Tag: robots

Here We Go…Ground Robots Could Replace One-Third Of Ukrainian Troops On Front Line

Ground robotic systems have the potential to replace as much as one-third of Ukrainian infantry troops operating on the line of contact, according to a senior Ukrainian military commander.

Andrii Biletsky, commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, told Militarnyi in an interview published March 21 that expanding the use of unmanned ground platforms could significantly ease the burden on frontline soldiers as the battlefield grows increasingly hostile to human movement and resupply.

Biletsky, who has previously described ground robotic systems as a looming “revolution” on the battlefield, pointed to the challenges posed by dense drone surveillance and heavily contested logistics lines. Constant observation by both enemy and Ukrainian drones has made traditional troop movements and supply deliveries exceptionally dangerous and difficult to sustain, writes United24Media.

“We will replace a third of soldiers with robots,” Biletsky declared in the interview.

He argued that robotic platforms could take over a substantial portion of both combat and logistics roles, allowing Ukrainian units to maintain operations under persistent aerial scrutiny while reducing risks to personnel.

The vision outlined by Biletsky is already materializing across the front. According to Ukrainian military data, forces conducted more than 7,000 ground robot missions in a single recent month. The vast majority of these deployments involved delivering supplies and equipment to exposed forward positions, enabling troops to minimize their exposure in high-risk areas while keeping essential logistics flowing.

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China Unleashes Machine Gun-Toting Robot Wolves With “Collective Brain”

China has released the first footage of its “robot wolves” storming through simulated urban combat, armed with machine guns and upgraded for real battlefield carnage.

These aren’t cute Boston Dynamics knockoffs anymore – they’re pack-hunting death machines designed by an institute with deep People’s Liberation Army ties, and they’re getting deadlier by the day.

As noted in a viral post that has racked up over two million views, the footage shows the wolves operating in coordinated swarms during street battle drills.

The system comes from the Southwest Automation Institute. Developers call it “100% indigenously designed and 100% domestically produced.” A non-military version is even listed for civilian sale on JD.com for $73,500 – though how closely it matches the PLA-grade model remains unclear.

The Southwest Automation Institute’s own follow-up analysis even admits the counterintuitive reality of this new warfare: “on tomorrow’s battlefields, war robots may not be the ultimate killing machines—they could actually reduce casualties. They spare human troops the need to storm positions directly, pushing more engagements into ‘drone v.s. robot’ territory. And unlike two groups of soldiers grinding each other down in brutal close-quarters fighting, troops facing robots know the machines cannot be outfought. A handful of robots can clear and secure an entire street in minutes. The clash ends fast, and both sides bleed far less.”

But the post quickly adds the chilling caveat: “The real battlefield is far more complex than any training exercise. The ultimate test for these Machine Wolves will be whether they can reliably distinguish friendly troops from enemy forces—and, most critically, identify civilians who suddenly appear in the chaos.”

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U.S. Tech Firms Demand Security Restrictions Against Chinese Robots

American A.I. and robotics companies are reportedly asking Congress to impose curbs on Chinese robotics manufacturers, due to their unfair business practices and the security risks they pose, Chinese media complained this week.

Interestingly, these concerns are particularly acute for humanoid robots, not the bulky industrial machines traditionally associated with the robotics industry.

Humanoid robots, the stuff of countless science fiction stories, are finally happening, and witnesses told the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday that China has developed a troubling lead in the new consumer technology.

Max Fenkell of the San Francisco-based company Scale AI highlighted a viral video from China’s Unitree Robotics that showed humanoid robots performing acrobatics and martial arts at a Lunar New Year celebration.

“The video went viral, not because it was impressive, but because of what happened when people compared it to last year, 12 months ago – the same robots could barely shuffle through a dance routine. This year, they’re doing karate. That is the speed of this competition,” Fenkell noted.

Fenkell said winning the humanoid robot race “requires a whole-of-government approach” to compete with China’s massive deployment of government funding and state power to support its robotics industry. He noted that American companies currently have the edge on quality of components and engineering, but China has taken the lead on implementing small-robot technology in practical ways.

“We’re seeing two different races play out and I fear right now the United States may be winning the wrong one,” he cautioned.

“The People’s Republic of China is moving aggressively to dominate the technologies that are reshaping the global economy and security, including artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems,” said subcommittee member Rep. Vince Fong (R-CA) in his opening statement.

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‘Pokémon Go’ Players Unknowingly Contributed 30 Billion Images to Train Delivery Robots

Nearly a decade after Pokémon Go transformed the real world into an augmented reality playground, the data collected from hundreds of millions of players is being repurposed to help autonomous delivery robots navigate city streets.

Popular Science reports that Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, has announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company specializing in short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. The collaboration will utilize Niantic’s Visual Positioning System, a navigation technology trained on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go users over the years, to help delivery robots navigate sidewalks and urban environments with unprecedented precision.

The Visual Positioning System can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters by analyzing nearby buildings and landmarks, offering a significant improvement over traditional GPS technology. This crowdsourced mapping effort represents one of the largest real-world data collection projects ever undertaken through a mobile gaming application, and demonstrates how user-generated content can be repurposed years after its initial collection.

“It turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco’s robot to safely and accurately move through the world is actually the same problem,” Niantic Spatial CEO John Hanke said in a recent interview with MIT Technology Review.

When Pokémon Go launched in 2016, it became a cultural phenomenon, attracting approximately 230 million monthly active players at its peak. The game prompted players to physically travel to specific locations and point their phone cameras at various angles while searching for virtual creatures superimposed onto real-world environments. While the game’s popularity has declined since its heyday, it still maintains around 50 million active users by some estimates.

The data collection effort received a significant boost in 2020 when Niantic added a feature called Field Research, which incentivized players to scan real-world statues and landmarks with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards. Additional data reportedly came from areas designated as Pokémon battle arenas. These scans created detailed 3D models of the real world, capturing the same locations across varying weather conditions, lighting scenarios, angles, and heights.

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First ‘Robot Arrest’ Takes Place in China After Droid Harasses Elderly Woman in the Streets

Is technology ‘breaking bad’?

Around a month ago, the world was faced with a stunning display of Chinese art and robotics, as a team of droids danced and performed flawless Kung Fu moves in perfect sync during the Lunar New Year celebrations.

But last week, a much less flattering portrait of the new technology was broadcast to the world, as an incident in the streets of the Chinese city of Macau ended with what is arguably the first android ‘arrest’.

The New York Post reported:

“The surreal incident occurred last week in the city of Macau, with the startled 70-year-old ending up in the hospital following her encounter with the 4-foot 4-inch bot.

Two cops escorted the humanoid bot off the busy street. They reportedly reprimanded the man who was operating the android remotely.”

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Singularity Update: You Have No Idea How Crazy Humanoid Robots Have Gotten

I just spent the afternoon at Figure headquarters in San Jose with Brett Adcock and David Blundin, and I’m still processing what I saw.

We’re not talking about concept robots. We’re talking about fully autonomous humanoid robots running neural networks end-to-end, doing kitchen work, unloading dishwashers, organizing packages – for hours at a time, with no human intervention.

Today? Figure’s robots are doing 67 consecutive hours of autonomous work. One error in 67 hours. That’s not a demo. That’s a product.

And here’s what most people don’t understand: the gap between “doing one task really well” and “doing every task a human can do” is collapsing at exponential speeds.

Let me explain why…

NOTE: Brett has been a past Faculty Member at my Abundance Summit, where leaders like him share insights years before the mainstream catches on. In-person seats for the 2026 Summit next month are nearly sold out. Learn more and apply.

The Death of C++ and the Rise of the Neural Net

When I first visited Figure, they had several hundred thousand lines of C++ code controlling the robots. Handwritten. Expensive. Brittle.

Every new behavior required engineers to anticipate edge cases, write more code, test it, debug it. It was the software equivalent of teaching a toddler to walk by writing an instruction manual.

In the last year, Figure deleted 109,000 lines of C++ code.

All of it. Gone.

What replaced it? A single neural network that controls the entire robot: hands, arms, torso, legs, feet. Full-body coordination. Real-time planning. Dynamic response to unexpected situations.

This is Helix 2, their latest AI model, and it’s a fundamentally different approach to robotics.

Here’s why this matters: neural nets learn from experience, not instructions.

You don’t code a robot to “grab a cup.” You show it thousands of examples of grasping objects—different shapes, weights, materials—and the neural net extracts the underlying patterns. It learns what “grasping” is at a representational level.

And once it understands grasping? It can generalize to objects it’s never seen before.

Brett put it simply: “If you can teleoperate the robot to do a task, you can train the neural net to learn it.”

That’s the unlock. If the hardware is capable—if the motors, sensors, and joints can physically perform the movement—then the AI can learn it from data.

Compare that to traditional robotics, where you’d need to write thousands of lines of code for every single new task. That approach doesn’t scale. Neural nets do.

The implication: Every robot in the fleet learns from every other robot’s experience. When one Figure robot masters folding laundry, every Figure robot on the planet instantly knows how to fold laundry.

Humans don’t work like this. Robots do.

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China Deploys Humanoid AI Robots to Guard Border

China is dispatching a new kind of recruit to its bustling border with Vietnam: humanoid robots. The UBTECH Walker S2 machines will patrol the Fangchenggang crossing in a high-stakes trial of AI technology.

The above video from UBTECH shows hundreds of these bipedal bots marching in formation, “staring” out at the world with two eye-sized cameras mounted over digital displays. Sophisticated sensors and software help them balance and navigate crowded spaces, and the droids also autonomously swap their own batteries to minimize downtime. At the end of the video, the bots file into multiple Chinese shipping containers and give a salute.

Border officials claim the robots’ roles will be diverse, from guiding passenger lines to checking cargo IDs and seals. The deployment is part of China’s national strategy to lead the global robotics race; footage released earlier this month shows a different model of android soldier deployed near the country’s border with India.

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Europol Pinpoints When Skynet-Like Human Resistance To AI Could Emerge

If Goldman’s estimates of a partial or full displacement of up to 300 million jobs across the Western world due to the proliferation of artificial intelligence and automation are even remotely correct, a new report suggests that by 2035, society could face widespread public resentment, protests, and even acts of sabotage directed at robotic systems.

A new report by Europol, the EU’s central intelligence and coordination hub for serious crime and terrorism, identifies around 2035 as a potential inflection point at which a human resistance movement against AI could begin to take shape, in a scenario that echoes the resistance to Skynet in the Terminator film franchise.

Europol warned of “bot-bashing” incidents and acts of sabotage against robotic systems in the middle of the next decade, as the spread of AI and robotics could fuel a populist backlash against technologies that have hollowed out parts of the Western economy and left millions unemployed.

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ROBOT DYSTOPIA: Europol Report Warns That, in a Decade, Enemy-Deployed Humanoids May Battle Law Enforcement, While People Unemployed by Tech Rebel and Demand ‘Humans First’

Robot apocalypse is nearer than we imagine, according to Europol.

If we may adapt two old sayings: ‘just because the liberals are constantly crying wolf, it does not mean that the wolf will never come’.

Take, for example, the European obsession with constantly keeping the population in a panic with dystopian scenarios.

While we are constantly dodging these catastrophic hoaxes, it is also true that every now and then, one of these scenarios may strike differently.

A new report by the European Police (Europol) warns that, in a decade, ‘angry mobs of unemployed citizens will riot in the streets against the hordes of service robots that have stolen their jobs’.

Swarms of enemy drones attacking electricity and water supplies, law enforcement combatting rogue robots… dystopian, but so close to out reality.

The Telegraph reported:

“The 48-page Europol document details how law enforcement will need to tackle robots and unmanned systems (drones, satellites and remote-controlled boats) in a dystopian vision of the future.”

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‘Spider robot’ promises to build entire houses in less than 24 hours

A spider-shaped construction robot named Charlotte is being developed in Sydney to 3D print a full-size house in roughly a day. Developers say the machine can autonomously form structural walls for about a 2,150-square-foot home using locally sourced materials.

Instead of cement and bricks delivered by truck, Charlotte compacts sand, soil, and clean waste into layered walls on-site. Researchers argue that this single-machine approach removes long supply chains and many high-carbon steps.

Charlotte, the construction robot

Charlotte is a mobile, legged system that pairs robotics with additive manufacturing, building objects layer by layer with a printer.

The prototype shown in Sydney is not a finished product, but its architecture offers a clear view of where construction automation is heading.

The work was led by Clyde Webster, founding director at Crest Robotics in Sydney. His work centers on agile field robots for construction tasks that are hard, repetitive, or risky. Momentum comes from the housing crunch and a push to cut carbon. 

“The building materials that we use today – even a simple brick has so many processes involved and some of them very – very carbon-intensive,” said Dr. Jan Golembiewski, co-founder of Earthbuilt Technology.

From soil to structure

Crest describes an undercarriage-mounted system that gathers sand, earth, and crushed brick, binds the mix in textiles, and then compacts it into successive layers. 

At the core is extrusion – pushing a material through a nozzle to form layers. That lets a robot produce continuous courses without mortar joints, guided by digital plans.

“It will work at the speed of over 100 bricklayers,” said Dr. Golembiewski. The team stresses speed as much as simplicity. 

Range of motion matters, too, since legs can step over uneven ground where wheeled rigs bog down. A compact, folding frame also makes transport easier, which is essential for remote sites.

Charlotte robots can cut carbon

Buildings use a lot of energy and materials. A UN Environment Programme report notes that in 2022 the sector accounted for 37 percent of energy- and process-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Cutting the most carbon-heavy steps in early stages can have outsized effects later. That is where embodied carbon, the total emissions from making and moving materials, becomes a key metric for builders and regulators.

Charlotte’s creators claim their method avoids cement entirely while turning clean waste into durable walls. If performance and safety data hold up, that would cut both cost and emissions on the same job.

There is a workforce angle as well. Automation that handles repetitive, high-risk tasks could reduce injuries while letting smaller crews do more skilled work.

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