Robotics

Today's Stories

1. 1

   Tesla expands robotaxi to Miami, pushing autonomous ride-hailing

   Tesla said its robotaxi service is now available in Miami, marking an expansion of its unsupervised autonomous ride-hailing operations. The company launched the service in Austin, Texas in June and had announced plans to expand to Dallas and Houston. Tesla's robotaxi push is a key part of CEO Elon Musk's broader shift from electric vehicles toward AI and robotics. The company is using a version of its self-driving software in these vehicles, making adoption of that technology a central business focus. The move also reflects accelerating competition in the robotaxi sector from players like Alphabet's Waymo and Amazon's Zoox.

   Musk said in May he expects fully self-driving cars without human safety monitors to become more widespread in the U.S. later this year. Tesla posted record second-quarter deliveries that beat Wall Street estimates, suggesting strong momentum behind the company's expansion efforts.

2. 2

   DeepSeek-R1 reaches #2 open-weights reasoning model

   DeepSeek-R1 has become the #2 open-weights reasoning model, according to the body's assessment ranking. The model processes 1M tokens of context, expanded from 128K in V3.2. Open-weights reasoning models are now accessible beyond proprietary vendors, which may allow researchers and companies to experiment with advanced reasoning AI without relying solely on closed commercial systems. This could shift how organizations approach AI adoption and development.

   DeepSeek-R1's context window (1M tokens) represents a substantial leap, enabling the model to handle significantly longer documents or conversations in a single pass compared to its predecessor.

3. 3

   Turvo President confirms management control amid shareholder tensions

   Turvo International's President Steven Tsai stated ahead of the company's July 2 earnings conference that representatives of major shareholder ZENG HSING Industrial Co., Ltd were not present, and he could not comment on their behalf regarding recent management changes. He acknowledged the shareholder's legal authority while calling for decisions to be handled in a manner acceptable to all parties. The statement signals ongoing tension between management and a major shareholder over control and direction, a situation that can create uncertainty about the company's strategic decisions and operational continuity. For investors and stakeholders, clarity on who holds effective decision-making authority is essential to understanding the company's near-term stability.

   Whether ZENG HSING Industrial and Turvo management reach a resolution that preserves investor confidence. The company has signaled robotics expansion plans, but execution depends on management alignment.

4. 4

   X Square Robot completes Series C to build full-stack embodied AI platform

   Shenzhen-based X Square Robot, founded in 2023, completed four consecutive financing rounds culminating in a Series C investment. The company is now valued over RMB20 billion and will use the funding to accelerate development of its embodied AI foundation models, robotics hardware, data infrastructure and commercial deployments. X Square Robot is pursuing a full-stack approach to embodied AI—combining foundation models, custom robotics hardware, and real-world training data collection into a single system. This approach may enable robots to learn and adapt across diverse physical environments (homes, care facilities, factories, logistics centers) rather than being programmed for a single task, addressing a fundamental challenge in robotics deployment.

   The company introduced WALL-B (an embodied AI foundation model) in April and recently launched the QUANXTA Zero Series, a data collection and training platform that reaches nearly 100 demonstrations per hour—more than double the efficiency of conventional teleoperation methods. X Square Robot has also begun real-world deployments: an AI-powered household cleaning service in Shenzhen and Beijing (in partnership with 58.com), and commercial pilots in elderly care and logistics.

5. 5

   Apptronik opens robot training warehouse 20× larger than before

   Apptronik, a humanoid robot maker, has opened Robot Park, a factory warehouse in Austin, Texas, where it will operate hundreds of its latest robots to practice real-world tasks like packaging, sorting, and moving boxes. The facility is roughly 20 times larger than the company's previous testing site, which could only hold about 10 robots at a time. Robot companies face a critical shortage of real-world data needed to improve their AI models, since few robots exist in the field and existing testing sites are tiny. By running hundreds of robots through physical tasks daily, Apptronik can capture real-world details—like hardware wear or a robot's foot slipping—that digital simulations alone cannot, allowing faster adaptation of its systems.

   Apptronik will share the data it collects with Google DeepMind, a research partner and investor, which will integrate it into Gemini Robots, the AI model used across the robot industry. This partnership ties the warehouse output directly to a foundational model that other companies rely on.

6. 6

   Tokyo University and Kubota develop drone method to predict potato yield before harvest

   Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Kubota Corporation developed a drone-based system that estimates underground potato yield before harvest. The method combines drone photography (using RGB and multispectral cameras), machine learning trained on the relationship between plant features and actual biomass, and a Gompertz growth curve model. Two-year field trials in 2023 and 2024 achieved a correlation coefficient of 0.8 or higher for tuber biomass estimation and 0.7 or higher for yield prediction. Traditionally, assessing potato yield during growing season has relied on destructive sampling (physically digging to measure). This non-destructive approach can capture spatial variation across a field and support pre-harvest yield forecasting and optimization of harvest timing—practical improvements for growers. The development reflects precision agriculture use cases that Tokyo-based Market Research Center forecasts will drive Japan's agriculture drone market to reach $357.8 million（約570億円） by 2034.

   The research team says the growth-curve approach is expected to support optimization of cultivation management, including suggesting optimal harvest timing. The work was carried out under the joint Kubota Todai Lab project.