Big thing
Figure retires F.02 in a vat of molten steel
Figure trained its retired F.02s to jump, on their own, into a 75-ton arc furnace in Finland, a Terminator-style sendoff with Arnold Schwarzenegger. The metal is sold as souvenirs.
Epic to some, uneasy to others. @Schwarzenegger: "Hasta la vista, F.02." (217K). @DeryaTR_: "This wasn't cool", we should "treat them with same dignity" (25K).
Figure is building a consumer brand now: a celebrity, a film and a merch drop are how you get ready to sell robots into homes and to raise the tens of billions it says scaling will take. A lot of people watched it and asked what the point was, and we're with them. We were waiting for the next robot. The most impressive part got buried under the Terminator jokes: robots trained in simulation jumped on their own into a furnace they'd never seen.
Labs news
1. Boston Dynamics makes its case for Atlas
A new film shows production Atlas training on real tasks at Hyundai's Georgia Metaplant and argues Spot and Stretch give it the edge. The target: a two-year payback.
@humanoidsdaily: "Some of the first footage we've seen of this version handling real tasks." @RobotAutoTrader: Hyundai plans to put "more than 25,000 Atlas humanoids into its own factories."
Heat: low · 56K views, 28 posts
2. Pollen will build 10,950 Microducks by 10 January
They come off the line in weekly batches from 10 December, earliest orders first.
@ClementDelangue: "Our next robot should have arms so that it can participate in the production of microducks" (15K).
Heat: low · 42K views, 5 posts
3. DoorDash Air, DoorDash's own delivery drone
Built around 13 years of order data, it's "as silent as a passing car", with flight times under ~5 minutes on average in early tests. Chipotle and Popeyes go first.
Few takes yet. @adcock_brett: "This is cool, nice work."
Heat: medium · 792K views, 2 posts
4. Runway's Praxis-1 turns video pre-training into robot control
A world action model meant to work as a policy on any robot, tested with Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra. Weights come out in the coming months.
Little so far. @NVIDIARobotics: "Congrats on the launch!"
Heat: low · 44K views, 1 post
5. California orders REK to stop human-vs-humanoid cage fights
The humanoid fighting league got a cease-and-desist for an "UNSANCTIONED HUMAN VERSUS HUMANOID ROBOT CAGE FIGHT."
Taken as a badge of honour. @cixliv: "We made it boys." @AviAisenberg: "We are officially living in the future."
Heat: medium · 191K views, 12 posts
Key research
Tested across six domains, Astra hits 92% on RxR navigation and 48% on a manipulation set when paired with π0.5, but fails all five obstacle-course runs, with each call taking ~40 seconds. It matters because frontier models already make good task decisions; the gap is fast, reliable control.
Rho: Microsoft's open-weight 5B robot models
Microsoft Research released Rho VLAs, midtrained for three dual-arm setups and paired with online corrections, and says they beat the strongest open-weight VLAs. It matters because fine-tuning a robot to a new task is still too data-hungry.
RoboCoach: a world model that decides what to teach next
It replays skills in a world model, finds the first subtask that fails, and asks for demos only there: 150 extra demos took a Franka from 13.3% to 75.0%. It matters because demonstrations are the expensive part.
A frontier chat model that was never pitched for robots turns out to be a great robot supervisor: stepping in on just one move in seven tripled the robot's success. It's far too slow to drive a robot today, at about 40 seconds a call, and we can't wait for someone to distill that judgment into something fast enough for the control loop.
Capital & exits
- Aleph Surgical raised a $7.5M pre-seed led by a16z. Embodied foundation models for autonomous surgery.
The billions this week went to general-purpose robot bodies and world models, and the new raises are taking that same recipe into single high-value jobs. Surgery is the boldest pick yet: surgical robots have always been instruments in a surgeon's hands, and now there's money behind one that does the whole operation itself. We love it.