Emanuele Rossetti, CEO of Makr Shakr, explains that the robot can be up to four times faster than a real-life bartender in preparing customers' drinks. "But that's not very fun to watch," he argues, and so the robotic arms have been slowed down to match the pace of a human.

Such developments could be transformative in the fields of homecare, health and manufacturing — and investors are taking note.

What if we could create a robotic fish that moved alongside marine creatures and mammals like a regular member of the aquatic neighborhood? That would give us a phenomenal window into undersea life.

What it does, for now, is pick up tote bins and move them. Amazon announced in October it will begin testing Digits for use in its warehouses, and Agility opened an Oregon factory in September to mass produce them.

First, you need to understand the meaning of the words as they are communicated in human language. You can learn this through processing large language data.

The best-known and perhaps most compelling examples of remote teleoperation and extended reach are the robots NASA has sent to Mars in the last few decades. My PhD student Marsette “Marty” Vona helped develop much of the software that made it easy for people on Earth to interact with these robots tens of millions of miles away.

Years ago, I befriended the biologist Roger Payne at a meeting of MacArthur Foundation fellows. Roger, who died in 2023, was best known for discovering that humpback whales sing and that the sounds of certain whales can be heard across the oceans.

Figure also plans to start with a relatively simple use case, such as in a retail warehouse, but aims for a commercial robot that can be "iterated on like an iPhone" to perform multiple tasks to take up the work of humans as birth rates decline around the world.

These examples of how we can pair the heart with the chip to extend our perceptual reach range from the whimsical to the profound. And the potential for other applications is vast. Environmental and government organizations tasked with protecting our landscapes could dispatch eyes to autonomously monitor land for illegal deforestation without putting people at risk. Remote workers could use robots to extend their hands into dangerous environments, manipulating or moving objects at hazardous nuclear sites.

All right, how about a fresh round of job listings? I plan to continue doing these periodically in chunks, going forward. The best way to get listed is to follow me over on LinkedIn and respond on threads where I announce a new job is coming up.

He casually continues, and it’s hard to tell if that Robot world pause put him in the right place to narrowly avoid disaster or if it ended up saving him by changing his walking path enough to his left that he avoids getting chopped in half by a falling pane of glass.

Picking up a can, spreading chocolate paste and flipping a pancake. Simple tasks for humans, but for robots they are extremely difficult.

Some researchers believe these advances could have as profound an effect on robotics as large language models, like ChatGPT, have had on words. The gigantic leap forward in text and image generation is now starting to happen to actions.

Spot’s AI abilities also allow it to learn quickly. When brewing giant AB InBev’s version of the canine machine encountered slippery floors while looking for air leaks in canning lines, its Boston Dynamics masters used machine learning simulations to teach it to cope. The work proved so effective, it has been rolled out to all Spots worldwide.