity with the subject matter, moderating a panel can feel like a million years or the blink of an eye. I’ve been doing this job long enough to have experienced both scenarios more times than I care to mention. Given the choice, I’ll opt for the latter every time. I prefer carrying on a conversation backstage, after getting the flashing red end of session light to the awkward farewells of people who fully run out of things to discuss.
I’ll be the first to admit that I overstuffed Tuesday night’s panel from a content perspective, but 20 minutes only affords you time to scratch the surface of embodied AI and humanoids with panelists from Agility, Dyna Robotics, and Physical Intelligence. We jumped around a bit, but from the afterglow of late checkout at the Sunnyvale Radisson the next morning, I think we touched on some pertinent topics to cap off a lively year for robotics.
The Nebius Robotics & Physical AI Awards and Summit was a one-day conference/ceremony held at the Computer History Museum situated conveniently between the Googleplex and Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus. NVIDIA sponsored the event, and Amit Goel, the silicon giant’s head of Robotics and Edge Computing Ecosystem, teed us up with his own keynote.
My panel was as follows: "The Pioneer Frontier: Architecting Truly Autonomous Systems" featuring Jonathan Hurst (co-founder, Agility AI), Kevin Black (researcher, Physical Intelligence), Lindon Gao (co-founder/CEO, Dyna Robotics).
Teleoperation has become a hot button topic in the world of humanoid robots. Particularly controversial is the question of whether such control amounts to legitimate tool or cheap, Wizard of Oz-style trickery. As with all other aspects of robotics demos, the truth boils down to transparency and context.
VR tele-op is an extremely valuable tool for training robots and deploying robots, as well as a fallback override for when things don’t work out as planned. It has proven especially helpful for tasks that still demand a human touch. Robotic surgery pioneer Intuitive, for instance, recently orchestrated a joint procedure involving two surgeons on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Working out of France and the United States, the medical professionals operated together on a tissue sample using a da Vinci robot.
Highly specialized — and delicate — tasks such as these seem destined to have humans in the loop for the foreseeable future. For now, surgeons can lend a guiding hand. In the future, they will likely continue to provide a well-tuned eye.
Technologies like remote surgery hold the promise of democratizing access to those unique skillsets. The true efficacy of implementation, however, is a much longer conversation involving healthcare access, politics, economics, and regulatory bodies, among other massive topics.
Budget at least an hour and a half to drive northwest from Boston to Lowell. Depending on time of day, it could take significantly longer. Beantown was recently named the fourth worst U.S. city for traffic, thanks in large part to I-93, the road that will take you half way to your destination. Lowell has a long history as a manufacturing town, establishing itself as a textile hub in the 19th century. By 1940, it had become the nation’s chief producer of Jack Kerouac.
Holly Yanco resided in the city for the past quarter-century, as a particularly notable computer science professor at UMass Lowell. A leading researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI), she has also done important work in the fields of assistive and search and rescue technologies. For more than a decade, Yanco has led the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center. She founded that university research lab, along with an enviable personal collection of Pez candy dispensers.
The latter formed the backdrop for our conversation, when we caught up with the professor earlier this year. Yanco was preparing to become Lowell’s latest export, another 90-minute road trip further west to Amherst. It’s a college town in its own right, as home to Amherst College, Hampshire College, and UMass Amherst, the “little Ivy” where Yanco now serves as Distinguished Professor, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and Distinguished Professor, Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences.
It’s like that old adage, “if you don’t like the humanoid robot space, wait five minutes.” Just last week in this selfsame newsletter, I was commenting on the relative lack of humanoid companies in Europe, and now Generative Bionics comes out swinging with a robust €70 million ($82 million) raise. Hailing from Italy, the country that gave us the Pinocchio, the first – and arguably best (no cap) – humanoid, the startup is going wide on use cases, including “manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and retail.” With the funding, the Genoa-based firm is hiring on 70 engineers from the nearby Italian Institute of Technology. The funding round, led by CDP Venture Capital, will also go toward improving the company's AI chops and building a production facility for its first system. That robot is set to be unveiled next month in Las Vegas at CES 2026. No word on how closely it will resemble one of the Sid from Toy Story-style robots pictured above.
Another big funding round out of China this week, as Deep Robotics secures a 500 million yuan ($70 million raise). I can’t blame the firm for setting up shop in Hangzhou. I’ve been once myself. It’s a former walled city with a massive lake that now serves as one of the area’s top vacation destinations. It also happens to be headquarters for retail giant Alibaba and — even more relevantly — Unitree Robotics (full name Hangzhou Yushu Technology Co., Ltd) and Zhejiang University, a top engineering school. Deep Robotics refers to itself as the “global quadruped leader.” In 2025, the company launched a hybrid four-legged/wheeled robot, along with DR-02, an “industrial grade” humanoid. The Series C will go toward "production capacity expansion, and market development, but also establishes deep partnerships with investors possessing strong industrial resources," per a statement.
Central to the conversation of humanoid safety is the question of how these systems fall. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with big, heavy hunks of metal. If they’re going to work around and with people, we need to be sure they’re not going to fall on us. Dynamic stability remains a big issue — that is to say that these bipedal systems require a constant power supply to stand up straight. But what happens if they just happen to lose their footing? That question was top of mind reading up on CMU/Meta’s BFM-Zero project. It’s a framework that allows humanoid systems to “think on their feet,” to put it in terms my bachelor of arts degree-having mind is capable of processing. Rather than falling flat on their face, the robot stumbles forward a few steps, regains balance, and returns to standing position.
“If we want humanoids to eventually work safely around people, whether in homes, offices or public spaces, they need to be able to recover from unexpected events gracefully and safely,” CMU assistant professor, Guanya Shi, says of the work. “BFM-Zero is the starting point for the adaptability humanoids need before they can accomplish real-world tasks.” The team describes the system as an “all-purpose behavior foundation model,” that adapts to various tasks without having to retrain.
Big implications for the tiny systems out of UPenn’s Nanorobotics lab. New research published in this week's Science Robotics highlights submillimeter ‘bots capable of carrying out autonomous tasks in unstructured environments. Researchers utilized lithographic printing methods to massively scale down the robots’ operating components. “By optimizing the circuits, actuators, and fabrication protocols to match the physical constraints of working at small scales,” the team writes, “we were able to shrink the volume of programmable, autonomous robots that sense, think, and act by 10,000-fold. At the same time, moving computation to the microrobot reduces both the cost and operational overhead to a bare minimum, paving a path to widespread adoption.” The team envisions a number of potential applications for the systems in the future, including autonomous drug delivery.
Some new video from the Google DeepMind team highlights Apptronik's Apollo performing open-ended tasks with help from Gemini 1.5, including domestic work like laundry folding.
Mercado Libre becomes the latest e-commerce firm to hire Agility's Digit robots. The bipedal systems will initially be deployed in a San Antonio warehouse, with plans to expand their reach down into Latin America.
A pregnant woman took a Waymo to a San Francisco hospital. It turned into an unexpected carpool before arriving at its destination.
Just over a month after its latest downsizing round, Teradyne has announced plans to open a new operating hub in the Detroit Metro area. The facility will manufacture Universal Robots systems and is poised to "create 200 jobs over the coming years," per the company.
For more than 30 years, Professor Holly Yanco has been a leading mind in human-robot interaction and search and rescue robots.
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.
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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