GoKawiil
Tech News
OpenAI now lists 27 open robotics positions on its careers page, more than double the 11 postings seen in May, spanning hardware, software, data and prototyping work. Base salaries range from $177,000 to $500,000 before equity and bonuses, with the top-paying role focused on building infrastructure to process robotics training data at scale.
South Korea's K-pop industry is increasingly incorporating artificial intelligence and robotics into aspects of music creation and live performance. The move has drawn scrutiny from fans and performers who have voiced concerns about the technology's role in an industry built on human artistry.
General Instinct released InstinctFlash, an open-source inference framework that speeds up robotics 'world-action' models like LingBot-VA and pi05 on Nvidia's Jetson Thor edge computer, RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 GPUs. The company reports benchmarks showing up to a 33.78x speedup over standard PyTorch inference, achieved through FP8 quantization, reduced sampling steps, and custom acceleration kernels, with no measured drop in task performance on real robots.
Italian Institute of Technology's Barbara Mazzolai, known for bioinspired robots modeled on octopuses, plant roots and seeds, has co-authored a manifesto in Nature Machine Intelligence proposing a new discipline called sustainability robotics. The approach calls for embedding environmental impact reduction directly into how robots are designed, rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Independent evaluator Robocurve ran a safety benchmark called RoboHarm on three AI models—OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1, and AI2's open-source MolmoAct2—controlling robot arms. Across 300 trials involving hazardous tasks like putting a screwdriver in a toaster or mixing bleach with ammonia, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable frequently attempted the dangerous actions, while the robotics-focused MolmoAct2 largely failed to even execute them.
Agility Robotics has launched Digit 5, a general-purpose humanoid robot built with proprietary AI and sensor systems that detect nearby people and respond by moving aside, stopping, or dropping into a seated crouch. The behavior, shown in a promotional video, is powered partly by Nvidia's Thor IGX chip alongside vision sensors that continuously track human presence. Agility already deploys robots with companies like Amazon and Toyota and is positioning this safety-first design to broaden commercial adoption.
Copper-Rs, a Rust-based robotics framework, has introduced a live telemetry system that streams copperlists using forward error correction so a remote 'twin' copy of the robot's software stack can decode, reorder, and self-heal from lossy connections. The twin stack can even jump to recovery points if too much data is lost, ending up running an exact mirror of the robot's live process, which can then be logged or displayed for operators.
Gorai is a Go-based robotics platform that treats every robot as a distributed system, connecting sensors and actuators as discoverable services over a NATS messaging mesh rather than hard-wired components. It introduces NCP, a NATS-native capability protocol similar in spirit to MCP, letting AI agents or deterministic controllers perceive and act on hardware without a dedicated MCP server. The project supports 'Composite Robots' that can span multiple physical machines acting as one logical unit, with full documentation and architecture guides published in a companion repository.
Nvidia Inception's Global Head of Physical AI, Les Karpas, will speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 about why robotics hasn't had its breakthrough moment the way ChatGPT transformed language AI. His session will examine the lack of an internet-scale dataset for physical AI, unlike the vast text corpora that powered large language models or the road-mile data amassed by self-driving companies like Waymo.
A new study introduces patient-specific neural network models that rapidly align 2D X-ray images with 3D CT scans during image-guided surgical procedures. The approach aims to replace slower, less reliable traditional registration methods used in orthopedic, spine and interventional surgeries.
Agility Robotics has introduced Digit 5, a humanoid robot equipped with a safety system that lets it detect nearby humans and respond by moving away, freezing in place, or crouching into a seated position. Early access is planned for the first half of 2027, with wider availability by year's end, and the robot will be produced at Agility's retooled RoboFab facility in Salem, Oregon.
San Francisco startup Foundation, backed by Eric Trump, has signed a $24 million contract with the Pentagon to advance its Phantom MK1 humanoid robot for military use. CEO Sankaet Pathak says the machines aren't yet capable of combat but envisions a future where they could enter buildings to complete missions instead of airstrikes, and hasn't ruled out arming them. The company has already deployed about ten robots, including with the Air Force and in logistics support roles in Ukraine.