Apptronik unveils Apollo 2 and a flagship data collection and training facility
Apptronik offers a bipedal configuration for movement through spaces built for people, while a wheeled base offers stability and efficiency for high-throughput environments. | Source: Apptronik Apptronik yesterday made two major announcements. First, the company launched Apollo 2, its updated humanoid robot. Second, it opened its newly expanded Robot Park, its flagship data collection and training facility for humanoid robots in Austin, Texas. Apollo 2 comes in both bipedal and wheeled-base conf
A robotics company announced a new humanoid robot model available in two physical configurations: one with legs for navigating human spaces and one with wheels for industrial environments. The company also opened an expanded facility designed to collect real-world data from these robots performing various tasks, which feeds into training artificial intelligence models developed in partnership with a major tech research team. This matters because humanoid robots require large amounts of real-world data to learn how to operate autonomously, and the company frames this integrated approach of robot deployment, data collection, and AI training as a path from prototype demonstrations to robots that work reliably in actual job settings. The facility represents part of a broader network where robots continuously generate training data while performing logistics, manufacturing, and retail tasks.
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Google DeepMind releases new advanced robotics AI model and next-generation gene prediction model
Alphabet Inc.’s artificial intelligence research lab, Google DeepMind, Tuesday debuted the next generation of Gemini Robotics, the company’s most capable vision-language-action model to date for creating an “AI brain” for robotics. Separately, DeepMind announced AlphaGenome 2 today, a next-generation AI model that can predict how DNA sequences and their variations affect human cell types, creating […] The post Google DeepMind releases new advanced robotics AI model and next-generation gene
Also reported by MarkTechPost
Gemini Robotics 2.5 accelerates real-world general dexterity
Our most capable vision-language-action model enhances robot dexterity, reliability, and safety
Also reported by Ars Technica
Can AI agents program industrial robots without training data? Berkeley says yes
The new RoboSimStudio is an open-source project that enables agentic AI coding of robotic simulation environments. | Credit: UC Berkeley UC Berkeley and NVIDIA have released open-source tools for a new approach: enabling teams of AI coding agents to write, simulate, and refine readable robot programs. Since the early days of industrial robots, programming, tuning, and troubleshooting robotic workcells has taken weeks to months. New research coming out of UC Berkeley has demonstrated that new age
Boston Dynamics adds wheels to Atlas humanoid to test whole-body control
Bridging the divide between deterministic physics-based control and policy-driven adaptation, Boston Dynamics has deployed a hybrid locomotion architecture on a wheeled variant of its Atlas humanoid. The “experiment” combined classical model-based motor control with whole-body reinforcement learning to maintain dynamic stability across unstructured, real-world terrain. In the video, Andy Wu, controls engineer for Atlas at Boston Dynamics, highlights some recent experiments that he
Practice Makes Precise: At CoRL, NVIDIA and Partners Reveal How Robots Rehearse Delicate Work in Simulation
Simulation, which has long been the proving ground for robots learning to walk, roll and hop, is now helping researchers teach robots tasks that require a finer touch: aligning gears, connecting cables and assembling small components. The shift from locomotion to manipulation is taking center stage at this week’s Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Austin, Texas, alongside the rise of agentic robotics — a new paradigm that integrates frontier agents to create interpretable code for physical
Memories.ai builds standardized egocentric video pipeline
Memories.ai models label every clip: Memories-H0 for hand pose, EgoAction for action segments. | Credit: Memories.ai Memories.ai is building a data pipeline for robotics companies that combines standardized video collection with AI-powered annotation to turn everyday egocentric footage into training data for robots. The San Francisco-based company is developing software and AI to help robots understand the physical world. It builds video-understanding models and data infrastructure, and it colle