The new “Walt Disney – A Magical Life” attraction debuting at Disneyland on Thursday, July 17th, marks the first time that the parks have portrayed the man himself as an audio-animatronic figure. The movements are fairly impressive, but the facial likeness requires a little imagination.
The US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) has created an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) system designed to scare wildlife like birds away from airports.
Built atop a 20 mph Traxxas RC car, the UGVs are upgraded with plastic coyotes to make them more intimidating and cost around $3,000 each, according to New Atlas. Testing is still under way, including at the Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida where the Blue Angels call home.
The open-source robot is fully programmable in Python, allowing tinkerers to create and test AI applications for the desktop-sized device, which features “expressive movement” with a motorized head and body, as well as multimodal sensing.
The $449 Reach Mini is wireless and powered by a Raspberry Pi 5 minicomputer. There’s also a cheaper, $299 Reachy Mini Lite model that requires a wired connection to a computer.
That’s the milestone Amazon just crossed. As The Wall Street Journal notes, it’s coming up fast on the company’s total human workforce, which the paper estimates at 1.56 million people right now, and as Amazon’s CEO has said is likely to go down over the next few years.
The million includes the new touch-sensitive Vulcan robot unveiled last month, though probably not Amazon’s rumored work on autonomous humanoid delivery robots.
The M3gan sequel embraces sci-fi to tell a timely but muddled story about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
The company brought five of its Spot robodogs to America’s Got Talent where they performed a choreographed routine to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” — although one got stage fright and collapsed.
It’s another attempt to make the company’s bots go viral, but is it enough to sell a $74,500 robot that can’t assemble cars or unload trucks? Boston Dynamics, which laid off five percent of its workforce last December, is now facing more and more competition.
The South Korean automaker’s new $7.6 billion factory is a bulwark against tariffs and EV-hostile policies.
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The Roborock Saros Z70 is the first vacuum that can tidy up before it cleans — but it’s still a work in progress.
Tesla’s Optimus robot has been plagued by fakery since it launched with a dancer in a suit followed by remote manipulation at the cybercab event. So what is this? Generative AI? A man behind the curtain in a mocap suit?
Does it even matter if Tesla can’t mass produce them without China’s rare earth magnets?
One upgrade that the new $1,600 X9 Pro Omni robot vacuum mop has over the current $1,300 X8 flagship is Boosted Large-Airflow Suction Technology, which optimizes airflow from intake to exhaust, instead of just relying on suction power.
There’s a deal running from May 13th-19th that’ll save customers $300, alongside a more affordable $1,200 T80 vacuum mop with near-identical specs to the X8.
These autonomous cutters show promise, but there’s still a ways to go before you should trust one in your yard.
The AI development platform Hugging Face has partnered with The Robot Studio to release the documentation for the SO-101 robotic arm that will cost anywhere from $100 to $500 to build, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch. The arm has six motors and works with one or more cameras, letting you train it to carry out certain tasks — like putting a Lego brick in a bin.
The restrictions on rare earth minerals and related magnets came in response to Trump’s escalating tariffs and we’re now seeing some direct impact. Tesla’s occasional CEO says his plan to build thousands of Optimus humanoid robots this year is contingent upon the availability of those magnets needed for the robot’s motors.
”China wants some assurances that these are not used for military purposes, which obviously they’re not,” said Musk.
Starlink also wasn’t intended for military purposes... until it was.
They ran a separate-from-humans 21-kilometer (or almost 13.5-mile) track on Saturday in Beijing — a first, according to Reuters. Each had support from accompanying engineers for battery swaps or to pick them up when they fell. No wheeled robots were allowed.
The fastest robot was the Tiangong Ultra from the Beijing Innovation Center of Human Robotics, at 2 hours and 40 minutes, while the winning human runner’s time was 1 hour and 2 minutes, Reuters reports.
First announced at CES 2025, Yukai Engineering’s Nékojita FuFu is a tiny robot that’s designed to hang off cups and bowls to cool food and drinks by blowing on them. Calling it a robot is might be a bit of a stretch, but it’s cute, compact, and now available for preorder through Kickstarter for ¥3,550 (around $25 USD).
It’s USB-C rechargeable and can reduce temperatures by up to 30 degrees in just three minutes.
Alongside their fifth studio album, And the Adjacent Possible, debuting today, OK Go has released a new music video for a song called Love featuring kaleidoscopic effects created by the band, 29 choreographed robots, and over 60 mirrors.
Filmed over two days inside a decommissioned Budapest train station, it took 39 takes to film the single-shot music video that was co-directed by OK Go’s Damian Kulash, who also wrote the song.
Writer / director Drew Hancock’s new thriller Companion stands somewhere between M3gan and Lars and the Real Girl with its story about a man (Jack Quaid) whose girlfriend (Sophie Thatcher) doesn’t know that she’s actually a sophisticated android. The movie’s an inspired entry in the growing canon of AI panic horrors, and if you missed it during its theatrical run, you’ll be able to catch it on Max beginning April 19th.
Last month it was revealed that an Apple research team had developed an expressive robot lamp seemingly inspired by Pixar’s Luxo Jr. mascot. Although highly-articulated, Apple’s robot wasn’t mobile, but MiMo is.
Developed by the Japanese robotics company Jizai, MiMo is powered by multiple AI models and features an expressive head that looks like a desk lamp sitting atop six legs allowing the bot to follow people around or interact with them.
We’re slowly starting to get a better idea of the full capabilities of Boston Dynamics’ upgraded Atlas robot. The company shared another video of the humanoid performing various moves developed using reinforcement learning and human motion capture. Atlas runs, crawls, and performs a respectable cartwheel.
The bot’s breakdancing moves might not win it an Olympic gold medal, but it’s certainly not the worst performance the world has ever seen.
Netflix’s terrible adaptation of The Electric State is as soulless as it is uninspired.
