Google is launching its first Gemini-powered smart glasses, with Samsung supplying the computing hardware. Given their built-in 12-megapixel camera, Google is emphasizing privacy protections, including a tamper-resistant recording light, automatic face redaction, and restrictions on real-time facial recognition and livestreaming. The company also promises not to use captured photos or videos for AI training or targeted advertising. Ars Technica reports: Google says the frames all weigh about 41 grams, which is not terrible but is definitely near the top for glasses generally. They will, naturally, weigh much more when you account for lenses. That will also determine the final pricing. So far, we only have the starting prices for these devices, including non-prescription lenses.

The setup here is similar to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses we've seen for a few years. There are no screens in the lenses, but you can interact with the AI system via voice or by activating the integrated camera. The experience should be similar to using Gemini Live on your phone, but it will be a lot easier to fire up the AI. You can say "Hey Gemini" or tap a touch-sensitive area of the frame to start interacting with the robot.

Since this is the same chatbot that operates across the Google ecosystem, it has access to your data and preferences. You can ask questions and get personalized answers, have Google Maps guide you by voice, or just talk with the AI to kill time. The glasses use custom open-ear speakers to limit distractions for those around you. Google notes the directional microphones should not pick up speech from other people, either.

Adding the camera feed is where things get interesting. When the AI can see what you see, it has the potential to do more work on your behalf. Google suggests asking Gemini for recommendations when looking at a bookshelf or glancing at an event poster to have the AI add it to your calendar. The glasses will also support Gemini Guided Vision, which provides conversational audio descriptions for people who are visually impaired. The new frames are available for preorder today starting at $395.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon's Ring is going deeper into surveillance with an indoor drone for home monitoring and an autonomous robot designed to patrol businesses. The company on Tuesday unveiled the $250 Ring Drone Cam, a security camera that can fly from room to room, including upstairs, as well as capture footage during the day or at night. When an alarm or sensor on windows, doors and home security devices is triggered, the textbook-sized drone travels a preset path to investigate suspicious activity. Users can also deploy the drone at any time, the company said.

[...] The company on Tuesday also debuted the $1,000 Ring Rover Cam. The device repurposes Amazon's Astro home robot, which had a short life as a business device and has seen few upgrades since its 2021 debut, for companies to use to patrol offices, warehouses and other workspaces. Ring said it "leveraged the best of Astro" to build the Ring Rover Cam, which it describes as a "purpose-built security robot." Similar to the Astro, the device is a display mounted on a two-wheeled base with an extendable periscope camera. It also features a "built-in siren," two-way audio and a "light tower" that shines onto the ceiling to help users keep track of its whereabouts. The Ring Drone Cam ships in the U.S. on Jan. 27, while the Ring Rover Cam will begin shipping to users on Dec. 16.

Boston Dynamics has equipped its Atlas humanoid with wheels, allowing the robot to rapidly roll across flat terrain while still using its articulated legs to navigate obstacles and uneven surfaces. "The 'experiment' combined classical model-based motor control with whole-body reinforcement learning to maintain dynamic stability across unstructured, real-world terrain," reports The Robot Report. From the report: In addition to learning how to move with wheels for feet, Atlas also performs pirouettes and various aggressive actuation maneuvers. This demonstrates that Atlas can smoothly switch between fast rolling on flat terrain and articulated legged motion over obstacles or irregular surfaces.

[Andy Wu, controls engineer for Atlas at Boston Dynamics] trained the system in sim. The system learned all of the behaviors in sim and executed them in real life, with surprising accuracy, according to Wu. Wu said converting Atlas' locomotion style was "wonderfully simple." A single custom adapter mounts an off-the-shelf scooter rim onto Atlas' existing ankle actuator, and that's the only new part in the whole build. Because Atlas was designed from the start to be produced at high volume and to be easy to service, Wu said the retrofit was about as involved as swapping a wheel on a bicycle. The software side was just as straightforward, he said. Each wheel is modeled as an "ankle" that can spin continuously, so all Wu had to do was take the baseline robot model and swap the feet out for wheels.

The next question that Wu intends to answer is the policy response to failed actuators. This is key to safety and to understanding how the system will respond to a system failure. The primary takeaway for Wu and the controls engineering team at Boston Dynamics is to understand control synergy. The video demonstrates that merging classical motor controls (for baseline stability) with whole-body RL (for reactive adaptation) yields superior real-world agility compared to using either method alone.

Elon Musk says Tesla will be "winding down" Cybertruck production at its Texas Gigafactory around mid-2027 to free up capacity for increased production of its Cybercab robotaxi. CNBC reports: The Cybertruck is exclusively produced at the company's plant in Texas alongside the Tesla Model Y and two-seat Cybercab, which Musk has touted as a crucial product for the automaker moving forward. Musk did not say whether the company would produce the Cybertruck at a different facility, but he later responded to a user on X who called the update an "end of an era" and said the Cybertruck was the "best vehicle Tesla has ever made." "True, but the Cybertruck fleet will be around for a long time," Musk said.

The Cybertruck and its polarizing design gained a niche following, but it did not achieve mass-market sales, despite Musk's pre-launch prediction that annual sales would eventually total 250,000. "Trucks have been the same for a very long time," Musk said when the truck was unveiled in 2019. "Like 100 years. Trucks have been basically the same. We want to try something different." While Tesla does not break out its sales by model or region, Cox Automotive estimated sales of the Cybertruck last year at 20,237 units in the U.S., down 48% from 38,965 in 2024. Thank you Slashdot reader Dan Posluns for sharing the news.

According to The Information, Apple is developing a $1,000 HomeView Ultra smart home hub with a 9-inch touchscreen mounted on a motorized arm that can follow users around a room and autonomously respond to its surroundings. It's also said to be experimenting with more ambitious home robots, including a wheeled robot that follows people, a smart home drone and a machine capable of folding laundry. Notebookcheck reports: According to the report, HomeView Ultra will feature a larger 9-inch touchscreen mounted on a robotic arm. This arm can automatically turn the screen toward the user. With a camera and several sensors, this smart home hub is said to be "fully aware" of its surroundings and capable of acting autonomously. This autonomy ranges from turning on the lights when someone enters the room to shooing a cat away when it jumps onto a table. These sensors are also intended to prevent the arm from hitting nearby objects with the display.

Apple is reportedly currently planning to announce this smart home hub in 2027 for around $1,000, but according to The Information, its launch could be delayed until 2028. The reason is allegedly the software, which has not yet been finalized, while the hardware is said to be ready for market already.

Writing contests face "a literary version of the ruined world" in Blade Runner, writes CNN. "Anxiety and suspicion about robot infiltrators are everywhere — and so are people claiming to hunt the robots down." Multiple companies now offer products that promise to spot the difference, with often contradictory, biased or erratic results. The makers of Pangram, an AI detection platform that has been cited as authoritative in many of the recent controversies, claim it can distinguish between human and synthetic writing with near-perfect accuracy... The company's own estimates claim that false positives — in which the tool wrongly reports that a piece of human writing was created — are 1 in 10,000 and shrinking. Peer-reviewed studies from the University of Chicago and the University of Brussels support that claim, though one 2025 study from the University of Maryland found that Pangram erroneously labeled 2% of documents as AI.

A widely referenced 2023 Stanford study that found AI writing detectors produced higher rates of false positives on writing from non-native English speakers was conducted before Pangram was created. Pangram ran an internal study using a database of non-native English texts and self-reported that false positive rate was around 8 in 10,000... Given the thousands upon thousands of pieces of writing published each day, a 1 in 10,000 chance of a false accusation — let alone an 8 in 10,000 chance — means that even the most trusted AI detector is going to be wrong, and wrong about a lot of people.

Pangram isn't able to tell users the truth about someone's writing, but it is able to introduce something much more complicated: doubt. Unless an accused writer confesses to using an LLM, there is no bulletproof way to prove an accusation, short of being given full access to someone's computer history and finding the chatbot prompts... To some people and institutions on the literary side, using automated AI writing detectors to fight the influx of AI writing is just trading one form of technological domination for another.
Pangram "has entered the public consciousness at a time of distrust that goes beyond writing," CNN notes, when people want to block "at least some of the daily overflow of misinformation and misrepresentation" recently studied by John Warner, the author of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI .

But he's one of the people who believes AI-detecting tools can create a new dependence on another kind of machine. "Like all other technology of automation, that is going to de-skill people from discerning these things for themselves."

"A human defeated two of the three robots he faced in a cage fight recently held in San Francisco," reports the Los Angeles Times, noting that videos of the event drew more than 10 million views on YouTube.

But "the humans behind that fight could face a battle of their own — the legal type — if they want to hold another event like 'Human Vs. Robot,' the Sept. 18 competition that placed influencer Frankie LaPenna inside an octagon to battle three humanoid robots that were controlled remotely by a human operator in separate MMA-style fights..." Wearing spiked gloves, a helmet and protective padding, the 5-foot-6, 205-pound LaPenna held his own against all three bots. He dominated his first opponent, referred to at the fight as "the child robot." Next came an imposing "Terminator"-inspired humanoid, which was listed on the fight video as 6-feet and 200 pounds with a kick force of 850 pounds. The robot landed several hard kicks, including one that knocked LaPenna across the mat and another with an impact that brought the humanoid to the ground and caused its head to come off — but the human seemed to gain strength as the match went on and eventually stood triumphantly with his foot on the machine's crumpled body.

LaPenna was dominant early in his final match, in which he faced a robot that resembled a "Predator" from the movies of the same name. After landing several punches and kicks and taking his opponent to the ground multiple times, LaPenna eventually became fatigued and called for the match to be ended. "He doesn't get tired. He doesn't stay down," LaPenna said in a postmatch interview.
"The crowd of about 100 (humans, not humanoids) was thrilled," writes the New York Times. (After beating his first robot opponent, LaPenna told his interviewer, "Clankers zero, humans one.")

But the New York Times adds that "Those who know humanoid robots best highly recommend against fighting them." "It's very unfair to put a human in with a heavily motorized system that's only going to dominate," said Ken Goldberg, a professor who oversees the automation lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's nothing surprising about that...." He said he understood the appeal of the fights that Robot Entertainment Kombat (REK) was staging, noting that it tapped "into some of the fear and frustration with robots that people feel.... I mean, they love to see the human kick the robot's gearbox," he said. But the odds of that human fighter getting his gearbox kicked are much greater, Dr. Goldberg said, given that REK's humanoid robots can weigh several hundred pounds and are made of steel.
To be fair, it looked like sometimes the robot just fell over. (And the robots were human-controlled, not programmed with split-second reactions...)

But "Not everyone is a fan," adds the Los Angeles Times: On Sept. 23, the California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist order to REK, its CEO Cix Liv and "all persons holding, promoting, advertising or sponsoring unsanctioned human versus humanoid robot cage fight." The letter states that "any boxing or mixed martial arts contest, match, or exhibition, involving any human in the State of California" requires the prior approval of the commission and that it is a misdemeanor to hold such an event without obtaining a license or permit from the state. A spokesperson for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the CSAC, said in a statement emailed to The Times that the commission is "committed to protecting the safety of the public and integrity of combat sports."

"Unsanctioned activity puts the physical and financial well-being of all those involved at risk and such activity will not be tolerated," the statement said.

A Philadelphia newscast reports on a grey-haired lady who allegedly refused to move out of the path of a delivery robot as a form of protest because "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers."

She was arrested, but says her actions were protected speech: According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the robot's path and ignored multiple commands from officers to move... Marvin said she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.... "I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward," Marvin said...

Marvin said she has confronted delivery robots on multiple occasions... Ashley Baldwin of West Philadelphia said she witnessed one of those encounters. "I actually thought the robot hit her, so my original question was, 'Are you OK? Did the robot hit you?' And she said, 'No, I have to stop this. They're taking over the world,'" Baldwin said.

Asked whether she plans to continue protesting the robots, Marvin said she does.
She was charged with disorderly conduct.

Uber did not respond to their request for a comment.

Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a story that has drawn international attention for being potentially the first documented instance of a robot being used directly in a sexual assault. According to the Associated Press, German police have opened a sexual harassment investigation after a robot allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl's buttocks and made thrusting motions while two young men reportedly filmed and streamed the incident. Investigators seized the robot and the suspects' phones and are trying to determine whether the movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time. From the report: Cologne police spokesman Christoph Bermel said the two male teenagers have not been charged but are considered suspects, and investigators were examining whether the robot's movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time.

Police were unfamiliar with this type of incident, he said. "We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far," Bermel told The Associated Press, saying it was "new territory for us." [...] The robot, said to be 120 centimeters (about 3 ft 11 inches) tall, was dressed in a white tank top, black sweatpants and wearing a gold chain and sunglasses. It also had what appears to be a fake mustache. Videos circulated on the internet show two young men escorting the robot toward a group of women, bumping into one and hugging others, on a lively nighttime street.

Tesla has begun offering public rides in Austin in its purpose-built Cybercab, a two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals. "You can go outside, take rides," said Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI. "Anyone can take rides. It's open to the entire public." Previously, the fleet consisted only of Model Ys.

Texas records show Tesla had registered 45 Cybercabs as of Thursday, though the company has not disclosed how many are currently carrying passengers. Tesla also says it eventually wants consumers to be able to buy the vehicles for under $30,000. Business Insider reports: Videos posted online by Tesla influencers and content creators who were invited to the Austin event showed that the Cybercab can be hailed through the Robotaxi app. In a video posted by David Moss, an autonomous-vehicle content creator, Robotaxi users could open the car's butterfly doors through the app. After the riders enter the car, the doors closed automatically, Moss said in the video. The launch comes nearly two years after Tesla first unveiled the Cybercab at its "We, Robot" event in Burbank, California.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued on Wednesday that artificial intelligence needs significant limits or else the harm to humans will outweigh any potential good. "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice," he said in a 6,000-word essay, entitled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." [...] "Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history," he said, adding that "I don't see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era." AI can provide great benefits in field like agriculture and medicine, he argued, such as breakthroughs in preventing and treating diseases. But he also noted that the transition carries big risks, like widespread unemployment, harming the educational and social development of children, or making it easier for criminals and bad actors -- or AI itself -- to cause deliberate harm.

"As the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control," he warned. These significant risks must be controlled quickly, Gates said. "If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it," he wrote. "However, I don't think that's going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead." In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper that will air on Wednesday evening, Gates said AI models have gotten dramatically more powerful at a rate faster than he expected. "They're now capable of causing cyberattack risk, bioterrorism risk, psychosocial risk," he said. "I have to say I'm kind of shocked that the exact criteria that we review these models with, and the actions we take to minimize the harms, are really completely missing."

In his essay, Gates proposed taxing AI or robots the way you would pay a human employee's payroll tax in order to slow the shift away from using human labor. He also wants to set aside some work to be done by humans only. "My message to leaders is: You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded," he said. "You can make sure AI benefits everyone. And you can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge."

Two humanoid robots competing at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday ran the 100-meter dash faster than Usain Bolt's 9.58-second world-record time. "[T]he Tiangong Ultra humanoid robot completed the 100-meter dash in 9.39 seconds during a preliminary heat," reports Engadget. "Developed by Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, the record-holding robot overtook Honor's Lightning robot, which completed the sprint in 9.47 seconds. From the report: Despite the impressive finish times, don't expect these humanoid robots to be used for any commercial purposes yet. After their sprints, they slammed directly into pads and some even required human assistance to be stretchered off the course. However, it's still a major improvement from last year's inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, where the Tiangong Ultra won the 100-meter dash in 21.5 seconds. Beijing has also hosted a humanoid robot half-marathon, where Honor's Lightning won in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, which also beat the pace of another human world record.

"The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing kicked off August 22 and will run until the 26, hosting thousands of robot participants competing in more than just track and field events, including soccer, table tennis and boxing," adds Engadget.

China's Chang'e 7 mission is set to launch for the moon's south pole, where it will attempt the first-ever landing directly at the pole and search the region's dark craters for water ice. "It's an amazing mission," says Norbert Schorghofer, a Hawaii-based senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. "There has never been a landed mission to find water [on the moon]." If successful, China "will be the leader in lunar science," Schorghofer adds. Scientific American reports: Chang'e 7, China's seventh moon mission, is scheduled to launch on a Long March 5 rocket from the coastal Wenchang Space Launch Site on the island of Hainan, with the launch window opening on the morning of August 24 local time (the evening of August 23 EDT). The mission includes an orbiter, as well as a lander, which totes a rover and a novel "hopping" robot. The spacecraft will take up to six days to reach lunar orbit, where it will then spend two months preparing for a November landing meant to be a near bull's-eye on the lunar south pole. The mission also includes equipment from several international partners, highlighting China's growing global influence -- both on and off Earth.

The mission's lunar target is Shackleton Crater, a 21-kilometer-wide (13-mile-wide) pit with a rim that grazes the moon's south pole. No other spacecraft has ever landed so close. That proximity should allow Chang'e 7 to prospect for water ice trapped in smaller depressions near Shackleton that, because of the moon's tilt, never see sunlight and have temperatures just a few dozen degrees above absolute zero. "There are big reservoirs of ice water at the poles," says Simone Dell'Agnello, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics.

No one knows, however, just how big those reservoirs are or what their actual distribution is across the lunar south pole's crater-pocked desolation. And because that ice might be used as for manufacturing rocket fuel or to make potable water for thirsty astronauts, answering those questions is key for the U.S.'s and China's competing plans to construct crewed lunar outposts.

Chinese robotics giant Unitree surged more than 600% in its Shanghai stock market debut, marking the first mainland Chinese listing by a humanoid robot maker and a major milestone for Beijing's robotics ambitions. The BBC reports: Unitree, officially known as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, was founded in 2016 and now plays a key role in Beijing's ambitions to develop advanced technology. It has become a robotics industry leader, selling devices from sensors and automated arms to four-legged and human-like machines. The firm shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year as demand for the technology grows.

Unitree is one of the few companies in the sector to make money, delivering a net profit of 278 million yuan in 2025. It is a fierce rival to developers in the US as it produces robots with similar features but at lower prices. The company is based in Hangzhou, in eastern China. The region is home to a so-called golden cluster zone of robotics firms, which have benefited from huge government investments. That support helped drive a more than threefold increase in the number of Chinese robotics firms between 2020 and 2024, according to state-run China Daily.

[...] Unitree's robot dogs start at $2,700, a fraction of the roughly $70,000 price tag for Boston Dynamics' four-legged device, Spot. "They're not exactly comparable because some of Unitree's dogs are much smaller," [said Harold Soh, a researcher from the National University of Singapore]. "But the price is a big difference." Unitree has been selling humanoid robots since 2023, with its $13,500 child-sized G1 model hitting the market the following year. Meanwhile, major US rivals -- including Elon Musk's Tesla -- have yet to start delivering rival products.

[...] Some experts expect Unitree's market debut to be a gauge of investor appetite for the fast-growing humanoid robotics sector. The listing has given the public a rare chance to invest in a humanoid robotics company and could set a benchmark for other manufacturers, said Jack Pearson from investment firm RoboStrategy. The listing also marks a "turning point" for China's robotics industry, as Unitree's success comes even as the US is curbing imports of foreign-made robots, Pearson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: At a BMW factory in South Carolina, a human-shaped robot with a screen for a face recently stepped from a charging station toward a stack of green plastic boxes. It grasped an auto part from one of the boxes, pivoted, placed the part in a trolley, then pulled the trolley across the floor. The robot's slow, stiff movements suggested a worker with a bad hangover rather than a technological revolution. "They're still slower than humans," Ulrich Wieland, a BMW vice president in charge of logistics at the factory, in Spartanburg, told reporters invited to see the robot in June. But, he added, "they're advancing fast."

Automakers have used robots for decades, but they are usually powerful, one-armed machines that are fixed in place and perform repetitive tasks like welding body frames or applying adhesives to door panels. Now, most major automakers are betting that robots designed to resemble human beings, known as humanoids, will usher in a new wave of automation and efficiency. Equipped with artificial intelligence, they are expected to move around and do tasks now done by humans without any modifications to factories or heavy equipment.

Unlike most of the robots now in use, humanoids would respond to voice commands and theoretically solve problems and react to unforeseen events. They would never take a lunch break, join a union or require health insurance. To optimists, robots could rescue U.S. manufacturing by increasing productivity, solving shortages of skilled workers and giving Western carmakers a fighting chance at competing with Chinese rivals that enjoy lower costs. Boring but important jobs like sorting parts would be done by robots, freeing humans for more interesting and specialized work.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots.

Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. "In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them," the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples.

They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Robotics companies promise that video-camera-toting security robots can deter and detect crime. But many companies are rethinking the approach after a trail of canceled contracts and questions about whether the artificial intelligence-powered bots are meeting the needs of businesses and local governments. Proof News found evidence of at least 21 security robot deployments since 2015. We contacted contract holders and combed news articles and determined that at least 13 of those programs have ended. Silicon Valley-based Knightscope secured the most security robot contracts, according to Proof's analysis, and also suffered the bulk of cancellations.

For example, New York City's then-Mayor Eric Adams installed a Knightscope robot on the overnight shift at the Times Square subway station, but the program was scrapped when the pilot expired in 2024. City leaders did not respond to Proof News' questions about why the robot wasn't renewed. By the end of its assignment, it was reportedly gathering dust in an empty storefront. Outside Columbus, Ohio, the city of Dublin pulled the plug on a Knightscope robot in May, ending its two-year pilot program after less than 10 months. The city enlisted the robot, dubbed DubBot, to patrol a downtown park, but city spokeswoman Robyn Gray said it "did not fully meet our operational needs," and failed to identify any criminal incidents or lead to any tickets or arrests.

[...] Seeking a new path forward in the security industry, Knightscope CEO William Santana Li said the company is forging a new model, combining its robots and AI-powered software with another key ingredient: human security guards. Knightscope announced it purchased Event Risk LLC, a national security guard firm, earlier this year. Knightscope has incurred net losses since inception in 2013, according to its most recent quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and is $273 million in debt. Knightscope hopes its pivot to incorporate people will give it a greater share of the physical security market -- which the company believes is worth an estimated $230 billion annually. Li declined to answer questions about the disbanded programs, but said in an email, "Technology cannot do everything -- and neither can people -- but the combination can be very powerful."

Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2 combines vision, language, and action models to control multiple types of robots, including humanoids performing tasks such as organizing shelves, tying bags, and replacing lightbulbs. "It's another milestone in our path towards really getting towards what we call like physical AGI, which means we get a robot to do anything that a human can," Carolina Parada, head of robotics at Google DeepMind, tells WIRED. From the report: Gemini Robotics 2 combines several different AI models into a single system. Taken together, they allow a robot to make sense of its surroundings and how to act in it. A vision language model (VLM), which understands images and video, can communicate with humans and reason how to perform different tasks. Two vision language action (VLA) models, trained to understand how to move in physical space, control the robot's full-body movement as well as the movements of grippers or hands.

In video demonstrations shared ahead of the release, the company showed several different robots performing complex tasks autonomously using the amalgamated model. In one demo, Apptronik's Apollo 2 robot used hands from a company called Sharpa to tidy shelves. Google DeepMind trained the model to perform these tasks using a mix of human teleoperation, video examples, and simulations -- it's not yet possible for AI models to perform a wide range of complex tasks without specific training.

[...] Parada says Google takes a multi-layered approach to safety, with guardrails applied on each model layer. It's also introducing ASIMOV-Agentic, a new benchmark for measuring the safety of various AI systems collaborating to control a robot. The benchmark detects whether a command will result in harmful or uncertain outcome.

The FCC's ban on Chinese-made robots extends well beyond humanoids to quadrupeds, research platforms, and many robot vacuums from allied countries. Supporters call it a major boost for domestic robotics, but critics warn that cutting researchers and startups off from affordable foreign hardware could slow U.S. innovation instead. Ars Technica's Jeremy Hsu examines who stands to gain and who stands to lose from the prohibition: Such an import ban would apply to some of the most affordable robots primarily produced by Chinese companies, including Unitree's humanoid robots that are used by robotics labs and researchers for tasks such as experimental robot surgeries. US consumers would also likely lose access to the newest robot vacuum cleaners that are mainly manufactured by Chinese companies such as Roborock. But the ban also broadly applies to foreign-made robots produced by countries nominally allied to the United States, including Japan, South Korea, and Germany. [...]

The ban on foreign-made robots could theoretically encourage more US and foreign companies to set up manufacturing facilities in the United States. There are already multiple companies racing to scale up production of humanoid robots in US factories, including Agility Robotics, 1X Technologies, and Figure AI. Tesla has been attempting to shift production away from older electric vehicle models and toward its Optimus humanoid robot. Boston Dynamics has already been making its Atlas humanoid robot, along with its four-legged Spot robot and wheeled Stretch robot, at its main facility in Waltham, Massachusetts. The US robotics company is also planning to massively scale up manufacturing of the Atlas robot under South Korea's Hyundai Motor Company, which gained full ownership of Boston Dynamics in July 2026.

"This is one of the strongest technology-security actions in modern US history," wrote Evan Beard, CEO of Standard Bots, in a LinkedIn post. "The message is unambiguous: robotics is a technology America must lead and own -- and foreign-subsidized robots will not be allowed to unfairly dominate US robotics as they did solar." Similar praise came from Rush Doshi, director of the Initiative on China Strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations, who, in a social media post, described the FCC decision as "one of the most significant actions taken so far in support of the US robotics ecosystem."

However, several robotics researchers and analysts interviewed by The Robot Report expressed skepticism about any potential boost to US competitiveness in robotics. Some even warned that the ban could prove counterproductive for US robotics efforts to develop humanoid robots. "In the near term, the measure could slow US physical AI innovation by cutting startups and researchers off from future low-cost Chinese platforms before comparable Western alternatives exist," said Georg Stieler, a global robotics advisor and managing director for Asia at Stieler Technology & Market Advisory, in an interview with The Robot Report.

US domestic production of robots lags behind China in terms of mass manufacturing at lower cost, said Rueben Scriven, a senior analyst at Interact Analysis. "This announcement is more likely to inhibit the US humanoid robotics industry, as the presence of low-cost Chinese humanoid robots has been helping educate the US market through promotional and entertainment use cases -- an effect this policy risks undermining," Scriven told The Robot Report. The report notes that previous FCC bans have done little to help create competitive U.S. alternatives, with restrictions on Chinese drones instead prompting companies to sell barely disguised versions of DJI technology.

The Trump administration has banned newly authorized foreign-made humanoid and four-legged robots, along with power inverters, citing "unacceptable risks" to the country's national security. FCC chairman Brendan Carr said the agency was doing its part "to secure America's critical supply chains." The BBC reports: The FCC has added the items to its Covered List -- a register of goods and services that are deemed a risk to US national security. The ban applies to new foreign-produced advanced robotic devices and power inverters and does not prevent the sale or import of any existing models that had been previously authorized by the FCC.

The FCC cited concerns that the use of foreign-made inverters could allow overseas firms to turn them off, steal data, facilitate remote access and surveillance by "foreign government actors, or be otherwise exploited through a cyberattack." It added that the use of robots made outside the US could allow "malign actors to surveil Americans, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or to remotely commandeer the robots."