The evolution of Digit: Agility Robotics’ journey from Cassie to Digit 5
From left to right: Cassie and Digit through the years. | Source: Agility Robotics Agility Robotics has been operating for over 10 years, and in that time it’s created five different versions of its Digit humanoid. The company has grown from its roots in the Dynamic Robotics Lab at OSU, to having three offices across the country, over 400 employees, and a factory that can build up to 10,000 robots annually. With the release of Digit 5, we’re looking back at how Agility’s techno
Agility Robotics has developed five generations of a humanoid robot called Digit, evolving from an early research platform focused on speed to a commercially deployed robot designed for warehouse and logistics work. The company started over 10 years ago with Cassie, a bipedal robot with ostrich-like legs, then released the first Digit in 2017 for researchers before commercializing it by the third iteration in 2019. Digit 4, released in 2023, proved the robot could perform warehouse tasks and has been deployed with multiple major companies, with learnings from those deployments informing the latest version. Digit 5 marks a shift toward practical industrial deployment, featuring human-like legs for strength rather than speed and the ability to work safely around human workers by dynamically responding to their presence.
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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