← Back to articles
Researcher uses OpenClaw AI agent to control a physical robot arm, demonstrating that AI-powered coding can simplify robot training and control
WIRED AI · May 20, 2026
AI Summary
- •The author connected OpenClaw (an AI coding agent) to a LeRobot 101 arm from HuggingFace's open-source robotics project. With help from OpenClaw and Codex, the author wrote a program that made the arm identify and grip a red ball, then trained a model to pick up objects.
- •Researchers from UC Berkeley, Nvidia, Carnegie Mellon University, and Stanford developed CaP-X, a benchmark to measure how well coding models can control robots. Their results show Gemini performs best for robot programming—possibly because Google DeepMind trained it to be multimodal (able to understand both text and images from the physical world). They also created CaP-Gym (a simulation and real-robot environment) and CaP-Agent0 (a framework that boosts coding-model performance on robot tasks).
- •Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at UC Berkeley, says AI-powered coding "has the potential to bridge the gap between conventional engineering methods, which are reliable but don't generalize, and contemporary vision-language-action models, which generalize but are not yet reliable." Spencer Huang notes that making robots controllable by spoken or typed commands is the "critical unlock for robots in society."
Related Articles
Robotics
Physical AI systems are shifting toward task-specific robots powered by edge computing rather than general-purpose humanoids
The Robot Report·May 23, 2026
Robotics
Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Max AI model ran autonomously for 35 hours to optimize code for its own custom chip, achieving a 10x speedup
THE DECODER·May 23, 2026
Robotics
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces partnership with Uber to power robotaxi fleet across nearly 30 cities and 4 continents by 2028
Yahoo Finance AI·May 23, 2026
Robotics
The Robot Report Podcast Episode 245 features Chris Elston, Chief Robotics Manager for Yamaha Robotics Group North America, discussing PLC and robot integration.
The Robot Report·May 23, 2026
Robotics
Grab's CTO says robots will become as important to the superapp's future as human drivers, with the company deploying its Carri robot for deliveries in Singapore while testing a 1+n strategy that includes competitors' robots.
Fortune AI·May 22, 2026
Stay ahead with AI news
Get curated AI news from 200+ sources delivered daily to your inbox. Free to use.
Get Started Free