AI in Robotics and Physical Systems
Robotics, embodied AI, autonomous systems, manufacturing automation, drones, vehicles, and AI systems acting in the physical world.
Taiwan’s Alternatives to Chinese Suppliers Still Depend on Chinese Inputs
Taiwan’s supply-chain exposure extends beyond advanced chips: moving production away from China does not necessarily remove dependence on Chinese-controlled suppliers operating abroad or on Chinese feedstock and processing. In a Hoover Institution roundtable, researchers from Taiwan’s Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology institute argue that resilience depends on building and qualifying alternatives without disrupting production before those substitutes are ready.
Direct and Indirect Methods Solve Trajectory Optimization in Opposite Orders
Stanford professor Marco Pavone argues that finding a feasible robot trajectory is different from finding one that minimizes time or control effort: the latter is an optimal-control problem. In this lecture, he explains two ways to solve it—derive continuous-time optimality conditions before discretizing, or discretize first and optimize the resulting finite-dimensional problem. He develops the indirect approach through Hamiltonians, costates and endpoint conditions, then shows how a free-final-time trajectory can be formulated for a boundary-value solver.
Low-Dispersion Samples Can Make Randomness Unnecessary in Motion Planning
In Stanford’s 2019 lecture on sampling-based motion planning, Professor Marco Pavone argues that planners can search complex robot configuration spaces without explicitly constructing their full obstacle geometry. Instead, they test sampled configurations and connections for collisions, trading a difficult global representation for local checks. Pavone compares PRM’s reusable roadmap with RRT’s incremental search, explains how dynamics change feasible connections, and presents results showing that well-spread deterministic samples can provide asymptotic guarantees without randomness.
Reachy Mini Turns Expressive Movement Into Its Desktop-Robot Pitch
Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face introduce Reachy Mini, an open-source desktop robot, through a music video built around the machine’s own recorded movements. The video’s case for the small robot rests on its expressive head and antenna motions, visible construction and simple prompt-and-response interaction; it also extends the open-source invitation to the film itself, which viewers can scrub through and fork.
A Small Set of Choices Makes Model Decisions Nearly 10 Times Faster
OpenAI’s Decisions API is designed for applications that need a quick choice from a limited set of actions, rather than an open-ended response. In the launch demonstration, Romain Huet and Charlie Guo show how it turns text or image inputs into decisions an app can act on, such as routing sales leads or choosing a lane to steer a car. Huet says narrowing the model’s task to a few choices makes the API nearly 10 times faster.
Bring Your Own Compute Could Make AI Apps Viable for Small Developers
OpenAI’s “Sign in with ChatGPT” could let apps use a customer’s existing AI allowance instead of paying model costs themselves, TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays argue. They see the feature as a potential way to make compute-heavy products viable for small developers, but say it also raises a question of control: whether OpenAI is offering a useful integration or laying the groundwork for an app-store model that could leave developers with less leverage over customers and billing.
Divergent Says Digital Manufacturing Can Put Defense Hardware in Flight in Under Three Months
Divergent CEO Lukas Czinger argues that the Pentagon needs manufacturing systems that can adapt designs quickly and produce them at scale, not just more factories. The company works beneath defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, using digitally driven processes including metal 3D printing; Czinger says it can move from engineering inputs to flight-ready hardware in under three months. He presents Divergent’s role as supplying production capacity, while contractors retain their programs and intellectual property.
Fortem Raises $50 Million to Double Manufacturing and Bookings
Fortem Technologies has raised $50 million in a Series B round that includes Lockheed Martin, as the counter-drone company plans to double manufacturing and bookings this year. CEO Jon Gruen said the partnership has moved beyond venture investment to finding projects where Fortem’s technology can be deployed. He also argued that lessons from operating in active conflict zones are shaping products designed to keep pace with evolving drone threats.
Lockheed Says One F-35 Could Control Eight Autonomous Vectis Aircraft
Lockheed Martin is investing in its autonomous Vectis aircraft before the Pentagon sets formal requirements, Aeronautics President OJ Sanchez says, betting that future air power will pair crewed fighters with drones rather than replace them. He says Lockheed has demonstrated that one F-35 could control as many as eight Vectis aircraft, extending the fighter’s reach and ability to act across missions.
China’s Arctic Military Presence Is Limited, but Its Capabilities Are Growing
Glenn Tiffert, a Hoover Institution research fellow, argues that China’s military role in the Arctic remains limited, but its ability to operate there is growing through research, ice-capable ships and commercial activity. Those investments can build knowledge and options with potential military uses, even as China seeks greater influence over regional governance. Tiffert says restrictions on Chinese investment in Western Arctic states have narrowed Beijing’s path there and redirected more of its activity toward Russia.
SpaceX Crew-13 Begins ISS Handover as Dragon’s Future Remains Unclear
SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Crew-13, a scheduled rotation that will include a handover with the departing crew. Bloomberg space correspondent Loren Grush said four more crew-rotation missions are planned after this one, but the longer-term role of Crew Dragon in NASA’s program is uncertain; speculation that SpaceX may retire the capsule after the ISS program ends is not a confirmed plan.
Saronic Bets $3 Billion on a New Shipyard to Scale Autonomous Shipbuilding
Saronic CEO and co-founder Dino Mavrookas argues that the United States needs to expand shipbuilding capacity quickly as China invests in the industry. The company is committing more than $3 billion to Port Alpha, a new Brownsville, Texas, shipyard it expects to open by the end of 2027, with its first ships due a year later. Mavrookas says building capacity ahead of demand is essential to scaling production of autonomous vessels.
Starship Reaches Orbit, Giving Engineers Months of Flight Data to Analyze
Former SpaceX Starship software manager Scott Morton calls the rocket’s first trip to orbit a “monumental step forward,” despite an engine failure during ascent. In an interview with Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow, Morton argues that the flight’s data may prove as valuable as the milestone itself: engineers will spend weeks or months examining how the vehicle and its software performed. He says Starship’s goal of carrying people to Mars was part of the program’s vision from the beginning.
Action-Based Search Could Make Web Video Usable for Robot Training
Rafael Levi of Bright Data argues that robotics’ training-data bottleneck is not simply a shortage of video, but the difficulty of finding useful footage in the vast amount already online. Staged demonstrations can distort how people naturally perform tasks, while broad web-video downloads often discard most of what they collect: Levi cites rates of 96% for NVIDIA’s Cosmos pipeline and 74% for Stable Video Diffusion. His proposed alternative is to search for actions first and collect only matching clips, while retaining the need for robot-specific data and further processing.
Claude Opus 5.5 Recreates Research Simulations and Trains a Virtual Creature to Walk
In a set of demonstrations, Two Minute Papers’ Károly Zsolnai-Fehér argues that Claude Opus 5.5 can do more than generate convincing images: it reproduced a research simulation of honey coiling and built a virtual creature that learned to walk. The results are imperfect, and the walking simulation strained his local machine, but he presents them as evidence of a notable advance in AI-assisted scientific and engineering work. He also points to Anthropic’s system card to caution that evaluation awareness and the risk of errors remain unresolved.
Physical AI Could Multiply Global GDP, but Depends on Rebuilding Manufacturing
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas argues that combining AI with machines operating in the physical world could multiply global GDP by eight to ten times, but says that prospect depends on rebuilding manufacturing capacity. He sees China’s strength across key supply chains as a constraint on US efforts to onshore production, and expects physical AI to develop through networks of connected machines rather than humanoid robots alone.
World Models Could Ease Robotics’ Training-Environment Bottleneck
World Labs CEO Fei-Fei Li argues that spatial intelligence—models that generate controllable, geometrically structured 3D environments—could extend AI beyond language and provide needed training and evaluation settings for robotics. She says the company’s Atlas model is designed to reconstruct and generate navigable worlds from images, while maintaining camera control and visual consistency. Li also argues that safety evaluation cannot rest with AI companies alone, calling for independent benchmarks and participation from academia, government, industry and civil society.
Hugging Face Bets on Cheap Robots to Build Physical AI
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf argues that Microduck, a sub-$400 open-source robot, is meant to bring more builders into physical AI—not by solving household work, but by giving users a capable machine on which to train and share behaviors. In this interview, Wolf places that bet alongside Hugging Face’s larger model: free public distribution supported by paid storage and compute infrastructure, with open models providing organizations an alternative when proprietary systems are unavailable, restricted or unsuitable. He also says that openness must be paired with stronger AI-driven cyber defense after the company’s own breach.
Hard-Tech Startups Rise as AI Lowers the Cost of Building
Y Combinator partners Garry Tan, Jared Friedman, Diana Hu and Harj Taggar argue that AI is reducing the software labor needed to build both physical and digital businesses, helping drive a rise in hard-tech startups and faster early revenue among YC companies. They say the opportunity is shifting toward companies that build physical capacity, own specialized data or take full responsibility for customer workflows—not software that merely records or assists work. AI also makes it easier for founders to start alone, they contend, while increasing the premium on judgment about what to build.
Impulse’s Series D Reaches $808 Million for Spacecraft Development
Impulse Space has raised a $308 million Series D extension to develop spacecraft that maneuver payloads after launch, bringing the round’s total to $808 million. Founder and chief executive Tom Mueller says the company is building demand across commercial, NASA and government customers for its Mira and Helios systems, while its near-term flight schedule is increasingly weighted toward government work.
Boring Co.’s $23 Billion Valuation Rests on an Unfinished Tunnel Build-Out
Bloomberg’s Kiel Porter reports that Elon Musk’s Boring Co. has raised $3 billion from the United Arab Emirates and affiliated investors at a $23 billion valuation, four times its previous level. The funding backs a broader tunnel expansion effort, but Porter says the company’s delivery record leaves its 2027 targets for a 60-mile Las Vegas network and Nashville’s 10-mile Music City Loop looking unlikely.
Covenant Raises $250 Million to Scale Long-Range Missile Production
Covenant is emerging from stealth with $250 million in funding and a claim that the US and its allies need long-range, heavy-payload cruise missiles that can be bought and produced in far greater numbers. President and Chief Growth Officer Abby Denburg argues that existing “exquisite capabilities” are too costly and scarce to close what she calls the deep precision strike gap. The company’s test is whether it can turn its Anthem prototype into serial production, beginning with planned deliveries from Dallas and a parallel facility in Germany.
Infrastructure Hiring Is Delaying AI’s Broad Jobs Reckoning
TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays argue that AI’s most meaningful advances will be the ones people can see operating in the world, not necessarily headline mathematical achievements such as OpenAI’s claimed Navier–Stokes proof. Coogan treats such proofs as evidence of model capability rather than an immediate engineering breakthrough, while pointing to computer-use agents, 3D generation and robotics as more tangible demonstrations. On jobs, he says current AI layoffs remain small relative to broader hiring tied to data centres, infrastructure and technical roles, postponing rather than disproving concerns about displacement.
AI Capability Is Moving From Benchmarks to Completed Tasks
John Coogan and Jordi Hays argue that the important tests for new technology are operational rather than promotional: GPT-6 Astra should be judged by whether its apparent Blender competence carries into real production work, and model costs by completed tasks rather than token prices. They apply the same standard to Tesla’s Cybercab, which they say will matter only if Tesla delivers a sub-$30,000, steering-wheel-free vehicle capable of viable autonomous operation by the end of 2026.