Machines that move
Robotics
Robots stopped being a demo. Warehouses, hospitals, streets and factories now run on machines that see, plan and act. This department follows the hardware, the software that drives it and the capital that follows both.
Long reads
Every read in Robotics
Robotics
The two-legged bet
Humanoids leave the lab
For twenty years the walking robot was a trade fair attraction. Now a dozen companies are building them by the hundred and a few are being paid for work. What changed is not the legs.
Robotics
Dexterity
The hand is the hard part
A robot can run, jump and carry a crate. Picking up a strawberry without crushing it is still a research problem, and it is the one standing between humanoids and most of the work they are sold for.
Robotics
Robot foundation models
The brain moved before the body did
The interesting thing about the current robot wave is not the hardware. It is that a single trained model can now drive many different bodies, and that it learns from video of people rather than from code written for machines.
Robotics
Robotaxis
The driverless mile is now a business
Twenty years after a Stanford car crossed the Mojave alone, paying passengers ride without a driver in a growing list of cities. The technology stopped being the question. The unit economics started being it.
Robotics
Collaborative robots
The robot that works next to you
While humanoids get the attention, the machine actually changing small factories is a slow, blunt arm that costs less than a delivery van and needs no cage.
Robotics
Logistics automation
A million robots, quietly
The largest robot fleets on earth do not walk, do not look like anything and never appear in a launch video. They move shelves, and they rebuilt how goods reach people.
Robotics
Medical robotics
The robot that has been working for twenty years
Long before humanoids, one robot category built a profitable business, an installed base and a razor-and-blade model. It is worth studying, because it shows what adoption of a serious robot actually looks like.
Robotics
Drones and delivery robots
The last mile is the expensive one
Delivery by air has been five years away for a decade. Meanwhile the boring version, a cooler box on six wheels moving at walking pace, quietly started working.
Basics
Explainers for Robotics
How large language models work
A very large function that predicts the next chunk of text. Everything these models can do is a consequence of doing that extremely well.
02Why AI needs GPUs
A neural network is millions of multiplications that can all happen at once. A graphics chip was already built to do exactly that.
03What is a humanoid robot?
A robot shaped like a person, so that it fits the spaces and tools built for people. That is the entire argument, and it is a better one than it sounds.