NVIDIA DROPPED A MOTION DIFFUSION MODEL FOR HUMANOID ROBOTS... trained on 700 hours of mocap data kimodo generates high-quality 3D human and robot motions from text prompts you control it with: → full-body pose keyframes → end-effector positions/rotations → 2D paths and waypoints works on human skeletons and unitree G1 robot plug the outputs directly into mujoco or retarget to other robots using GMR has a web-based interactive demo with a timeline editor. runs locally needs ~17GB VRAM to run inference open source under apache 2.0show more

We’ve seen humanoid robots walk around for a while,... but when will they actually help with useful tasks in daily life? The challenge here is the diversity and complexity of real-world scenes. Our new work tackles this problem via 3D visuomotor policy learning. Using data from only 1 scene, our Improved 3D Diffusion Policy (iDP3) enables a full-sized humanoid robot to autonomously pick&place objects, pour water, and wipe tables, in the wild open world. (and all these skills are useful, right?) Web: Fully open-sourced code:show more

Imagine having a ping pong robot! 🏓 Researchers and... developers building physical AI: meet Reachy 2 from Pollen Robotics, an open-source, humanoid robot for real-world experimentation. It’s a bimanual mobile manipulator: each 7-DOF arm mimics human proportions and can lift up to 3 kg, giving dexterity for object handling. It can be controlled with Python and ROS2 Humble, or go straight into VR teleoperation, use a headset to move Reachy’s arms, hands, and head, and see through its cameras as if you’re in the robot’s own body. Want it to move around? A mobile base with three omnidirectional wheels, rich sensors, and LiDAR lets Reachy 2 navigate and explore its surroundings smoothly. 🗺️ Under the hood, it’s powered by a CPU system that’s ready for machine learning, perfect for loading AI frameworks and testing new models from Hugging Face directly on the robot. Keep making robots more, and more accessible Pollen team! ... and keep making more open source models to make robots more mainstream clem 🤗!show more

BOOM! Humanoid Robots Just Performed Surgery for the First... Time! REAL VIDEO! In a groundbreaking preclinical breakthrough, researchers at UC San Diego have achieved what many thought was years away: teleoperated humanoid robots successfully completing live surgeries. Published in Nature, the study marks the world’s first use of humanoid robots for in-vivo laparoscopic procedures on large animals (pigs). Two separate surgeries were completed: Key Details •. Procedure: Laparoscopic gallbladder removal (cholecystectomy) •. Team 1: Human surgeon + one humanoid robot (the robot performed core tasks while the human assisted) •. Team 2: Two humanoid robots working together with no human at the operating table •. Robots: Custom “Surgie” humanoids (~5 ft tall, ~60 lbs) using standard surgical tools •. Control: Fully teleoperated by surgeons (remote human control, not autonomous) •. Significance: First demonstration of humanoid robots handling real surgical workflows in a live setting, proving compatibility with existing OR tools and spaces This proof shows humanoid robots could one day help address surgeon shortages, enable remote procedures in rural areas, battlefields, or even space all at a fraction of the cost and space of traditional surgical robots like da Vinci. Read the full publication here: Project page with video: The future of surgery just got a whole lot more interesting. And medical cost for the first time in decades will be scheduled to go down, much further down.show more

Most robots still need markers, checkerboards, or long calibration... rituals just to know where their arms are. Now it works from raw images in seconds. roboreg is a markerless multi arm localization toolkit that plugs into ROS 2 and RViz. No special hardware. No custom setup. You toggle between robot descriptions and the system figures out the rest. The idea is simple: ✅ Hand eye calibration from plain RGB or RGB D images ✅ Only three robot poses needed for millimeter accuracy ✅ Works with any ROS 2 compatible robot and camera ✅ Fully open source under Apache 2.0 It is powered by Hydra, a new marker free ICP variant that converges far more reliably than classical baselines and runs in under a second. If you want to try it: roboreg: ROS 2 roboreg: Hydra paper: pip install roboreg More details and discussion on Open Robotics Discourse:show more

This work makes a humanoid robot do simple parkour... moves by looking with a depth camera and choosing the right move on the fly. The big deal is that it turns lots of small human moves into long, real-time robot behavior, without hand-coding every transition or retraining for each new course. A humanoid robot is usually good at steady walking, but it often fails when it has to do fast moves like jumping up, vaulting, or rolling, and then keep going to the next obstacle. The hard part is that you cannot easily collect training data for every possible obstacle shape, distance, and mistake, so robots end up learning a few moves that only work in a narrow setup. This work starts from short clips of real human parkour moves, like stepping over, vaulting, climbing, and rolling. It uses motion matching, which is basically a smart “pick the next clip that fits best right now” search, to stitch those short clips into a long, smooth plan that looks like a human doing a whole course. Then it trains a controller with reinforcement learning (RL), which means the robot learns by trial and error to copy that plan while staying balanced and not falling. After training separate expert controllers for different moves, it compresses them into 1 controller that uses only onboard depth sensing and a simple “go this fast in this direction” command. In real tests on a Unitree G1 humanoid, it can clear multiple obstacles in a row, adapt when obstacles get moved, and climb a wall up to 1.25m.show more

🦿Xpeng showed a humanoid robot called IRON whose movement... looked so human that the team literally cut it open on stage to prove it is a machine. IRON uses a bionic body with a flexible spine, synthetic muscles, and soft skin so joints and torso can twist smoothly like a person. The system has 82 degrees of freedom in total with 22 in each hand for fine finger control. Compute runs on 3 custom AI chips rated at 2,250 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second), which is far above typical laptop neural accelerators, so it can handle vision and motion planning on the robot. The AI stack focuses on turning camera input directly into body movement without routing through text, which reduces lag and makes the gait look natural. Xpeng staged the cut-open demo at AI Day in Guangzhou this week, addressing rumors that a performer was inside by exposing internal actuators, wiring, and cooling. Company materials also mention a large physical-world model and a multi-brain control setup for dialogue, perception, and locomotion, hinting at a path from stage demos to service work. Production is targeted for 2026, so near-term tasks will be limited, but the hardware shows a serious step toward human-scale manipulation.show more

🚨BREAKING Unitree's IPO application on the Science and Technology... Innovation Board has been formally accepted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange, with a planned fundraising of 4.202 billion yuan. Of this, the intelligent robot model R&D project accounts for the majority, amounting to 2 billion yuan. In other words: For Unitree, hardware is no longer the problem,the real bottleneck that urgently needs to be overcome is the development of intelligent robot models. Notably, Unitree reports that it has sold over 5,500 humanoid robots,ranking first globally,making them the growth engine of its robotics business.show more

The future of housework just leaked on GitHub and... nobody is talking about it. knox byte just open sourced a framework that coordinates swarms of Unitree G1 humanoid robots to clean your entire house on their own. It's called ARGOS. You tell it "clean the bedroom" in plain English and 2+ G1 robots split the room into zones, sweep in parallel, and sync up for the tasks that need four hands like making the bed or moving furniture. The Claude API decomposes your sentence into a task graph. An auction system makes every robot bid on every task based on distance, battery, and current load. The cheapest robot wins. Cooperative jobs go to the cheapest team. Here's what makes this different from every demo video Boston Dynamics keeps teasing: → 12 cleaning tasks baked in sweeping, mopping, wiping, vacuuming, taking out trash, making the bed, changing sheets, moving furniture, sorting items → 3 policy architectures running underneath OpenVLA-7B for language tasks, Diffusion Policy for floor coverage, ACT for dexterous bimanual work → Train it on your own footage record yourself cleaning, run one command, it extracts poses, builds a LeRobot dataset, and LoRA fine-tunes the policy → PEFA protocol for cooperative work Propose, Execute, Feedback, Adjust. If one robot fails halfway through making the bed, the team replans and retries → Full MuJoCo simulation so you test policies before pushing them to real hardware → Silver and cyan terminal dashboard that shows live fleet status, zone maps, task queues, and battery levels in real time The G1 robots talk to each other over CycloneDDS mesh using Unitree's native SDK. No cloud. No middleware. The whole thing runs on a Jetson Orin inside each robot. The wildest part is the training pipeline. Drop cleaning videos into a folder, run argos train ingest, and the framework does the entire pipeline frame extraction, pose estimation, action labeling, HDF5 dataset, fine-tune, evaluate in sim, deploy to robot. One command per stage. Unitree G1s already exist. The framework to make them clean your house just hit GitHub. 52 stars. MIT License. 100% Opensource.show more

TESLA HALTED MODEL S AND MODEL X PRODUCTION TO... BUILD AN ARMY OF OPTIMUS ROBOTS The Fremont assembly line was torn down in 46 days. In its place, Tesla is building a line for humanoid production, aiming for a million units a year A humanoid robot is a body shaped like a human. Physical AI is the intelligence that controls that body Walking and making coffee is often just imitation learning from a scripted routine. But once the environment shifts, the learned trick stops working Language models had the entire internet to train on. Robotics has nothing close to that scale of data, which is why one giant brain hasn't worked for anyone yet The industry is moving toward modularity instead - separate models for vision, movement, and planning, each improved on its own The real question is no longer whether a robot can move impressively. It's whether it can pull its sensors into one picture of the world and adapt to whatever wasn't scripted for itshow more

China now has its own “Bolt” — a robot... named after sprint legend Usain Bolt. A Chinese research team has unveiled the world’s first full-size humanoid robot to reach a peak speed of 10 meters per second, setting a new global benchmark for humanoid running. Bolt runs like a body pushed to the limit. Its joints and power systems work in tight coordination, keeping it balanced even at sprint speed. Built to match the build of an adult man—1.75 meters tall and 75 kilograms—it is a life-sized system operating at the edge of physics. Compared with Usain Bolt’s iconic 9.58-second 100-meter world record, which many experts believe may stand for decades, the gap between humans and machines is narrowing fast. Chinese robots are now challenging the ceiling of human performance—much as AlphaGo once challenged Go champion Ke Jie. The breakthrough builds on earlier world-record achievements in high-speed robotic running and marks a giant leap for China in humanoid motion and control. Beyond records, Bolt also carries practical value: robots are leaving the lab and stepping into real-world settings—sports training, emergency response, and demanding industrial tasks where speed, balance and control truly matter.show more

I'll always root for a team that open-sources its... best work, and Robbyant just did it properly. Robbyant, Ant Group's embodied-AI company, released LingBot-Vision, a vision foundation model for robots, and the part I love is the data. They trained it on 161M images, filtered down from 2B raw ones and mostly pulled straight from the open web, with no human labels, no edge detectors, no depth sensors anywhere in the loop. It learns the exact edges of objects from raw pixels. That's roughly a tenth of the data DINOv3 saw, and under a third of the training. And it shows in the results. On depth, working out how far away things are, the 1B model edges out a 7B on NYU-Depth. It also powers LingBot-Depth 2.0, which reads the surfaces cameras usually choke on, glass and mirrors, and halves indoor depth error. LingBot-Vision is fully open. Weights from the 1.1B flagship down to a tiny 21M version, code, and the paper. This is the timeline I want more of. Robbyantshow more

Wonderland: Navigating 3D Scenes from a Single Image Contributions:... • First, we introduce a representation for controllable 3D generation by leveraging the generative priors from camera-guided video diffusion models. Unlike image models, video diffusion models are trained on extensive video datasets. This enables them to capture comprehensive spatial relationships within scenes across multiple views and embed a form of "3D awareness" in their latent space, which allows us to maintain 3D consistency in novel view synthesis. • Second, to achieve controllable novel view generation, we empower video models with precise control over specified camera motions. We introduce a novel dual-branch conditioning mechanism that effectively incorporates desired diverse camera trajectories into the video diffusion model. This enables expansion of a single image into a multi-view consistent capture of a 3D scene with precise pose control. • Third, to achieve efficient 3D reconstruction, we directly transform video latents into 3DGS. We propose a novel latent-based large reconstruction model (LaLRM) that lifts video latents to 3D in a feed-forward manner. With this design, during inference, our model directly predicts 3DGS from a single input image, effectively aligning the generation and reconstruction tasks—and bridging image space and 3D space—through the video latent space. Compared with reconstructing scenes from images, the video latent space offers a 256× spatial-temporal reduction while retaining essential and consistent 3D structural details. Such a high degree of compression is crucial, as it allows the LaLRM to handle a wider range of 3D scenes within the reconstruction framework, with the same memory constraints.show more

If you’ve been ignoring Axis Robotics because it looks... like another random points farm, read this. In the last 48 hours, Unitree said robotics is approaching its "ChatGPT moment", while the chairman of ACE Robotics believes it could happen by the end of 2027. But for robots to reach that level, they need a crazy amount of training data. That’s exactly what Axis is building. You control simulated robots directly from your browser, complete simple tasks and earn points. Those movements also help create data that can be used to train real robots. And this isn’t some tiny experiment anymore: - $12M raised - 123K+ contributors - 3M+ robot trajectories - Community data already used to train a real robot So yeah, we’re basically farming a potential airdrop while teaching our future robot servants how to work 😂 If you haven’t started yet, it’s completely free. You only need a tiny amount of gas on Base to sign your completed tasks. ✅ Start farming Axis points: Important: Sign every completed task from the History page, otherwise you won’t receive the points.show more

Today, we're shipping MLX support for TADA, our open-source... text-to-speech model, which means the entire pipeline (LLM, flow-matching, and decoder) can now run locally on any Apple Silicon device. We're seeing a 45% reduction in memory usage and a 10x speed-up when using it quantized. With these improvements, you can use TADA on-device for OpenClaw or any personal chatbot. If you own a MacBook, Mac Mini, or Mac Studio, record a 10-second clip of any voice, type any text, and get high-quality, natural and expressive speech in real-time. Completely offline, completely free.show more

90% of "AI developers" just download pre packaged GGUF... files from Hugging Face, hit run, and call it a day. The top 10% know how to pull the raw safetensors, run the math, and quantize massive models into Q4_K_M themselves. If you think llama.cpp can only execute models, you’re missing the best part of the open source ecosystem. It’s a high performance optimization suite. Manually stripping 69% of the VRAM footprint off a brand new model architecture is where real infrastructure value is made. If you want to actually master local inference and deploy models like Google’s massive Gemma 4 12B it on consumer NVIDIA hardware using llama.cpp, you need to learn this pipeline. Let's build it. I just took the raw 22.7 GB Gemma 4 baseline and manually compressed it down to a 7.02 GB Q4_K_M GGUF artifact using llama.cpp. That is a 69% reduction in footprint. No quality loss. No VRAM bottlenecks. Just native, hardware accelerated C++ inference running a full 2,50,000 token context window on a dual NVIDIA Tesla T4 setup. Stop melting your VRAM on unoptimized weights and stop relying on other people's pipelines. Own your stack. I mapped this entire architecture from dynamic binary fetching to raw quantization and real time GPU streaming into a single, bulletproof notebook. Notebook link is in the comments below. Bookmark this blueprint for your next deployment and tell me which quantization works best for your workflow and model.show more

[Most robots react. This one thinks a step ahead.]... Ant Group's Robbyant just published LingBot-VA 2.0 — a video-action foundation model built from scratch for robot control, not fine-tuned from a video generator. The usual approach takes a video generator made for content creation and bolts a robot policy onto it. LingBot-VA 2.0 argues that's the wrong starting point, and pretrains the whole causal stack natively instead. What stands out: → Foresight Reasoning — the robot predicts the next action chunk while executing the current one, then overwrites the imagined frame with the real observation. Prediction and execution stop waiting on each other. → 927 ms → 142 ms per chunk, across four cumulative optimizations. That lifts asynchronous control from 35 Hz to 225 Hz — a 6.5× speedup. → One shared latent space. A semantic visual-action tokenizer puts world states and actions in the same coordinates, so unlabeled web video carries action-relevant signal. → Sparse MoE video stream — 128 experts, top-8 routing. Roughly 2.5B of ~15.3B parameters fire per token. → Few-shot by design — adapts from 10–15 demonstrations, and a human demo video can replace the text instruction entirely. Full breakdown: Paper: Project Page: Robbyant Ant Groupshow more

You can't 3D reconstruct glass from images... ...WRONG! Thanks... for video diffusion, now just about anything is possible! Introducing...Diffusion Knows Transparency (DKT) Transparent and reflective objects usually break robot vision and photogrammetry pipelines because they don't follow the "solid object" rules standard cameras expect. DKT is a new AI model that repurposes the "internal physics engine" found in video generation models to solve this problem. Researchers took a massive video diffusion model (WAN) and fine-tuned it using a custom-built synthetic dataset to turn it into a high-precision depth sensor. To train the AI, they built the first massive synthetic video library of transparent objects, 1.32 million frames of perfectly labeled glass and metal objects in motion. Without ever seeing a "real" labeled video of glass during training, the model (DKT) outperformed all previous specialized systems on real-world benchmarks (ClearPose, DREDS). They created a "lightweight" 1.3B parameter version that runs fast enough (0.17s per frame) to be used on actual robot hardware. Two reasons I find this project important: 1. It further proves that synthetic data will be essential for training the next generation vision models. 2. In real-world robotic tests, using DKT's depth maps nearly doubled the success rate of robot arms trying to pick up objects on tricky reflective or translucent surfaces. At home robots will need to interact with these types of objects on a daily basis. Check out the project page here: Code is LIVE! #Computervision #Robotics #AIshow more

🚨 BREAKING: NVIDIA just announced the Isaac GR00T Reference... Humanoid Robot. The first fully open humanoid robot reference design built on Jetson Thor, and it's going straight to the world's top research institutions. This is Jensen Huang's bet on open physical AI infrastructure. The hardware stack is serious: → Unitree H2 Plus chassis, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 31 degrees of freedom → Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, 22 degrees of freedom, bringing total to 75 across the full body → NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor onboard compute, 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, 128GB unified memory → Multi-view sensing, stereo head camera, wrist cameras, IMU Alongside this announcement, Unitree also introduced the H2 Plus as a standalone product, a frontier humanoid combining Unitree's own body, Sharpa's five-finger hands and NVIDIA Robotics Jetson Thor compute into one fully integrated research platform. The full Isaac GR00T software stack ships with it, teleoperation for data capture, open foundation models, Isaac Sim for training, Isaac Lab for evaluation, and accelerated ROS middleware for deployment. The complete loop from data to real-world robot in one unified platform. ETH Zürich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego and Ai2 are already on board as launch research partners. NVIDIA Robotics did to AI what it's now doing to robotics, build the platform, open the ecosystem, let the world build on top of it. Whoever owns the infrastructure layer wins. NVIDIA knows this better than anyone. 👀 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more