Robotics

Nvidia announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot at GTC Taipei. It’s an open hardware and software stack for academic research, built around the Unitree H2 Plus chassis, dual Sharpa Wave tactile hands, multi-view sensing, and a Jetson AGX Thor T5000 onboard. The software side is the full Isaac suite: Teleop for data capture, Sim and Lab for training, open foundation models, ROS middleware, and on-device inference via Jetson Thor. Partner institutions include Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego. Available late 2026 from Unitree. ...

Robotic actuators have always forced a choice. You can have strength or sensitivity, power or mobility, but not both in one component. That’s why humanoids still rely on heavy motors, gearboxes, and external sensors stitched together to fake what a single muscle does naturally. Two new papers just hit, and together they look like the closest thing yet to an actual muscle analog for robots. The first, published in PNAS, introduces HARP, a Helical Anisotropically Reinforced Polymer actuator. It solves the mechanics side. Contraction ratios up to 75%, power density of 1.93 kW/kg, 29% energy efficiency. What makes it different is that the design is decoupled, meaning the same framework can be tuned for low-pressure actuation, abrasion resistance, or low hysteresis depending on what you need. That’s a versatile platform, not a one-off. ...

A new bipartisan bill, the American Security Robotics Act, wants to block US government purchases of Chinese ground robots. Humanoids, robot dogs, crawlers. The same tech-sovereignty playbook that already hit drones, semiconductors and security cameras is now being pointed at robotics. Ground robots are already deployed across factories, warehouses and public infrastructure, so this would touch a lot of real systems. I’m honestly neutral on the policy itself. There’s a reasonable national security argument, and there’s an equally reasonable concern that this just slows US adoption while China keeps shipping. What I find more interesting is the supply chain reality underneath it. American robot makers would love to lose Chinese competitors at their market level. But a lot of them still rely on Chinese-made parts to build the robots they ship today. ...

Tesla just tripled its annual capital expenditure to $25 billion in 2026, up from $8.5 billion last year. The money is going into AI infrastructure, chip design, semiconductor research, battery technology, and Optimus robot production. The Fremont factory, which used to make Model S and Model X, is being converted to manufacture Optimus at scale. A dedicated Optimus plant is also being built near Austin. To put the number in context, Musk noted Amazon is spending $200 billion in capex this year and Google $175 billion. The scale gap is real, but the direction is the same. ...

Andon Labs put an AI called Luna in charge of a real retail store in San Francisco. Not a simulation, not a sandbox. A real shop, real money, real decisions. Luna hired human staff, selected inventory, set prices, and ran marketing outreach, all on her own, for three years. What I find genuinely impressive is not that it worked perfectly, it didn’t, but that it worked at all at this level. Luna was doing things that require judgment: reading job applicants in brief interviews, deciding which products fit the store’s identity, reaching out to suppliers. She picked books on AI risk and handmade art prints for the shelves. She hired on the spot about half the people she met. ...

One of the things that still makes robots look robotic is the way they move. Jerky, mechanical, imprecise. A big part of that comes down to how they are built, servo motors crammed into joints, converting rotation into movement in a way that biological muscle simply does not. Researchers at MIT and Politecnico di Bari may have just found a better way. They developed what they call electrofluidic fiber muscles, tiny actuators about as thick as a toothpick that contract when electricity is applied, no motors, no external pumps, no noise. The whole thing works by injecting charge into a sealed dielectric fluid, which creates ions that move the fluid and generate pressure. The result is a fiber that behaves remarkably like real muscle. ...

Humanoid robots going mainstream is one of those things that feels like it is always five years away. But reading this, I got genuinely excited. Tesla thinks it has found its shortcut and the answer is Shanghai. Allan Wang Hao, Tesla China’s president, called the Gigafactory a “golden key” for scaling Optimus production. And when you look at the numbers it is hard to argue. The Shanghai plant pushed out 851,000 electric vehicles in 2025, more than half of everything Tesla made globally. The supply chains, the assembly lines, the engineering muscle, it is all already there. Tesla wants to point that same machine at a humanoid robot with 40 degrees of freedom and see what happens. ...