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

DimensionX: Create Any 3D and 4D Scenes from a... Single Image with Controllable Video Diffusion TL;DR: Create 3/4DGS from Video Diffusion Note: Some first inference code released (not all yet). Contributions (cited): • We present DimensionX, a novel framework for generating photorealistic 3D and 4D scenes from only a single image using controllable video diffusion. • We propose ST-Director, which decouples the spatial and temporal priors in video diffusion models by learning (spatial and temporal) dimension-aware modules with our curated datasets. We further enhance the hybriddimension control with a training-free composition approach according to the essence of video diffusion denoising process. • To bridge the gap between video diffusion and real-world scenes, we design a trajectory-aware mechanism for 3D generation and an identity-preserving denoising approach for 4D generation, enabling more realistic and controllable scene synthesis. • Extensive experiments manifest that our DimensionX delivers superior performance in video, 3D, and 4D generation compared with baseline methods.show more

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

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

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

Trained on zero real-world data. Learned to walk, pick... up boxes, and follow multi-step instructions... in the REAL world. ( 📌 Paper below) Researchers from Amazon FAR, Berkeley, Stanford, and CMU scanned real rooms with an iPhone, rebuilt them as 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes, then generated 48,000 synthetic trajectories of a Unitree G1 walking, grasping, and placing objects inside those virtual replicas. They rendered the robot's first-person camera view from each run and paired it with the matching language instruction and motion data. That's the dataset every humanoid team needs and nobody has: synced egocentric video + language + kinematics, at scale. Instead of collecting it in the real world, they manufactured it. They trained a vision-language-kinematics policy on that synthetic data alone, then deployed it on the physical G1 across five task types: navigation to a named object, lifting boxes of three different sizes with no per-size tuning, chained multi-step tasks, robustness to mid-task layout changes and flickering lights, and multi-minute long-horizon runs. No real-world fine-tuning at any point. Real-world interaction data has been the hard limit on humanoid learning... slow, expensive, and small. If scanning a room once and synthesizing thousands of labeled interactions holds up as a general recipe, that limit moves. Data stops being the bottleneck robotics teams have to solve for. 📌 Paper: Project: ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:show more

Figure is aiming to develop the world’s largest and... most diverse real-world humanoid pretraining dataset. For this purpose, they’re partnering with Brookfield, a global asset manager overseeing $1 trillion in assets, including 100,000 residential units, 500M square feet of commercial office space, and 160M square feet of logistics space. The data collected from this collaboration will be used to train Figure’s Helix AI model, enabling humanoids to perform tasks autonomously in real-world environments designed for humans. In addition to data collection, the partnership will explore support for next-generation GPU data centers, real estate for robotic training environments, and commercial use cases across Brookfield’s global footprint.show more

Pretty human-like hand Beijing-based SynapX will unveil its tendon-driven... OctoH-Hand at WRC. Human-scale in size, the hand uses a hybrid architecture combining fully tendon-driven actuation with direct-drive motors in the forearm. It integrates 28 independently controllable actuators and 23 active DoF, along with tactile sensors embedded in the palm. Interestingly…SynapX is building more than just a dexterous hand. It has also developed a World model(SYNWorld), and a data collection system(OctoSense), creating a loop from data collection to world understanding and policy generation, and finally to real-world execution and feedback. Another physical AI bridge for humanoid robots.show more

Something big is happening in robotics - and it’s... hiding in plain sight. This post is not about dancing robots but in the data that powers them. Open robotics datasets have exploded this year, turning the field into a more scalable and collaborative ecosystem. In just two years, Hugging Face datasets grew from 11k to over 600k - and robotics is by far the fastest-growing segment. We went from 1k robotics datasets in 2024 to 27k in 2025! For comparison, text generation, the second-largest category, has only around 5k datasets in 2025. That gap is massive. Open datasets are important because robotics lives and dies by real-world robot data - video, actions, sensors, failures. By making this data easy to upload, reuse, and benchmark, researchers, startups, and large players are now releasing real-robot datasets that would have stayed locked inside labs just a few years ago. Major contributors include NVIDIA, LeRobot initiative, and a rapidly growing maker community. This surge is also enabled by cheaper video storage, better tooling, and an open-source AI culture now spilling into the physical world. And it really matters: open robotics data dramatically lowers entry barriers, accelerates learning-by-doing, and speeds up progress toward generalist and humanoid robots. Robotics won’t scale through hardware alone - but to a large extent through shared data. Viz below from AI World - link to the story and more viz/filters in comment.show more

𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲-𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻... 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱, 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝘆 Modern VLAs and world-action models can perform impressive manipulation skills, but adapting them reliably to new robots and tasks remains challenging. A natural solution is DAgger-style online imitation learning: deploy the robot, collect human corrections, and update the policy. Yet foundation models are fragile in the low-data regime, fine-tuning on a handful of interventions can improve one behavior while degrading others. Online post-training or reinforcement learning can require costly data collection and exploration, making real-world learning expensive and potentially unsafe. In our new paper, 𝗙𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗗𝗔𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿, we take a different approach: 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹, 𝘄𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝘁 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. The key idea is 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻: we map human corrective actions back into the latent noise space of the frozen generative policy. These latent targets train a lightweight controller that adapts the robot while preserving the original model's capabilities. Across simulation and real robots, FlowDAgger: 📈 Learns from only 5–20 human intervention episodes 🏆 Outperforms supervised fine-tuning and latent-space reinforcement learning 🤖 Works across VLAs, diffusion policies, and world-action models ✔️ Provides reliable improvements without modifying the pretrained policy We believe this offers a practical path toward making robot foundation models improve during deployment, learning from the way humans naturally teach: through corrections. 📄 Paper: 🌐 Project: 💻 Code: This project was led by my amazing colleague Michael Murray with help from Daphne Chen, Simran Bagaria, Dean Fortier, Tess Hellebrekers, Harshavardhan Reddy Gajarla, Galen Mullins and Andrey Kolobov at Microsoft Research and Maya Cakmak at University of Washingtonshow more

World modeling and imitation learning have largely been considered... two disparate worlds. In our recent work, Unified World Models, just accepted to #RSS2025, Chuning Zhu provides a dead-simple unifying solution: just train a joint diffusion model over actions and future states, but with *decoupled* diffusion time steps across these modalities. Manipulating these decoupled time steps then allows for marginalization or conditioning on actions or states; a single model can serve as a policy, forward dynamics model, video prediction model, or inverse dynamics model by simply setting diffusion timesteps carefully. The resulting model can leverage video datasets along with robot training data much more effectively, and shows improved robustness, generalization, and flexibility. This is exciting because it is frustratingly simple, scalable, and shows strong improvement on real-world robotics problems. Please refer to Chuning Zhu 's excellent thread for more details! More details/code can be found on our website and in the paper -show more

The ATG School One-Pager I’m not trying to reinvent... schooling. There are just a handful of things I believe in which I haven’t seen in any school I’ve been around as a student or parent. Policy #1: Each student gets to be responsible for growing some of their own food, no matter how small, and THROUGHOUT schooling (not just a quickie project here or there). Policy #2: Minimum 1:1 ratio of time NOT SITTING IN THE CLASSROOM. What you do with this is up to you. There are so many real world skills, sports, gardening, music, etc. The strict ratio in the school day is the key for me. Common sense and personal interests can take it from there. Policy #3: Daily time to read whatever you want to read about. The biggest barrier for my reading was INTEREST. Be there to ensure the book is at their level, and to help them if they don’t understand something. Other than that, LET THEM ENJOY READING, ALL THE WAY THROUGH SCHOOL, not just in early years. Policy #4: (This is the most unusual yet the biggest reason I’m in education.) High school is a 50/50 bridge to winning in real life. Mornings are for actual work, making and SAVING UP MONEY. Afternoons are for learning finances and professional skills of YOUR INTEREST. With average work, you’ll finish school with $50,000-$100,000 in the bank, more skills than the norm, and a greater chance of creating your life and work from there on out, rather than conforming to make a paycheck. Policy #5: As part of the high school 50/50 system, ensure each student learns the adult financial red tape in your state/country before you’ve got bills, kids, etc.show more

Most imitation learning policies break when the camera moves... or the robot changes. NOT THIS ONE 👇 [📍 Bookmark for later ] A new 3D scene representation encoder, tackles this by enabling zero-shot generalization to unseen embodiments and viewpoints… And it works with any IL algorithm. The trick? •Use a 2D foundation model to extract semantic features •Lift them into 3D space for localization (not semantics) •Condition the IL policy on this spatially grounded vector Across 93 simulated and 6 real tasks, Adapt3R: ✅ Maintains IL performance on LIBERO & MimicGen benchmarks ✅ Outperforms DP3 and 3D Diffuser Actor in most settings ✅ Holds >80% success on LIBERO even with large camera rotations Thanks for sharing this, Animesh Garg & Albert Wilcox! 📍Paper: Website: Code:show more

It's 2030 and you are reviewing humanoid robots. A... Tesla. A Google. An Apple. An OpenAI. A Meta. A Figure. And a bunch of Chinese-made ones. Which one is best, and why? I think the Tesla understands the world much better. Why? There were eight Teslas around me on the freeway today. Start there. No other robot company has that data. But my robot is parked at the local high school twice a day. Its cameras see humans in all of our weirdness. How we move. Where we go. Where we walk. Who we talk with. What you are wearing. Whether your hair was combed this morning. That data will lead to robotics breakthroughs. Apple might keep up with its Vision Pro data, but it is too freaked out by the privacy implications of using said data. (On the front are six cameras and a couple of TOF -- Time Of Flight -- sensors that can see everything in your home in great detail). Google has a lot of data, for sure. All my: 1. Email. 2. Calendars. 3. Photos. 4. TV watching behavior. 5. Contacts. 6. Documents and spreadsheets. 7. Files. 8. Location data. So I expect Google's robot will be attractive to many. But how do you see the others shake out over the next five years? Make some guesses. But remember what an AI pioneer told me years ago about AI: it's all about the data. The Chinese ones have huge advantages: the Chinese have more data on their citizens, and many more citizens to boot AND they can make robots cheaper than we can. But now that you know OpenAI is building its own robot you have caught wind of what I've heard from many in San Francisco and Silicon Valley: that humanoid robots are the real prize of AI and will be highly profitable for those that can make them and find customers willing to buy them. Here, too, I learned long ago never to bet against Elon Musk. Will you?show more

With Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0 now released and open-sourced,... we're excited to showcase the technical highlights behind this impressive innovation: ✅360° Panoramic Generation: Creates complete, immersive “world scenes”, far beyond localized views. ✅Explorable 3D Scene Generation: Generates diverse, spatially consistent 3D worlds from text/image for truly immersive exploration. ✅Interactive/Editable: Achieves separation of foreground objects, background terrain, ground, and sky, for seamless secondary editing. ✅Exportable Mesh: Generated scenes can be exported as 3D meshes for direct import into mainstream game engines and modeling software. ✅Industry-Leading SOTA Evaluation: Surpasses state-of-the-art open-source models in generation quality. As the industry's first open-source model for physical simulation and explorable world generation, Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0 aims to foster a collaborative community ecosystem with developers and enthusiasts. ✨ Try it now: 🤗 Hugging Face:show 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

Someone is vibe coding a live 3D news globe... with Claude Code that pins real world events on a spinning Earth as they happen. Instead of doomscrolling a feed, you open a tab with a 3D Earth and watch the world light up in real time. Breaking news, conflicts, disasters and humanitarian alerts get pinned to the exact spot on the map, alongside live flights and upcoming rocket launches. Click any event and it pulls up a short brief with its actual sources, so you can see where it came from. People are already saying it's the only way they want to read news now, the kind of thing you keep open in a tab and just glance at all day.show more

Generative 3d environments just became a thing with the... announcement of OpenAI's new video model, Sora. Michael Rublof from took one of those videos, and turned it into a NeRF using Colmap and Nerfstudio. While people are laughing at the topology of generated models, the world is changing around us, and that's exciting and a little scary, but we'll find a way to turn Gen Ai into creative superpowers. I believe in human creativity, in our ability to surprise, to move, to change and to challenge. Here's to the future! #ai #artshow more

The 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games opened today in... Beijing, and a world record has already been set. The Lightning robot, developed by smartphone maker Honor, ran 100 meters in 9.32 seconds, beating Usain Bolt's human record of 9.58 seconds. A total of 2,056 humanoid robots from 666 teams are participating in the games, competing in various real-world tasks and athletic events, such as house cleaning, firefighting, soccer, running, boxing, and more. Comment from me: Artificial intelligence is the foundation of future technological and environmental development. Today, we can see that two global centers have emerged in terms of the number of data centers, AI infrastructure, and the integration of AI into industrial and humanoid robotics: the United States, along with Japan and South Korea, and China. Russia is not an independent center and is lagging far behind the leaders, having squandered all its potential in the war. Europe is currently following the US lead, but it is already developing its own AI structures and semiconductor strategy, changing regulations, and investing hundreds of billions in technological autonomy, and it could become the third global center.show more