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Tech News
Jack Turner, a self-taught 23-year-old animatronics expert, is repairing and restoring decades-old animatronic figures that had fallen into disrepair. His work focuses on returning these aging mechanical systems to working order rather than replacing them with new technology.
A local startup called Tau Robotics is trialing a humanoid robot that cleans homes while a human operator pilots it remotely using onboard cameras, rather than operating autonomously. A journalist who signed up for the waitlist had the robot sent to clean their apartment and reported both glitches and moments suggesting future potential. Separately, Samsung is expanding its Pyeongtaek, South Korea semiconductor campus, where three fabs run continuously, a fourth is starting up, and a fifth is under construction to meet AI-driven memory chip demand.
A journalist hosted a demonstration of Tau's humanoid cleaning robot, which is remotely operated by human staff from the company's headquarters. The robot struggled to climb exterior stairs, had to be carried up a carpeted staircase, and stopped working mid-session after its operator's remote-viewing equipment overheated and shut down. Tau offered to comp the visit and provide a free follow-up session.
Meta has developed a prototype humanoid robot called Max intended to assist with household chores, according to The Information, built in about three months with help from Chinese robotics firm Fourier. The robot reportedly weighs about 106 pounds, stands roughly five feet tall, has a facial-expression display, a speaker, hands for grasping small objects, and runs on NVIDIA's Jetson Thor chips. A second prototype, Max 2, has reportedly been in development since September with design updates to the torso, hands, a projector, and added sensors for navigating stairs.
D.R. Horton, the largest U.S. homebuilder, is partnering with Promise Robotics to shift wall-framing work from traditional jobsites into a factory setting where robots assemble components. The move applies automation to a process typically done manually by framing crews on-site.
The Carmelite Monks are employing computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines, fitted with diamond-tipped blades and milling bits, to carve ornate Gothic stonework for their church construction. The monks program the coordinates themselves, using the technology to produce intricate pinnacles and details that traditionally required months of hand-carving by skilled artisans.
BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo told CNBC's Jim Cramer that robotics and physical AI are emerging growth areas for the company's QNX software platform, which already runs in over 275 million vehicles worldwide. He said QNX's royalty backlog has surpassed $1.2 billion, up more than $250 million over two quarters, driven by automaker upgrades, expanded software offerings, and demand for physical AI applications.
Chicago residents have filed separate lawsuits against delivery robot companies Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics, alleging their sidewalk robots used onboard cameras and LIDAR sensors to capture biometric data—including images of hands, bodies, and faces—without consent. One plaintiff says a human operator remotely watched his delivery, while another claims his data could be retained for AI training or shared with third parties. Coco has called the suit against it frivolous, denying it collected biometric data in Chicago.
A new robotics system called Dream-1 is designed to generalize zero-shot to tasks, environments, and robot hardware it has never encountered before, removing the need for each robot to collect its own training data first. Its developers point to falling hardware costs, including bimanual robot arm setups priced as low as $2,000, as a second factor making wider robot deployment feasible. Together, they argue, these shifts could let robotics escape the chicken-and-egg problem that has long slowed the field compared with self-driving cars.
A video of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demonstrating small robotic Microducks at the GTC Berlin keynote went viral, and preorders surpassed 20,000 units within a day, according to Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue. The Microducks are open-source robots made by Pollen Robotics, a company Hugging Face acquired in 2025; Nvidia itself acquired Hugging Face in September. The devices were trained using Nvidia's technology stack and ship with basic tricks like walking and sitting, with owners able to teach and share new behaviors.
Workers in India, including a Bengaluru barber named Mohammed Ashim, are being paid to film their hands performing everyday jobs like haircuts, pottery and embroidery. Firms such as Rashdan Technologies collect this footage and sell it to robotics and AI companies training 'physical AI' systems that control robots. Rashdan says it pays $5-$10 for eight to 10 hours of recorded work and blurs faces to protect worker identity.
MIT researchers created a gum-stick-sized robot with a flexible gel body and two thin fins coated in genetically modified muscle cells that contract when exposed to light. By targeting light at either fin and varying its frequency, the team can steer the robot's direction and speed, and it successfully navigated a small underwater maze at a top speed of about four body lengths per minute.