Robotics

Surgical robots break out

ACE-Data-0: Human-Centric Ambient Capture as Embodied Data Engine

FA-RDP: A Frequency-Adaptive Reactive Diffusion Policy for Contact-Rich Manipulation

FasTac: A Curved Multispectral Vision-Based Tactile Sensor for High-Speed High-Precision 3D Shape and Force Perception

TurboVLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Model at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with <1 GB VRAM

The $1/Hour Worker: Four Robotics CEOs on Humanoids at Home, China's Threat, and the End of Dangerous Jobs

Weekly Funding rounds / Statistics / Insights of July 28, 2026

Fei-Fei Li on Spatial Intelligence and Robotics

Reeling It In: Flexible Needle Pick Up via Thread Manipulation for Autonomous Suturing

Transformer Transformer: A Unified Model for Motion-Conditioned Robot Co-design

πR2: Reactive Real-time Flow Policies

Import AI 466: The bitter lesson for robotics, AIs complete week-long programming tasks; and OpenAI's accidental A…

Series A activity: Week of July 19, 2026

Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation

Drop-Then-Recovery: How Redundant Are Vision-Language-Action Models?

N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation

N0-VTLA: Scaling Vision-Tactile-Language-Action Model with Latent Tactile Tokens

Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang

Building the Physical AI Stack | Travis Kalanick on TBPN

AXIS: A Growable Community-Driven Data Engine for Scalable Robot Manipulation

Xiaomi-Robotics-1: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with over 100K Hours of Real-World Trajectories

Axios Pro Rata: 🪏 Gold digging

Travis Kalanick Is Back | Building the Future of Industrial AI

Closing the Lab-to-Store Gap: A Data-Efficient Post-Training and Experience-Driven Learning VLA Framework for Retail Humanoids

FELT: Generating Tactile Signals from Vision for Visuo-Tactile Manipulation

LENS: LLM-guided Environment Simplification for Planning and Control in Clutter

Uni-LaViRA: Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation for Unified Embodied Navigation

147. 和蚂蚁灵波沈宇军聊：机器人原生基础模型、大脑和本体的关系、预训练与数据scale up、老师汤晓鸥

Series A activity: Week of July 12, 2026

Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition

DiMaS: Distribution Matching for Steering Vision-Language-Action Models

Directional Constraints for Efficient Exploration in Safe Reinforcement Learning

Masked Visual Actions for Unified World Modeling

DSWAM: A Dual-System World Action Foundation Model for Fine-Grained Robot Manipulation

Patch Policy: Efficient Embodied Control via Dense Visual Representations

Self-learning factories

Handroid: Bridging Dexterous Hand and Humanoid

Axios Pro Rata: Details matter

Emerging Manager Q&A: Robin Haak about €15M Robin Fund II

Scaling Behavior Foundation Model for Humanoid Robots

SpaceX Shares Fall Back to Earth

Reflex: Real-Time VLA Control through Streaming Inference

RoboTTT: Context Scaling for Robot Policies

146. 对Physical Intelligence柯丽一鸣4小时访谈：Pi的开源模型研究，机器人的江湖、族谱与主角

Agile perceptive multi-skill locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild

Never Too Late for Force: Accelerating VLA Post-Training with Reactive Force Injection

Worlds in One Demo: A Synthetic Data Engine for Learning Open-World Mobile Manipulation

172: Momenta IPO后再访曹旭东：就是想做没有尽头的AI

Towards Human-level Dexterous Teleoperation

VIA: Visual Interface Agent for Robot Control

VLAFlow: A Unified Training Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models via Co-training and Future Latent Alignment

B-spline Policy: Accelerating Manipulation Policies via B-spline Action Representations

DemoBridge: A Simulation-in-the-Loop Toolkit for Single-View Human Demonstration Retargeting

AnyDexRT: Calibration-Free Dexterous Hand Retargeting with Few-Shot Human Guidance

DexVerse: A Modular Benchmark for Multi-Task, Multi-Embodiment Dexterous Manipulation

Native Video-Action Pretraining for Generalizable Robot Control

Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Models

TouchWorld: A Predictive and Reactive Tactile Foundation Model for Dexterous Manipulation

Calf-Integrated Arms for Bimanual Quadruped Loco-Manipulation

LAMP: Latent Motion Prior-Guided Real-World Learning for Dexterous Hand Manipulation

RynnWorld-Teleop: An Action-Conditioned World Model for Digital Teleoperation

Closing the Reality Gap: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Deployment for Dexterous Force-Based Grasping and Manipulation

Improving Vision-Language-Action Model Fine-Tuning with Structured Stage and Keyframe Supervision

S2-VLA: State-Space Guided Vision-Language-Action Models for Long-Horizon Manipulation

SILO: Simulation-in-the-Loop Sim-to-Real Transfer for Multi-Stage Cable Routing

In-Context World Modeling for Robotic Control

ThinkingVLA: Interleaved Vision and Language Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation

Decoupling the Declarative from the Procedural in Vision-Language-Action Models

CoDex: Learning Compositional Dexterous Functional Manipulation without Demonstrations

Z-1: Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models

Posts from VC News Daily for 07/02/2026

VT-WAM: Visual-Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation

FurnitureVLA: Learning Long-Horizon Bimanual Furniture Assembly with Vision-Language-Action Model

Axios Pro Rata: Steely promises

Adapting Generalist Robot Policies with Semantic Reinforcement Learning

Human-as-Humanoid: Enabling Zero-Shot Humanoid Learning from Ego-Exo Human Videos with Human-Aligned Embodiments

SPACE: Enabling Learning from Cross-Robot Data Toward Generalist Policies

TactX: Learning Shared Tactile Representations Across Diverse Sensors

Import AI 463: Self-improving robots; a 10k Chinese GPU cluster; and an elegiac essay for the human era

170: 【具身季报 26Q2】世界模型大风不停，和不想被贴标签的人

Quantum leap

DexCompose: Reusing Dexterous Policies for Multi-Task Manipulation with a Single Hand

SimFoundry: Modular and Automated Scene Generation for Policy Learning and Evaluation

(Many) of Us Want Home Robots. What's the Holdup?

Peggy Johnson — Meet Digit (Agility Robotics)

Humanoid-DART: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation using Diffusion-guided Augmentation through Relabeling and Tracking

Scalable Behavior Cloning with Open Data, Training, and Evaluation

VibeAct: Vibration to Actions for Contact-Rich Reactive Robot Dexterity

Peggy Johnson (Agility Robotics) on the $2.5B SPAC Deal

Why AI isn't killing finance software

CoStream: Composing Simple Behaviors for Generalizable Complex Manipulation

ForceBand: Learning Forceful Manipulation with sEMG

InSight: Self-Guided Skill Acquisition via Steerable VLAs

Import AI 462: Superpersuasion; self-sustaining AI; paths to ASI

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

PanoVine: Whole-Body Visuomotor Control for Soft Growing Vine Robot

PhysVLA: Towards Physically-Grounded VLA for Embodied Robotic Manipulation

SkyJEPA: Learning Long-Horizon World Models for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Control of Quadrotors

HITTER: A HumanoId Table TEnnis Robot via Hierarchical Planning and Learning

SpaceX's AI rocket fuel

Co-VLA: Coordination-Aware Structured Action Modeling for Dual-Arm Vision-Language-Action Systems

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

Generating Robot Hands from Human Demonstrations

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos

Object-Centric Residual RL for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real VLA Enhancement

TactSpace: Learning a Physics-enriched Shared Latent Space for Tactile Sim-to-Real Transfer

Series A activity: Week of June 7, 2026

The World of Atoms, Not Bits⚛️, The VC Liquidity Crunch💸, From Prompts to Orchestration🛠️

Kairos: A Native World Model Stack for Physical AI

T-Rex: Tactile-Reactive Dexterous Manipulation

What Matters in Orchestrating Robot Policies: A Systematic Study of Hierarchical VLA Agents

Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA: From Vision-Language-Action Models to a Real-World Robot Learning Stack

Improving Robotic Generalist Policies via Flow Reversal Steering

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

WEAVER, Better, Faster, Longer: An Effective World Model for Robotic Manipulation

CHORUS: Decentralized Multi-Embodiment Collaboration with One VLA Policy

FACTR 2: Learning External Force Sensing for Commodity Robot Arms Improves Policy Learning

IMPACT: Learning Internal-Model Predictive Control for Forceful Robotic Manipulation

TacForeSight: Force-Guided Tactile World Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation

OASIS: From Simulation Data Collection to Real-World Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Axios Pro Rata: AI USA Inc.

LARA: Latent Action Representation Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

Shield-Loco: Shielding Locomotion Policies with Predictive Safety Filtering

Raj Patel — Inside Human Archive (humanarchive.ai)

OneVLA: A Unified Framework for Embodied Tasks

ProGAL-VLA: Grounded Alignment through Prospective Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models

ElegantVLA: Learning When to Think for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models

RDGen: Demonstration Generation for High-Quality Robot Learning via Reinforcement Learning

Colosseum V2: Benchmarking Generalization for Vision Language Action Models

VLA-Pro: Cross-Task Procedural Memory Transfer for Vision-Language-Action Models

Reshaping a Broken Industrial Robot Market (Physical AI + RaaS)

How to Instruct Your Robot: Dense Language Annotations Power Robot Policy Learning

BORA: Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Online Residual Adaptation for Real-World Dexterous VLA Models

EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Models

FineVLA: Fine-Grained Instruction Alignment for Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies

Qwen-VLA: Unifying Vision-Language-Action Modeling across Tasks, Environments, and Robot Embodiments

VisualThink-VLA: Visual Intermediate Reasoning for Effective and Low-Latency Vision-Language-Action Policies

Sam Altman watched 900 million people talk to one personality every week

Beyond Binary: Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation with Physics-Grounded Contact Representation

Humanoid Everyday: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Open-World Humanoid Manipulation

When Absolute State Fails: Evaluating Proprioceptive Encodings for Robust Manipulation

RIO: Flexible Real-Time Robot I/O for Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning

GuidedVLA: Specifying Task-Relevant Factors via Plug-and-Play Action Attention Specialization

Towards Long-horizon Embodied Agents with Tool-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Models

Gemini Robotics — Google IO 2026

Factored Diffusion Policies:Compositionally Generalized Robot Control with a Single Score Network

PokeVLA: Empowering Pocket-Sized Vision-Language-Action Model with Comprehensive World Knowledge Guidance

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Marc Andreessen on AI, California, and the Future of America | Joe Rogan

PointACT: Vision-Language-Action Models with Multi-Scale Point-Action Interaction

MolmoAct2: Action Reasoning Models for Real-world Deployment

StableVLA: Towards Robust Vision-Language-Action Models without Extra Data

TacSE3: Equivariant SE(3) Motion Estimation from Low-Texture Visuotactile Images for In-Gripper Tracking and Compensation

Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple)

Do World Action Models Generalize Better than VLAs? A Robustness Study

VLA-ATTC: Adaptive Test-Time Compute for VLA Models with Relative Action Critic Model

Offline Semantic Guidance for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Policy Distillation

RLDX-1 Technical Report

Brett Adcock (Figure) on the First 8-Hour Autonomous Shift

Rev Lebaredian (NVIDIA) — SCSP AI+ Expo

CoCo-InEKF: State Estimation with Learned Contact Covariances in Dynamic, Contact-Rich Scenarios

Realtime-VLA FLASH: Speculative Inference Framework for Diffusion-based VLAs

What to Ignore, What to React: Visually Robust RL Fine-Tuning of VLA Models

TiPToP: A Modular Open-Vocabulary Planning System for Robotic Manipulation

Axios Pro Rata: Spirited debate

$\Delta$VLA: Prior-Guided Vision-Language-Action Models via World Knowledge Variation

Learning while Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policies

Jim Fan — VLAs Are Dead, WAMs Are Next

DOT-Sim: Differentiable Optical Tactile Simulation with Precise Real-to-Sim Physical Calibration

FlexiTac: A Low-Cost, Open-Source, Scalable Tactile Sensing Solution for Robotic Systems

LaST-R1: Reinforcing Action via Adaptive Physical Latent Reasoning for VLA Models

MotuBrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control

RopeDreamer: A Kinematic Recurrent State Space Model for Dynamics of Flexible Deformable Linear Objects

Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising

RedVLA: Physical Red Teaming for Vision-Language-Action Models

dWorldEval: Scalable Robotic Policy Evaluation via Discrete Diffusion World Model

162: 中国最早AI创业者的故事，与唐文斌聊天才策略、旷视、十年前的机器人和具身新创业

Deepak Pathak & Abhinav Gupta (Skild AI) — One Brain, Any Robot

Cortex 2.0: Grounding World Models in Real-World Industrial Deployment

EmbodiedMidtrain: Bridging the Gap between Vision-Language Models and Vision-Language-Action Models via Mid-training

UniT: Toward a Unified Physical Language for Human-to-Humanoid Policy Learning and World Modeling

AnoleVLA: Lightweight Vision-Language-Action Model with Deep State Space Models for Mobile Manipulation

FLASH: Fast Learning via GPU-Accelerated Simulation for High-Fidelity Deformable Manipulation in Minutes

Novel Algorithms for Smoothly Differentiable and Efficiently Vectorizable Contact Manifold Construction

Sequoia Pulls in $7B to Invest in Late-Stage AI Deals

Observing and Controlling Features in Vision-Language-Action Models

VADF: Vision-Adaptive Diffusion Policy Framework for Efficient Robotic Manipulation

VP-VLA: Visual Prompting as an Interface for Vision-Language-Action Models

The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here

R3D: Revisiting 3D Policy Learning

Vision-Based Safe Human-Robot Collaboration with Uncertainty Guarantees

A Mechanistic Analysis of Sim-and-Real Co-Training in Generative Robot Policies

Simulator Adaptation for Sim-to-Real Learning of Legged Locomotion via Proprioceptive Distribution Matching

Towards Practical World Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models

ViserDex: Visual Sim-to-Real for Robust Dexterous In-hand Reorientation

Sergey Levine — The Robot Revolution Nobody Is Talking About

Sim-to-Real Transfer for Muscle-Actuated Robots via Generalized Actuator Networks

BREAKING: 1st Look Inside Applied Intuition's $15B Physical AI Garage

Your Complete GMSL Solution

A-SLIP: Acoustic Sensing for Continuous In-hand Slip Estimation

LAMP: Lift Image-Editing as General 3D Priors for Open-world Manipulation

Learning Humanoid Standing-up Control across Diverse Postures

SIM1: Physics-Aligned Simulator as Zero-Shot Data Scaler in Deformable Worlds

Sumo: Dynamic and Generalizable Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation

CMP: Robust Whole-Body Tracking for Loco-Manipulation via Competence Manifold Projection

Inside the AI Garage Powering the Real World

Action Images: End-to-End Policy Learning via Multiview Video Generation

SnapFlow: One-Step Action Generation for Flow-Matching VLAs via Progressive Self-Distillation

The liquidity puzzle in interval funds

DySL-VLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model Inference via Dynamic-Static Layer-Skipping for Robot Manipulation

Large Reward Models: Generalizable Online Robot Reward Generation with Vision-Language Models

Adaptive Action Chunking at Inference-time for Vision-Language-Action Models

MobileManiBench: Simplifying Model Verification for Mobile Manipulation

Not All Features Are Created Equal: A Mechanistic Study of Vision-Language-Action Models

frax: Fast Robot Kinematics and Dynamics in JAX

ABot-M0: VLA Foundation Model for Robotic Manipulation with Action Manifold Learning

Xiaomi-Robotics-0: An Open-Sourced Vision-Language-Action Model with Real-Time Execution

Functional Force-Aware Retargeting from Virtual Human Demos to Soft Robot Policies

Sergey Levine - Building LLMs for the Physical World - [Invest Like the Best, EP.465]

FocusVLA: Focused Visual Utilization for Vision-Language-Action Models

OmniGuide: Universal Guidance Fields for Enhancing Generalist Robot Policies

SOLE-R1: Video-Language Reasoning as the Sole Reward for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

134. 和谢晨聊“数据的综述”：AI和机器人数据的历史、版图、金字塔与Recipe

Rethinking Visual-Language-Action Model Scaling: Alignment, Mixture, and Regularization

ST4VLA: Spatially Guided Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

VLAW: Iterative Co-Improvement of Vision-Language-Action Policy and World Model

Disentangled Robot Learning via Separate Forward and Inverse Dynamics Pretraining

The nuance behind evergreen funds

A Unified and General Humanoid Whole-Body Controller for Versatile Locomotion

SoftMimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning in Deformable Object Manipulation

Open-World Task and Motion Planning via Vision-Language Model Generated Constraints

Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies for Embodied Reasoning and Hierarchical Control

Being-0: A Humanoid Robotic Agent with Vision-Language Models and Modular Skills

DualCoT-VLA: Visual-Linguistic Chain of Thought via Parallel Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models

UniDex: A Robot Foundation Suite for Universal Dexterous Hand Control from Egocentric Human Videos

DreamDojo: A Generalist Robot World Model from Large-Scale Human Videos

155: 贾鹏创立至简后的首次访谈：从英伟达到理想，具身智能的六边形战士

SpaceX at Musk's mercy

Scaling Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Robot VLAs with Generative 3D Worlds

Travis Kalanick &amp; Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas

Why Robots Still Struggle With Simple Tasks (And What Might Finally Change That) | Karol Hausman, Co-Founder & CEO…

RJ Scaringe (Mind Robotics) — "We're Doing Robots All Wrong"

Bernt Børnich (1X) — Meet NEO, Your Robot Butler in Training

Jagdeep Singh (Rhoda AI) — Building and Exiting Multiple Companies

Pete Florence (Generalist) — Scaling Laws, Train One Improve All

145: Dialogue with Sun Kuan: The Birth of the First "Consumer-Grade Exoskeleton"

Pete Florence (Generalist) — Why Robot Intelligence Will Be General

Fei-Fei Li (World Labs) — On Creating Large World Models

Elon Musk: A Different Conversation w/ Nikhil Kamath | Full Episode | People by WTF Ep. 16

Interview with DeepMind's Jie Tan: Robotics, Cross-Embodiment, World Models, Gemini Robotics 1.5, and Google

141: The Former Head of DJI LiDAR Developed an "Electric Wheelchair"? Talking Entrepreneurship with Strutt's Hong Xiaoping After Two and a Half Years: Not Doing Humanoid Robots Can Still Lead to Embodied Intelligence

No Priors Ep. 141 | With Sunday Robotics Co-Founders Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi

The Breakthrough For Home Robots | Kyle Vogt, CEO of the Bot Company

Lindon Gao, Dyna Robotics, Sebastian Spitzer, AI Infra, HPE - F50 Physical AI Summit

Lindon Gao - Dyna

#38 Karol Hausman & Kevin Black: Building A Brain For Any Robot | AI Eating The Physical World

$600M AI Robots Powering the Future of the Physical Economy

Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

AI Robots for Your Laundry w/Lindon Gao LIVE FROM CLEAN - S6E103 The Laundromat Millionaire Show✈️

【BAAI2025】 Building Physical Intelligence | Karol Hausman

The Race to Create General-Purpose Robots | Karol Hausman & Lachy Groom on TBPN