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Aiper Scuba V3 Pool Robot Review: Eye on the Prize

WIRED

Now outfitted with AI computer vision, Aiper's new pool cleaner can actively search for debris. AI vision helps to power excellent cleaning. Charging stand makes topping up the battery easy. Only spends 10 minutes at the waterline after each run before sinking. Cleanup can be a bit of a bear.


Inside China's robotics revolution

The Guardian

An engineer at the AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China, where the 5,000th mass-produced humanoid robot had rolled off the production line. An engineer at the AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China, where the 5,000th mass-produced humanoid robot had rolled off the production line. How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? C hen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but when he is in his element - up close with the technology he builds, or in business meetings discussing the imminent replacement of human workers by robots - he wears an exuberant smile that brings to mind an intern on his first day at his dream job. Guchi makes the machines that install wheels, dashboards and windows for many of the top Chinese car brands, including BYD and Nio. He took the name from the Chinese word, "steadfast intelligence", though the fact that it sounded like an Italian luxury brand was not entirely unwelcome. For the better part of two decades, Chen has tried to solve what, to him, is an engineering problem: how to eliminate - or, in his view, liberate - as many workers in car factories as technologically possible. Late last year, I visited him at Guchi headquarters on the western outskirts of Shanghai. Next to the head office are several warehouses where Guchi's engineers tinker with robots to fit the specifications of their customers. Chen, an engineer by training, founded Guchi in 2019 with the aim of tackling the hardest automation task in the car factory: "final assembly", the last leg of production, when all the composite pieces - the dashboard, windows, wheels and seat cushions - come together. At present, his robots can mount wheels, dashboards and windows on to a car without any human intervention, but 80% of the final assembly, he estimates, has yet to be automated. That is what Chen has set his sights on. As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China . But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work.


A multi-armed robot for assisting with agricultural tasks

Robohub

In their paper Force Aware Branch Manipulation To Assist Agricultural Tasks, which was presented at IROS 2025,, and proposed a methodology to safely manipulate branches to aid various agricultural tasks. We interviewed Madhav to find out more. Could you give us an overview of the problem you were addressing in the paper? Our work is motivated by StickBug [1], a multi-armed robotic system for precision pollination in greenhouse environments. One of the main challenges StickBug faces is that many flowers are partially or fully hidden within the plant canopy, making them difficult to detect and reach directly for pollination.


Robot goes BERSERK at a restaurant in California as desperate staff try to drag it away from customers - as one viewer asks 'why isn't there a big red power off button?'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Meghan unveils new As Ever line with Lilibet... amid claims Netflix has been left with huge $10m surplus of her unsold products after'split' with streamer Outrageous full story of scandalous affair that's the talk of Manhattan's exclusive private schools: Family insiders reveal humiliating sex secrets... shock'confession' letter... and the furious relative who exposed it all Sinister truth about explosive resignation of Trump's top counter-terror chief Joe Kent... and his shock claim Israel is manipulating the president: MARK HALPERIN Ugly new Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban divorce fight ERUPTS: Her friends share humiliating details of'midlife crisis'... and reveal brutal REAL reason daughter Sunday Rose'snubbed' him Kim Kardashian takes a VERY dramatic tumble in towering $80 'stripper heels' and accidentally grabs an'old lady' as she falls on her way out of Vanity Fair Oscars party USA baseball stars slammed over'disgraceful' national anthem gesture before WBC final vs Venezuela Israel says Iran's intelligence chief has been killed in overnight airstrike in latest attack on regime: Live updates Canada's ultimate revenge on Trump over tariffs gathers pace I ran America's only Supermax jail: What history's most notorious terrorists and serial killers told me as they waited to die Fox News anchor issues blistering takedown of liberal media's delusional take on Iran: 'A stalemate? How I lost 8st in my 50s and now finally have the figure of my dreams. I've been large my whole life, but I now feel happier than I ever did in my 20s. Presidential hopeful JB Pritzker's bold defiant bet against black caucus pays off Everything JFK Jr told friends about his love affair with'sexual dynamo' Madonna... her unprintable pillow talk... and his perverse incest request that she couldn't go through with Mamdani forces New York beloved preschool to hike annual fee to $36,000... and parents are fuming Heath Ledger's lookalike daughter Matilda steps out days after 17 year anniversary of late actor's Oscar win Supreme Court's top judge issues chilling warning as Trump targets his own appointees Robot goes BERSERK at a restaurant in California as desperate staff try to drag it away from customers - as one viewer asks'why isn't there a big red power off button?' This is the shocking moment a dancing robot goes berserk at a restaurant, sending food flying while staff try to drag it away.


Robot firefighters enter burning buildings first

FOX News

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .


Near-Optimal Edge Evaluation in Explicit Generalized Binomial Graphs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Robotic motion-planning problems, such as a UAV flying fast in a partially-known environment or a robot arm moving around cluttered objects, require finding collision-free paths quickly. Typically, this is solved by constructing a graph, where vertices represent robot configurations and edges represent potentially valid movements of the robot between theses configurations. The main computational bottlenecks are expensive edge evaluations to check for collisions. State of the art planning methods do not reason about the optimal sequence of edges to evaluate in order to find a collision free path quickly. In this paper, we do so by drawing a novel equivalence between motion planning and the Bayesian active learning paradigm of decision region determination (DRD).


A very serious guide to buying your own humanoid robot butler

New Scientist

You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there's something you need to know Science fiction is strewn with humanoid robots, from bad-tempered Bender in to cunning Ava in . And it has long seemed like that's the natural home for such robots - on the screen and in books. The idea of a walking, talking, functioning robot with two arms and two legs has appeared to be a distant dream. Last year, machines ran, boxed and even played football at China's World Humanoid Robot Games, albeit sometimes falling over in the process . Meanwhile, companies have been readying their own range of humanoids that promise to do something a bit more useful: help around the house .


Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

For an autonomous system to be helpful to humans and to pose no unwarranted risks, it needs to align its values with those of the humans in its environment in such a way that its actions contribute to the maximization of value for the humans. We propose a formal definition of the value alignment problem as cooperative inverse reinforcement learning (CIRL). A CIRL problem is a cooperative, partial-information game with two agents, human and robot; both are rewarded according to the human's reward function, but the robot does not initially know what this is. In contrast to classical IRL, where the human is assumed to act optimally in isolation, optimal CIRL solutions produce behaviors such as active teaching, active learning, and communicative actions that are more effective in achieving value alignment. We show that computing optimal joint policies in CIRL games can be reduced to solving a POMDP, prove that optimality in isolation is suboptimal in CIRL, and derive an approximate CIRL algorithm.


Learning to Poke by Poking: Experiential Learning of Intuitive Physics

Neural Information Processing Systems

We investigate an experiential learning paradigm for acquiring an internal model of intuitive physics. Our model is evaluated on a real-world robotic manipulation task that requires displacing objects to target locations by poking. The robot gathered over 400 hours of experience by executing more than 50K pokes on different objects. We propose a novel approach based on deep neural networks for modeling the dynamics of robot's interactions directly from images, by jointly estimating forward and inverse models of dynamics. The inverse model objective provides supervision to construct informative visual features, which the forward model can then predict and in turn regularize the feature space for the inverse model. The interplay between these two objectives creates useful, accurate models that can then be used for multi-step decision making. This formulation has the additional benefit that it is possible to learn forward models in an abstract feature space and thus alleviate the need of predicting pixels. Our experiments show that this joint modeling approach outperforms alternative methods. We also demonstrate that active data collection using the learned model further improves performance.


Hierarchical Object Representation for Open-Ended Object Category Learning and Recognition

Neural Information Processing Systems

Most robots lack the ability to learn new objects from past experiences. To migrate a robot to a new environment one must often completely re-generate the knowledge-base that it is running with. Since in open-ended domains the set of categories to be learned is not predefined, it is not feasible to assume that one can pre-program all object categories required by robots. Therefore, autonomous robots must have the ability to continuously execute learning and recognition in a concurrent and interleaved fashion. This paper proposes an open-ended 3D object recognition system which concurrently learns both the object categories and the statistical features for encoding objects. In particular, we propose an extension of Latent Dirichlet Allocation to learn structural semantic features (i.e.