The Hallway Track
78 tracked signals on robotics.
AMD acquires World Labs for $8.2B, gaining spatial AI and Atlas sparse reconstruction model
“Recently we released Atlas, a first of its kind omni model architecture that solves a key outstanding problem in spatial intelligence: new camera view prediction.”
Sam Altman expects OpenAI to declare AGI achieved internally by December 2026.
“Automated AI Research Intern”
Mass Magnetics aims to recycle rare earth magnets for robotics and defense.
“A huge portion of the world's magnets will come from recycled materials.”
Atlas is a new next-generation model capable of high-quality world simulation.
“Yesterday was a big day. You launched a new cutting-edge model that received a great reception.”
Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics 2 with whole-body intelligence, dexterity, and multi-robot collaboration.
“What we're building here is the intelligence layer to power any robot to do a broad range of useful tasks.”
NVIDIA declares physical AI has arrived after 15 years, unveiling full robotics stack and Japan mechatronics partnership.
“After 15 years of work, physical AI is here.”
Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics ER 2 with multi-robot collaboration and video understanding.
Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 Video, beating Seedance 2.0, Gemini Omni, and Grok Imagine
NVIDIA Cosmos is an open foundation model generating synthetic data for physical AI training.
“For physical AI, compute is data.”
NVIDIA's ENPIRE framework lets coding agents run a closed-loop self-improvement process for real-world robots, hitting 99% on dexterous tasks.
“Frontier coding agents can autonomously develop a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks in the real world, such as PushT, organizing pins into a pin box, and using a cutter to cut a zip tie,”
NVIDIA's Jensen Huang frames the AI factory as the largest infrastructure buildout in history and the best enterprise investment of the next decade.
“you can't think if you don't generate words”
NVIDIA unveils Cosmos 3, an open omnimodel for physical AI that perceives, generates, and acts.
“Cosmos, the foundation for developers of the age of physical AI.”
NVIDIA releases Cosmos 3, billed as the first open omni-model for physical AI reasoning and action.
General-purpose LLM agents may outperform specialized models for robot control
“We are working on creating LLMs that drive robots”
Skydio uses agent orchestration to let one operator control large fleets of autonomous drones simultaneously.
“Thousands of these drones are now deployed across the country—at energy companies, public safety agencies, and construction firms.”
Dyna Robotics is building reliable, commercially deployable general-purpose manipulation policies, not just demos.
“Robot Demos Are Easy. Reliability Is Hard”
Robotics has appeared 'almost here' for 70 years despite current physical-AI hype reaching its peak.
“robotics has been "almost here" for the last 70 years.”
Perceptron AI wants to unify VLMs, VLAs, and world models into 'embodied foundational models' for real-time physical-world interaction.
“we want to move away from the distinction between VLM, VLA, world models, whatever you want to call it, to what we call embodied fundamental models”
Today's top vision models fail at basic visual reasoning, relying on pattern recognition over spatial understanding.
“there's actually a big gap between how these models handle visual thinking and how humans do it”
World Labs' Marble system generates navigable 3D worlds from images with no established recipe yet
NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Edge brings 4B world model robot control to on-device hardware
Physical Intelligence robots now perform complex household tasks in previously unseen environments
“we showed how robots can do useful tasks in environments in rooms they've never been in before”
World Labs is acquiring a robotics company to apply its large world models to physical spaces.
“we are building the next frontier of AI which is what we call spatial intelligence”
Applied Intuition launches Dana, a platform to democratize autonomous systems development
“There's no reason autonomy should be this obscure, difficult technology. Our vision for that is a high school kid that can make iPhone apps should be able to make autonomous systems.”
NVIDIA frames AI-generated virtual worlds as the training ground for physical AI and robotics.
“AI will generate amazing virtual worlds. And in these virtual worlds, the next era of AI, robotics will begin.”
NVIDIA launches Halos, a full-stack functional safety system for physical AI robots.
“Traditional safety which was built for structured environments can not work anymore as the spaces become more unstructured and robots move out of cages.”
NVIDIA introduces World-Action Models (WAMs), robot policies fine-tuned from pretrained world/video models to act.
“WAM World-Action Model: a policy that starts from a pretrained world-model or video”
NVIDIA launches Cosmos 3, a frontier foundation model for physical AI combining reasoning, world, and action models.
“Physical AI systems must understand the real world before they can act within it.”
Hugging Face's Reachy Mini robot now runs AI inference fully on-device locally
Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics are partnering to bring frontier AI breakthroughs into physical robotics
“you have this vision language and action model and you could like talk to the robot and you can ask it to do things and you get all this like understanding for free in robotics”
Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 for spatial reasoning in physical robots
“We aren't just teaching machines to see the world, but we're enabling them to perceive it with advanced spatial awareness and understanding.”
Tensor builds AI-learning robotic factories that mass-produce humanoid robots and industrial equipment
“We are like the TSMC of the robotics world.”
Physical AI's real bottleneck is scarce, natural robot training video, not the models.
“AI is no longer the hard part, the data is what's important.”
NVIDIA JetPack 7.2.1 introduces agentic video skills and T3000 emulation for Jetson edge AI
MIT robotics researchers say practical humanoid robots are 10+ years away despite Silicon Valley hype
“the people building and researching this stuff without the incentive to raise money think that a robot that can replace your maid is still 10 plus years away”
NVIDIA released Cosmos, a world model that teaches AI to simulate physical reality
“Cosmos teaches robots to dream.”
NVIDIA's Cosmos-based World Action Models aim to generalize robot manipulation beyond training demonstrations
US AI supply chain faces extreme concentration risk beyond chips, especially in robotics components dominated by China
“Robotics is an incredibly promising industry and the supply chain is right now completely dominated by China.”
Tiny LLMs are essential to scale AI intelligence beyond expensive robots to mass-market devices
“If we want intelligence to get into lots and lots and lots of devices and not just really expensive robots, we are going to need tiny models.”
Plummeting sensor costs make dense physical-world data collection feasible for AI models
“More real-world data enables precise modeling, and once you can model a system, you can control it.”
AI agents, robots, and wearable-equipped humans require new operating systems for physical-world industries
“Today's operating systems just weren't designed to manage all three types of workers.”
AI enables voice, monitoring, and robotics products for the massive underserved aging market
“This is one of the largest, most underserved markets in the world, and it's growing every single day.”
DoorDash's AI natural language ordering drives 50% new restaurant discovery and 40% larger grocery baskets
“50% of trajectories are people ordering from places they've never ordered from before, which is huge because that's one of the hardest metrics historically for Door Dash for us to move”
NVIDIA Omniverse libraries now make Blender scenes robot-ready for physical AI simulation.
“The physical AI era will be built in simulation first.”
Google demos Gemma running on-device on Hugging Face's open-source Reachy Mini robot for local AI interaction.
“Faster processing means quicker reactions, which is great for robots navigating the real world.”
Hugging Face's open-source Robot Worldwide Hackathon launched thousands of builders into robotics, many for the first time.
“After that, I did nine other hackathons and I won six out of it. So, it gave me really good boost.”
Hugging Face shows deploying models from the Hub to robot hardware using Strands Agents and LeRobot.
Microsoft demos LLM-planned robot control via Semantic Kernel skills written in Python, with novel robotics skills not yet public.
“It's a while loop for the robot.”
General Robotics exposes a unified quadruped robot API and AI inferencing via an MCP server so Copilot agents can program robots in natural language.
“I very infrequently have to write code myself. I'm using, you know, models from Cloud Model, from OpenAI through Copilot to kind of help me write all this code.”
Google DeepMind outlines efforts to power the future of robotics in Europe.
Gemma 4 E2B runs fully on-device for multimodal inference on robot ducks via Raspberry Pi 5 and Jetson Orin Nano.
“And through multimodal inputs of Gemma 4, they're able to process and understand their environment like never before.”
Hugging Face's LeLab is a no-code GUI for teleoperating robots, collecting data, training and deploying models.
“It lets you teleoperate the robots, collect the data set, train models both on your own hardware and with powerful GPUs available through hugging face.”
Hugging Face shows how to add MCP tools to its open-source Reachy Mini robot.
NVIDIA JetPack 7.2 enables one-command edge deployment of agentic AI with optimized memory and performance.
Monumental Robotics builds autonomous construction machines for solar farms and data centers, aiming for Mars.
“We are building the construction machinery to build a city on Mars, starting with large-scale infrastructure on Earth, like solar farms and data centers.”
NVIDIA shows how to accelerate a ROS 2 node using an AI agent and Isaac ROS with CUDA buffer backend.
“a fast CUDA kernel alone does not guarantee a fast ROS 2 graph”
AWS Strands Agents open-source framework gives physical robots natural language reasoning capability
“I've given this robot an agentic layer and I've given it it's called strands agents which is an open-source framework which was built by AWS”
NVIDIA demonstrates AI agents training cross-embodiment robot navigation policies across robot types
NVIDIA explores AI coding agents to build real-time edge AI apps with Holoscan
DoorDash's delivery history data solves the 'last hundred feet' problem for robots
“That data doesn't exist anywhere else. It doesn't exist in Google Maps. It only exists at DoorDash.”