🤖 Boston Dynamics is Retiring

Good Morning, Roboticists!

For years, Atlas flipping through the air symbolized the outer edge of robotics possibility. Now Boston Dynamics is retiring it.

NEXT

Atlas is Retiring on a Backflip

👀 What’s happening: Boston Dynamics released final footage of the research version of Atlas performing cartwheels and backflips. The clips are framed as a last run in the sun. The experimental platform is being retired as the all electric enterprise Atlas moves toward factory deployment and commercial timelines.

🌍 How this hits reality: This closes the demonstration era. The flips mattered only to prove whole body learning and zero shot transfer worked. Now that they do, spectacle becomes noise. Industrial buyers care about uptime, task coverage, and cost per shift. Data from these tests feeds production models, not marketing reels, shifting focus to deployment math.

🤖 Key takeaway: Boston Dynamics footage hinge Humanoid robotics just crossed from proof to pricing. The question is no longer what robots can showcase, but whether generalist robots can outcompete fixed automation and human labor at scale.

DEMO

The New Shape of Housework Robot

👀 What’s happening: NEXFORM unveiled its NW-1 robot with demos spanning hotel cleaning and kitchen chores. It poured water, tidied rooms, cooked rice, and washed dishes. The surprise was not the tasks themselves, but the form. No legs, just a tall base with arms and a decorative head.

🌍 How this hits reality: Most service humanoids fail on cost, stability, and maintenance before intelligence runs out. By skipping humanoid body and mobility, this design cuts complexity while keeping reach and dexterity. In hotels and kitchens, over 70 percent of work is hand-only at fixed stations. Wheels and lift columns solve that cheaper than bipedal balance.

🤖 Key takeaway: This is not a humanoid breakthrough. It is a mobile dual-arm machine dressed in humanoid language. That distinction matters because it strips out the most expensive failure points. Adoption depends on whether buyers decide arms on wheels deliver enough value, and whether embodied AI finally stops paying a premium for legs.

NEW TECH

Soft Robots Are One-Step Printed

👀 What’s happening: Engineers at Harvard University demonstrated a 3D printing method that builds movement directly into soft robots. Using a single rotating nozzle, they print flexible filaments with precisely placed hollow channels. When inflated, those channels bend, twist, or contract in preprogrammed ways, without molds or post-assembly.

🌍 How this hits reality: Soft robotics has long promised safe handling and medical use, but motion control was slow and artisanal. Traditional molds, casting, and sealing limited iteration speed. This approach collapses fabrication into one step. Design changes shift from weeks to minutes. That stresses assumptions around customization cost, tooling labor, and how quickly soft machines can be tuned for surgery, logistics, or delicate manufacturing.

🤖 Key takeaway: This reframes soft robots as software defined objects. If motion can be printed as a parameter, not assembled as hardware, expect faster design cycles and narrower gaps between prototype and deployment across medical devices, assistive tools, and human machine interfaces.

QUICK HITS

• Cartwheel Robotics has shut down after failing to secure the right funding, highlighting the capital challenges facing humanoid robot startups.
• HumanX enables the Unitree G1 to learn and generalize complex humanoid skills directly from human video, without task-specific reward engineering.
• A3 reports a 6.6% rise in North American robot orders in 2025, led by non-automotive demand and growing collaborative robot adoption.
• Chef Robotics and Packline launched an end-to-end food automation solution integrating AI-driven meal assembly and packaging.
• AGIBOT hosted a robot-led live gala to demonstrate large-scale, stable humanoid robot performance in real-world cultural settings.

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