#robotics

#robotics

Janyla Amazing Haqq, 19, was charged in San Mateo County court Wednesday for kidnapping a 14-year-old girl in Daly City and taking her to Oakland to be forced into human trafficking. Prosecutors say Haqq convinced the girl and her male friend to get in a car with her and three strangers, when they proceeded to take the girl to International Boulevard in Oakland after dropping the boy off, who told the girl's mother. [KRON4]

An elephant's trunk is a marvelous thing, flexible enough to bend and stretch as it forages for food, but also stiff enough to grasp and maneuver even delicate objects like peanuts or a tortilla chip. That's because the trunk is highly sensitive when it comes to sensing touch. Scientists have determined that the whiskers lining the trunk are crucial for that sensitivity thanks to their unique structure, amounting to a kind of innate "material intelligence, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

Dario Amodei shares his utopian and dystopian predictions for the near-term future of artificial intelligence. I want to try and focus on scenarios where A.I. goes rogue. I should have had a picture of a Terminator robot to scare people as much as possible. I think the internet... The internet does that for us. Are the lords of artificial intelligence on the side of the human race? My prediction is there'll be more robots than people.

Alibaba has launched RynnBrain, an open source AI model that helps robots and smart devices perform complex tasks in the real world. The model combines spatial understanding with time awareness. Alibaba's DAMO Academy introduced the foundation model that enables interaction with the environment. RynnBrain can map objects, predict trajectories, and navigate in complex environments such as kitchens or factory halls. The system is trained on Alibaba's Qwen3-VL vision language model.

It feels like an episode of The Jetsons come to life, but the truth is that the AI boom has officially entered the physical world. Most of us interact with artificial intelligence through screens- Gemini drafts our emails, ChatGPT summarizes our docs-but behind the scenes, engineers are racing to give AI hands and feet. Robots already pack boxes in warehouses and make guacamole in fast-food kitchens. Soon, they will be washing dishes, taking care of pets, and performing your manicure.

"If a rover comes across a crater in front of it, for instance, it can't decide what to do after communicating with Earth," he says, because sending signals across space takes too long. "It must decide on its own. So I think AI is very important for the nation's deep space exploration."

A decade ago, China's political leaders laid out an ambitious industrial plan: By 2025, they pledged, their country would be a world capital, with the goal of moving from "Chinese speed to Chinese quality, the transformation of Chinese products to Chinese brands." This is the difference, they wrote, between "Made in China" and "Created in China." At WIRED, we never take what the government (ours or anybody else's) says at face value.

You know that feeling when you want to practice your serve but no one's available to hit with you? Or when you're playing a casual match with friends and everyone's arguing about whether that ball was in or out? Designer Jaehong Jeon has created something that might just solve both problems, and it happens to look like the friendliest little robot you've ever seen.

Its name is Atlas, an all-electric humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics, the Massachusetts-based company and maker of the four-legged inspection robot, Spot, and the mobile warehouse robot, Stretch. Hyundai, which owns Boston Dynamics, unveiled the latest version of Atlas at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 5. During live demonstrations, Atlas was seen waving hello to its audience before moving car parts from one rack to another.

So Tony Cholerton, a zookeeper who had been a motorcycle engineer for many years, invented Robovacc a machine to quickly administer vital jabs without the presence of people. The result, a clever contraption he controlled from an adjacent room with a handset taken from remote-control toy aeroplanes, successfully administered vaccinations to Cinta in a feeding area. The tiger sat up briefly, mid-meal, as the needle penetrated her rear end, then calmly continued eating.

1X, the robotics company behind the Neo humanoid robot, has unveiled a new AI model that it says understands the dynamics of the real world and can help bots learn new information on their own. This physics-based model, called 1X World Model, uses a combination of video and prompts to give Neo robots new abilities. The video allows Neo robots to learn new tasks they weren't previously trained on, according to 1X.

The ping pong player The movie Marty Supreme just came out a month ago, so I guess it's only appropriate that there was a ping-pong-playing robot at this year's convention. The Chinese robotics firm Sharpa had rigged up a full-bodied bot to play some competitive table tennis against one of the firm's staff. When I stopped by the Sharpa booth, the robot was losing to its human competitor, 5-9, and I would not characterize the game that was occurring as particularly fast-paced.

"We need to be able to bring a new task to bear in a day or two," Playter said. "And that's because, I think in a factory, there's literally hundreds of tasks and the tasks evolve."

January 7th, 2026 29 minutes

Hyundai's decision to use its CES keynote to tout Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot sends a pretty clear message about how the auto industry is absorbing the bad news about EVs in the United States in 2025, and where it thinks things are heading in the new year. EVs are out, and AI and robotaxis are in. In addition to Hyundai, Mercedes announced its plans to roll out its Nvidia-powered Level 2++ driver assist feature in the US later this year.

If you listen to the CES hype machine this year, you might think that robots are finally ready to take over your domestic duties. To some extent that's true, but take note of the plural: there's no single robot ready to take over all of your household chores yet, but an army of them just might. You might have had one of these single-purpose robots in your home for years already, of course.

The company has equipped it with its proprietary AI engine and promises "human-like cognition, emotional awareness and expressive behavior." The doll, which in the marketing video is called Emily, is Lovense's answer to the global loneliness crisis. It says, over time, a user's relationship with the system will grow deeper as it learns to adapt to their needs. And that the doll is the natural evolution of the virtual companions that have, until now, "existed only on phones and screens."

When Hyundai acquired the robotics giant Boston Dynamics in 2021, very few observers thought that using mechanical dogs to spot-check welds in car factories would be the endgame. Today, at CES 2026, Hyundai offered a detailed look at what it really wants to do with robots: make them more humanlike, and then put them to work building cars. The goal, Hyundai officials said, is simple: better safety, better quality, more durability and reliability, and at lower production costs.

The company, Lyte, emerged from stealth on Monday after raising about $107 million to date from investors including Fidelity Management & Research, Atreides Management, Exor Ventures, Key1 Capital, VentureTech Alliance and a group of private investors led by the Israeli entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz. Mountain View, California-based Lyte was founded in 2021 by three former Apple employees Alexander Shpunt, Arman Hajati, and Yuval Gerson who played a major role in building the depth-sensing and perception technology that Face ID uses to capture faces.

There is no question that 2026 is already set up to be something of a continuance of 2025, at least in the sense of moving deeper into the world of AI, automation, and robotics. As companies deploy AI at scale and industrial robots continue to replace human labor slowly, chip manufacturers can't keep up with demand, and the hype isn't really hype anymore, as it's infrastructure being built in real time.