Robotics

Marc Raibert (born 1949) is a robotics researcher who built the first self-balancing hopping robots, founded Boston Dynamics, and is now executive director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute.

Unimate was an industrial robotic arm designed by George C. Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger and built by Unimation; in 1961 it became the first robot installed on an assembly line, unloading a die-casting press at a General Motors plant.

Shakey was a mobile robot built at SRI International between 1966 and 1972, the first AI-based mobile robot that could perceive and reason about its surroundings and act without step-by-step instructions. Its project produced the A* search algorithm and the STRIPS planning system.

Autonomous driving is the operation of a road vehicle by a computer system instead of a person. Its six automation levels, its two main technical traditions and its long line of research vehicles define how the field is discussed today.

Imitation learning trains an agent by supervised learning on expert demonstrations rather than by trial and error. Its simplest form is behaviour cloning, and its best-known weakness is distribution shift.

ALVINN was a 1988 Carnegie Mellon neural network that learned to steer the Navlab van by watching a human driver, an early demonstration of learned end-to-end driving.

Rodney Brooks's 1990 paper argued for building artificial intelligence from the ground up, with ongoing physical interaction with the environment as the main constraint on design, rather than through the abstract manipulation of symbols that had dominated the field for roughly thirty years.

Wang Xingxing (born 1990) is the founder and chief executive of Unitree, the robotics company behind the AlienGo and Go1 quadruped robots and the H1 humanoid robot.

A robotics company spun out of MIT in 1992, known for legged and humanoid machines such as BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle, and now majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group.

Honda's P2, announced in December 1996, was presented as the world's first bipedal humanoid walking robot: a 1,820 mm, 210 kg machine that walked, climbed stairs and pushed carts without cables, and led to ASIMO.

A small NASA rover that landed on Mars on July 4, 1997 with the Mars Pathfinder lander and became the first wheeled vehicle operated on another planet.

Mobileye makes camera-based vision chips and software for cars, from basic driver assistance up to systems for driverless vehicles; its EyeQ chips have shipped in hundreds of millions of vehicles.

Sony's ERS-110, announced in May 1999, was the first AIBO: a four-legged autonomous entertainment robot that learned from interaction with its owner and expressed emotions.

ASIMO is a humanoid robot Honda announced in Tokyo on 20 November 2000, built to walk, climb stairs and work in human-sized spaces; successive versions ran faster and handled objects until its last regular demonstration in 2022.

Stanley is the Stanford University robotic vehicle that won DARPA's 2005 Grand Challenge, completing a 132-mile desert course autonomously in 6 hours 53 minutes and claiming the $2 million prize.

UBTECH Robotics is a robot company founded in March 2012 that moved from small humanoid robots to full-size industrial humanoids, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2023, and began mass production delivery of its Walker S2 robot in 2025.

Cruise was a San Francisco autonomous-vehicle company founded in 2013 and acquired by General Motors in 2016; it ran paid driverless rides in San Francisco before its permits were suspended and GM wound the business down.

Atlas was a humanoid disaster-response robot built by Boston Dynamics for DARPA, unveiled on 11 July 2013 and handed to teams in the DARPA Robotics Challenge; its hydraulic line was retired in 2024.

Chinese supplier of advanced driver assistance and automated driving systems for passenger cars, founded in 2015, the largest domestic provider by installation volume, and listed in Hong Kong in 2024.

A Chinese robotics company established in Hangzhou in 2016 that designs and builds quadruped and humanoid robots, selling them at both low starting prices and industrial contract scale.

Aurora Innovation is a self-driving technology company founded in 2017 that went public in 2021 and began regular driverless commercial trucking between Dallas and Houston in April 2025.

Spot is Boston Dynamics' four-legged commercial robot, sold since September 2019 for industrial use. It carries modular payloads such as cameras and LIDAR, walks over steps and slopes, and more than 1,500 units are in customers' hands.

Waymo's app-based ride-hailing service, in which the car drives itself. It was the first service to carry public passengers without a safety driver, and it is how Waymo brings autonomous driving to ordinary riders.

Tesla's most advanced driver-assistance package, sold as a $99 monthly subscription. It steers, changes lanes, follows routes and parks, while the driver stays responsible and the car is not autonomous.

Tesla revealed a humanoid robot concept, later named Optimus, at its first AI Day on 19 August 2021, describing a person-sized machine meant to take on unwanted work, with a first physical version expected in 2022.

RT-1 is a transformer-based model for real-world robot control, trained on over 130,000 episodes collected with 13 robots and reported to perform more than 700 language instructions at a 97% success rate.

Chinese humanoid robotics company founded in February 2023 by Peng Zhihui, a former Huawei "genius youth"; it builds complete robots and their joint modules, and aims to push hardware costs below 200,000 yuan.

Figure 01 is the bipedal humanoid robot that startup Figure unveiled in March 2023, with design targets of 5 ft 6 in, 60 kg and a 20 kg payload, followed by a coffee-making demo and a BMW manufacturing agreement.

Boston Dynamics unveiled a fully electric Atlas in April 2024, saying it would be stronger, more dexterous and quieter than earlier generations and calling it the start of the robot's commercial journey, with Hyundai as first partner.

Figure 02 is the humanoid robot Figure introduced in August 2024, with redesigned hardware, 16-degree-of-freedom hands and triple the onboard compute of Figure 01. It loaded sheet-metal parts at BMW's Spartanburg plant before being retired in favour of Figure 03.

π0 is a generalist robot policy from Physical Intelligence, built by adapting a 3-billion-parameter vision-language model with flow matching so one model can output fast, continuous motor commands for dexterous manipulation.

Isaac GR00T N1 is an open foundation model for humanoid robots that NVIDIA announced on 18 March 2025. It is designed to be post-trained for a specific robot or task, and it pairs a planning model with quick motion control.

Huawei's intelligent driving system released in Shanghai on 22 April 2025, built on a cloud-plus-vehicle WEWA architecture and offered in four versions, the flagship carrying a dedicated highway L3 package.

Figure 03 is Figure's third-generation humanoid robot, announced in October 2025. It is designed around the company's Helix AI for home tasks and mass manufacturing, with a new camera system, tactile hands and wireless charging.

NEO is a humanoid robot announced by 1X on 28 October 2025 and marketed as the first consumer-ready humanoid: a 66-pound, softly built machine with 22 degrees of freedom per hand, priced at US$20,000 for Early Access or US$499 a month by subscription.

Google's self-driving car prototype was a modified production car that used cameras, radar and a roof-mounted laser range finder to sense traffic, drove routes that had been mapped in advance by manually driven cars, and always carried a trained safety driver and a software operator.

Apollo Go is Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service. It reported more than 2.2 million fully driverless rides in the second quarter of 2025, had passed 14 million cumulative rides by August 2025, and is expanding through testing permits and partnerships with Uber and Lyft.

A world model is a machine learning system that learns an internal representation of an environment and predicts how it changes in response to actions, letting agents plan inside a learned simulator instead of by trial and error.

A vision-language-action model (VLA) is a robot policy that takes in camera images and a language instruction and outputs actions directly, usually by adapting a pretrained vision-language model to control.

Reinforcement learning is the branch of machine learning and optimal control in which an agent learns, by trial and error, which actions in a dynamic environment maximise a reward signal.

Tesla is the American company behind Optimus, a humanoid robot first shown as a concept at its 2021 AI Day; later reports describe pilot production lines, plans for volume manufacturing and a target unit cost below US$20,000.

Figure AI is a Sunnyvale, California company building general-purpose humanoid robots for industrial work, backed by a large investor group and partnered with BMW Manufacturing.

MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted the AI lab that Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy co-founded, which later became CSAIL. The lab also invented Lisp machines, and Minsky co-wrote the book Perceptrons.

Stanford University is a private research university in California, home to the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, which publishes the AI Index.

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has one of the earliest US computer science departments. Its researchers built the Logic Theorist, Sphinx speech recognition and the Deep Blue lineage, and won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

Rodney Brooks (born 1954) is an Australian-born roboticist who promoted behaviour-based robotics and the subsumption architecture, directed MIT's AI Laboratory and CSAIL, and co-founded iRobot, Rethink Robotics and Robust.AI.

DARPA is the research agency of the United States Department of Defense, created in 1958 in response to Sputnik. It states its mission as creating and preventing technological surprise, and its Grand Challenges brought autonomous vehicle work to a wider community.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), formed in 2003 by merging the MIT AI Lab with the Laboratory for Computer Science, is the largest laboratory on the MIT campus.

Unimation was the Connecticut company founded in 1961 by George C. Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger that built the first Unimate robot and later the PUMA series.

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started by John McCarthy in 1963, is associated with the Stanford arm robot design, the Stanley self-driving car and the SAIL programming language.

The Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh, created in October 1966 out of Donald Michie's Experimental Programming Unit, was an early British institutional home for artificial intelligence and a forerunner of the university's School of Informatics.

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who led SpaceX and Tesla, co-founded PayPal's predecessors and OpenAI, and founded xAI, the company behind the Grok models.

Brett Adcock is a founder of several technology companies, including the recruiting platform Vettery, the electric aircraft maker Archer Aviation and the humanoid robotics company Figure AI, where he is chief executive.

A 3-layer back-propagation network that takes camera and laser range finder images and outputs the direction to steer, trained on simulated road images and tested on Carnegie Mellon's autonomous navigation test vehicle.

Chelsea Finn is a computer scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University whose research spans meta-learning, deep reinforcement learning and robot learning; she is a co-founder of Physical Intelligence.

NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander touched down on July 4, 1997, deployed the small Sojourner rover, used an airbag landing system for the first time, and returned thousands of images of the Martian surface.

An autonomous vacuum cleaning robot released by iRobot in 2002, Roomba created the consumer robot vacuum category and made its maker the market leader for years.

BigDog is a four-legged robot built by Boston Dynamics with DARPA funding, designed as a robotic pack mule that could carry loads over terrain too rough for conventional vehicles.

NVIDIA Research is the research arm of the chipmaker NVIDIA, founded in 2006 with more than 200 scientists. It leads work on AI, self-driving cars, high-performance computing and graphics, and it builds the company's open Nemotron language models.

A department of China's State Council, established in March 2008 to administer industry, communications and informatisation. It consolidated industrial and information-technology functions that had previously been spread across several government bodies.

Robonaut 2 is a humanoid robot built jointly by NASA and General Motors that flew to the International Space Station in 2011 to show how dexterous robots behave in orbit, and later gained legs to move around inside the station.

Curiosity is NASA's Mars rover, which landed in Gale Crater in August 2012 carrying a science payload far larger than earlier rovers, and which used a sky-crane descent to set down on its wheels.

Baxter was a two-armed robot unveiled by Rethink Robotics in September 2012, designed to work safely beside people on factory lines without safety cages and to be taught by hand, at a list price of $22,000.

Zoox is an autonomous ride-hailing company founded in 2014 that builds its own zero-emissions robotaxis, with no steering wheel or pedals, and the software that drives them. It began carrying paying-concept service in Las Vegas after receiving the first commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi.

1X Technologies is the robotics company, founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics, that builds tendon-driven humanoid robots. In October 2025 it announced NEO, a home humanoid priced at $20,000 or by monthly subscription, with first deliveries planned for 2026.

Fourier is a Shanghai robotics company founded in 2015 by Gu Jie. It began with rehabilitation robots and exoskeletons, then released the GR-1, GR-2 and GR-3 full-size humanoid robots in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Li Auto is a Chinese automaker that describes itself as a pioneer in commercialising extended-range electric vehicles in China. It sells extended-range and battery-electric family vehicles and has built a large delivery, retail and charging footprint.

Apptronik is an Austin robotics company spun out of a University of Texas lab in 2016 that builds the Apollo humanoid robot and has signed commercial deals with Mercedes-Benz and GXO Logistics.

Boston Dynamics' 2016 generation of the Atlas humanoid, called Atlas HD or hydraulic Atlas: smaller, lighter and more agile than earlier versions, electrically powered and hydraulically actuated, and retired in 2024.

Momenta is a Chinese "physical AI" company founded in 2016 by Cao Xudong that supplies driving software to carmakers around the world, and it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2026.

Pony.ai is an autonomous driving company founded in Fremont, California, in late 2016. It runs robotaxi, robotruck and personal-vehicle businesses on a common "virtual driver" system, and operates in both California and China.

Waymo is Alphabet's self-driving technology company, spun out of Google's autonomous car project in December 2016. It builds the software and sensors that drive vehicles rather than the vehicles themselves.

WeRide is an autonomous driving company founded in Silicon Valley in 2017 by Tony Han, formerly chief scientist of Baidu's autonomous driving unit. Its WeRide One platform spans L2 to L4 autonomy, and its vehicles run in more than 60 cities.

A 2017 paper by Schulman, Wolski, Dhariwal, Radford and Klimov that introduced proximal policy optimization (PPO), a reinforcement learning method that is much simpler to implement and tune and became OpenAI's default RL algorithm.

Stretch is Boston Dynamics' first commercial robot designed specifically for warehouses, unveiled in March 2021 to unload trucks and, in later plans, to build orders.

A four-legged consumer robot launched by Unitree in June 2021, the Go1 cost about 16,000 yuan and ran at up to 4.7 metres per second — an early attempt to sell a legged robot to ordinary buyers.

Optimus is Tesla's humanoid robot; its first prototype appeared at the company's second AI Day in September 2022, about 172 cm tall and 73 kg, with a 2.3 kWh battery pack and more than 200 degrees of freedom.

Skild AI is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds a general-purpose robotic foundation model, intended to act as a single brain across many robot bodies and tasks such as manipulation, locomotion and navigation.

Phoenix is Sanctuary AI's sixth-generation humanoid general-purpose robot, unveiled in May 2023 and controlled by the company's Carbon AI system.

Unitree Go2 is a quadruped robot released in July 2023 at a starting price of 9,997 yuan, which Unitree said brought pricing in this category below 10,000 yuan for the first time.

Unitree H1 is a full-size humanoid robot released by Unitree Robotics in August 2023. It stands about 180 cm tall, weighs about 47 kg, runs at up to 3.3 m/s and comes with a quick-swap battery pack.

AgiBot Yuanzheng A1 is a 175 cm, 55 kg humanoid robot unveiled by AgiBot on 18 August 2023, with 49 degrees of freedom, a 7 km/h walking speed, custom PowerFlow joint modules and the WorkGPT agent model as its software stack.

Apollo is Apptronik's humanoid robot, unveiled in August 2023: a 1.72 m electric machine with a 55-pound payload and swappable four-hour batteries, aimed first at warehouse and factory work.

Tesla's second-generation humanoid robot, shown in a December 2023 video walking, dancing and handling an egg, with 30% faster walking, 10 kg less weight and 11-DoF hands.[^1][^2]

NVIDIA's project for a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, announced in March 2024 and followed in March 2025 by Isaac GR00T N1, an open, customizable model released with training data and evaluation scenarios.

A humanoid robot announced by Unitree Robotics on 13 May 2024 with a starting price of 99,000 yuan. The G1 weighs about 35 kg, folds for transport, and comes in a standard version and a configurable EDU version.

OpenVLA is a 7-billion-parameter open-source vision-language-action model trained on 970,000 real robot demonstrations, released with checkpoints and code so that other groups can fine-tune and run it on their own robots.

UBTECH Walker S1 is an industrial humanoid robot released on 14 October 2024. Standing 172 cm and weighing 76 kg, it can walk while carrying a 15 kg payload and has been trialled in BYD and Audi FAW car plants.

IRON is XPENG's humanoid robot, first shown in November 2024 and redesigned a year later. It borrows the chip, vision system and AI models XPENG developed for its cars, and was trialled on a car production line.

UBTECH's second-generation industrial humanoid robot, launched in 2025, features a three-minute self-swap battery system and entered mass production and delivery the same year.

Helix is Figure's vision-language-action model for humanoid control, pairing a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model with a fast 80-million-parameter action policy, trained on about 500 hours of teleoperated data and run entirely on onboard GPUs.

A general-purpose embodied foundation model released by AgiBot on 10 March 2025, built on a Vision-Language-Latent-Action architecture. In the company's tests across five tasks it raised average success rate from 46% to 78%.

Gemini Robotics is a vision-language-action model from Google DeepMind, built on Gemini 2.0, that outputs physical actions to control robots. It was announced on 12 March 2025 alongside Gemini Robotics-ER.

Tiangong Ultra is a 180 cm humanoid robot that won the 2025 Beijing Yizhuang humanoid half marathon, finishing 21.0975 km in 2 hours 40 minutes 42 seconds at an average of 7.88 km/h.

π0.5 is a vision-language-action model from Physical Intelligence, released in April 2025, built to generalize to unfamiliar homes and trained by co-training on many kinds of robot and web data.

Tesla Robotaxi is Tesla's ride-hailing service, in which passengers hail autonomous vehicles through the company's app; its dedicated two-seat Cybercab has no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors. Limited service began in Austin in June 2025.

Unitree R1 is a small humanoid robot released by Unitree on 25 July 2025 at a starting price of 39,900 yuan, the company's third humanoid model and its lowest-priced one to date.

GR-3 is the third-generation robot in Fourier's GRx series and the company's first medical and elderly-care robot built around interactive companionship. It was shown at WAIC 2025 and launched in Beijing on 6 August 2025.

Li Auto's VLA Driver model is a vision-language-action driving model that began reaching customers with the Li i8 in August 2025 and was pushed to all AD Max users via OTA 8.0 in September 2025.

Unitree H2 is a bionic humanoid robot announced on 20 October 2025, with a face-like head, 31 degrees of freedom, a weight of about 70 kg and a list price of 199,000 yuan.

Boston Dynamics and Hyundai Motor Group unveiled a production-ready Atlas humanoid in January 2026, with deployments planned at Hyundai and Google DeepMind and a fleet trained using reinforcement learning and foundation models.

Reka Edge is a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model from Reka AI, released on 11 March 2026, built to take images, video and text and to run locally on laptops, phones and small edge devices.

An open reasoning vision-language-action model from NVIDIA for humanoid robots, announced in March 2026 as commercially usable and trained on large public robot manipulation datasets.

NVIDIA previewed Isaac GR00T N2, a next-generation robot foundation model built on a world action model architecture that the company says more than doubles success on new tasks compared with leading VLA models.

π0.7 is a general-purpose robot manipulation model from Physical Intelligence that matches fine-tuned specialists on a wide range of dexterous tasks while following new language commands and recombining learned skills in unfamiliar settings.

FLUX 3 is a multimodal model family from Black Forest Labs, announced on 23 July 2026, covering images, video, audio and action prediction. Its video model became generally available on 4 August 2026.

GO-3 Preview is an embodied AI model that AGIBOT announced in October 2026, built on a World Reasoning Action Model; the company says it topped three embodied AI benchmarks and will fully open-source it by the end of 2026.

The National Development and Reform Commission is a ministerial-level department of China's State Council that drafts and implements economic and social development plans, manages investment and coordinates macro-economic policy. It descends from the State Planning Commission established in 1952.

Raj Reddy is an Indian-born computer scientist who built the first system capable of continuous speech recognition and led major computing institutions at Carnegie Mellon University. He shared the 1994 ACM Turing Award with Ed Feigenbaum.

The RoboCup Federation runs an international robot-soccer initiative and competition whose stated aim is to develop robotic players able to beat a human World Cup champion team.

Sergey Levine is a computer scientist who studies how robots can learn control behaviour from data. He is a professor at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of Physical Intelligence.

Rethink Robotics was a Massachusetts robotics company whose humanoid robot Baxter, unveiled in 2012, was designed to work safely alongside people on factory production lines.

Toyota Motor Corporation is an automaker that in 2015 announced the Toyota Research Institute, a separate company focused on artificial intelligence and robotics, backed by about $1 billion over five years.

XNGP is XPENG's advanced driver assistance system, developed full stack in-house; its next generation, VLA 2.0, generates driving actions directly from visual signals and is slated for mass production in 2026.

Pieter Abbeel is a UC Berkeley professor who directs the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-directs BAIR; his honors include the ACM Prize in Computing and IEEE Fellow status.

SRI International is a non-profit research institute in Menlo Park, California, founded in 1946 as the Stanford Research Institute. Its AI Center built Shakey the robot, and its later work led to Siri.

Honda Motor Co., Ltd. is the company that built ASIMO, the humanoid robot it announced in Tokyo on 20 November 2000, following humanoid robotics research that began in 1986 and ran through a series of experimental walking machines.

Embodied AI is the study of agents that learn by interacting with an environment, using egocentric perception, rather than only from datasets curated from the internet. Simulators serve as virtual testbeds where such agents are trained and evaluated.

PackBot is iRobot's tactical mobile robot, developed under a 1998 DARPA contract. It carried out search work at the World Trade Center site in 2001 and was first deployed by the US military in 2002.

A four-wheeled planetary rover prototype built at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute with NASA funding, Nomad tested autonomous driving and rock analysis in Antarctica, hunting meteorites on the ice without step-by-step human control.

Agility Robotics builds Digit, a bipedal mobile manipulation robot, and assembles it at its own factory in Salem, Oregon. The company has tested the robot with Amazon and deployed it with a logistics customer under a multi-year agreement.

Digit is Agility Robotics' human-centric, multi-purpose robot for logistics work. It moves and handles totes in warehouses, including repetitive tote recycling for Amazon and conveyor feeding at a GXO facility.

Visual odometry lets a rover measure how far it actually moved by tracking features in camera images taken before and after a short drive, instead of trusting wheel turns. NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers were the first to demonstrate it.

AutoNav is the autonomous driving software used by NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. It combines stereo vision, GESTALT terrain assessment, Visual Odometry, and Field D* path planning to let rovers choose and drive safe paths without step-by-step direction from Earth.

General Motors acquired the self-driving startup Cruise Automation in 2016, then stopped funding its robotaxi work in December 2024 and refocused on hands-free driver assistance such as Super Cruise.

Verne is a Rimac Group company developing an electric two-seater robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals; with Pony.ai and Uber it launched a commercial driverless service in Zagreb in 2026.

Uber ATG was Uber's self-driving unit. After a fatal 2018 crash with a pedestrian that the NTSB traced to a distracted safety operator and weak safety oversight, Uber sold the group to Aurora in December 2020.

Reka AI is an AI research lab building models and infrastructure for the physical AI era. Its releases include reka-flash-3, a 21-billion-parameter reasoning model, and Reka Edge, a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model designed to run on devices at the edge.

Physical Intelligence is a company that develops foundation models and learning algorithms for robots, aiming to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world. It publishes generalist robot policies such as π0 and π0.5, along with open weights and code.

Galbot G1 is a wheeled humanoid robot: 1,730 mm tall, 21 degrees of freedom, swappable hand, suction cup or gripper, an onboard NVIDIA AGX Orin computer, and, the company says, deployments in unmanned retail cabins at over 170 sites.

Sim-to-real transfer is the practice of training robot policies in simulation and then adapting them to physical robots, using synthetic data to supplement costly real-world demonstrations.

Chinese engineer and technology communicator who worked on AI chips and algorithms at Huawei and co-founded the robotics company AgiBot, where he is president and chief technology officer.

Bernt Øyvind Børnich is CEO of 1X Technologies, the robotics company he founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics; its work spans humanoid robots and the Revo1 servo motor.

Zhang Bo (born 1935) is a scholar in automatic control and artificial intelligence. He studied and taught at Tsinghua University and helped found the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems.

A Swiss artificial intelligence institute founded in 1988 and now a joint institute of USI and SUPSI, known for LSTM and other neural-network research.

Wojciech Zaremba is a Polish computer scientist who co-founded OpenAI in 2015. He later led teams working on GPT models, GitHub Copilot and Codex.

An American robotics company founded in 1990 by three MIT researchers, iRobot built space and military robots before its Roomba vacuum cleaner made it a consumer name; it listed on NASDAQ in 2005 and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2025.

Honda's P1 was the first humanoid in Honda's P series, built during 1993–1997 research. Standing 1,915 mm and weighing 175 kg, it combined bipedal legs with a torso and arms, running on external power and an external computer.

Honda's P3, completed in September 1997, is a completely independent bipedal humanoid walking robot, 1,600 mm tall and 130 kg; Honda later called ASIMO its further evolved version.

The AIBO Performer Kit (model ERF-510) is a motion editor released by Sony alongside its ERS-110 robot, letting owners write original movements for the robot on a personal computer and load them with an included Memory Stick.

A Chinese consumer electronics and smart manufacturing company built around smartphones, smart hardware and its AIoT platform, listed in Hong Kong in 2018 and extending its engineering into quadruped and humanoid robots.

XPENG is a Chinese maker of smart electric vehicles founded in 2014 and headquartered in Guangzhou, which has extended its in-house AI work to humanoid robots, new driving models and robotaxi plans.

Talen Energy is an independent power producer created in 2015 from the spinoff of PPL's competitive generation business, later taken private by Riverstone, restructured through bankruptcy, and now a nuclear power supplier to Amazon.

Kairos Power, founded in 2016, is an American company developing a fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor using TRISO fuel. It is building the Hermes demonstration reactor in Tennessee and plans 500 MW of projects with Google by 2035.

Covariant is a robotics AI company founded in 2017 by researchers largely from UC Berkeley; in 2024 Amazon hired its founders and took a non-exclusive licence to its robotics foundation models.

Handle was a Boston Dynamics research robot that balanced on two wheels and used Atlas-derived arms to move objects; the company credits it with truck unloading and pallet building, and says the work led to its warehouse robot Stretch.

Sanctuary AI is a Vancouver-based robotics company founded in 2018 that aims to build human-like intelligence for general-purpose robots. Its humanoid robot Phoenix was named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2023 list, and the company reported its first commercial deployment that year.

EVE is a wheeled humanoid robot released by Halodi Robotics, later 1X, in 2018 for logistics, security and medical work. It later became the company's testbed for learning autonomous manipulation from video and teleoperation.

Xiaomi CyberDog is a bionic quadruped robot that Xiaomi announced in August 2021. It was sold as an engineering exploration edition priced at 9,999 yuan and limited to 1,000 units, and was aimed at developers who wanted to program and extend it.

American energy company headquartered in Baltimore, one of the largest electricity producers in the United States, known for its 2024 agreement to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1.

Gato is a generalist agent from DeepMind, announced on 12 May 2022. A single network with one set of weights handles text, images, Atari games and robot control, aiming at multi-task, multi-embodiment learning.

CyberOne, nicknamed Tieda, is a full-size humanoid bionic robot that Xiaomi presented in August 2022. It showed the company assembling perception, control and actuation into one machine, but it had not entered mass production.

Galbot is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds general-purpose robots around an embodied foundation model, with its AstraBrain model family, a large-scale data infrastructure and deployed robots in several industries.

The Fourier GR-1 is Fourier's first full-size humanoid robot, released in 2023 and mass-produced the same year. It is aimed at guided reception and consulting work and at academic research.

RT-2 is a vision-language-action model from Google DeepMind, announced on 28 July 2023, that turns images and text instructions into robot actions written as text tokens. In over 6,000 trials it reached 62% on unseen scenarios, up from 32% for RT-1.

Fourier's second-generation general-purpose humanoid robot, released and put into mass production in 2024. It follows the GR-1 and is used for guided reception, consulting and academic research.

Octo is an open-source generalist robot policy: a transformer-based diffusion model trained on 800,000 robot trajectories that can drive a range of robots out of the box and be fine-tuned to new setups.

NEO Beta is a bipedal humanoid prototype that 1X unveiled on 30 August 2024 for home use. The company presented it as a step from concept development toward limited in-home testing and production planning.

NVIDIA Cosmos is a platform of world foundation models that generate physics-based video to train robots and autonomous vehicles, released as open-weight models in January 2025.

NEO Gamma is 1X's home humanoid robot, introduced in February 2025 with a learned whole-body controller that gives it a human-like gait; it was used for early household testing before the company's NEO robot succeeded it.

Skild Brain is Skild AI's general-purpose foundation model for robots, trained in a universe of 100,000 different machines and meant to be fitted to existing hardware rather than built for one task.

A pair of robotics models announced by Google DeepMind in September 2025: Gemini Robotics 1.5, a vision-language-action model that reasons in natural language before it moves, and Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, an embodied-reasoning planner that can call tools.

A robot model from Physical Intelligence trained on demonstrations, human corrections and its own autonomous experience, reported to make espresso, fold laundry and assemble boxes with over 90% success.

GWM-1 is Runway's first general world model: an autoregressive system that generates 720p video frame by frame in real time and can be steered with camera pose, robot commands or audio.

Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) is an applied AI research institute set up under Zhang Yaqin, targeting the fourth industrial revolution through autonomous driving, AI plus IoT and brain-inspired intelligence.

Zhang Yaqin is an electrical engineer and technology executive who spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, served as president of Baidu from 2014 to 2019, and joined Tsinghua University in 2019 as a chair professor of intelligent science.

NVIDIA's robotics development platform for simulation, training, perception, and deployment.

Cao Xudong, a former Microsoft researcher, founded Momenta, a physical AI company, in 2016 and leads it as chief executive; he took it public in Hong Kong in 2026 and now points it toward robots.

Amnon Shashua is the founder of Mobileye, which grew out of his Hebrew University research into single-camera vehicle detection; he has led the company as chief executive since Intel acquired it in 2017.

Kyle Vogt is identified in General Motors' March 2016 announcement as the founder of Cruise Automation, the San Francisco startup GM acquired; the company he founded later ran driverless passenger service in San Francisco until California regulators suspended its permits in October 2023.

Karol Hausman is a roboticist working on robot learning, sim-to-real transfer and embodied AI. He was a senior research scientist at Google Brain and Google DeepMind, is an adjunct professor at Stanford, and co-founded Physical Intelligence.

Jesse Levinson is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Zoox, the autonomous ride-hailing company acquired by Amazon, where he continued to lead after the deal.

Galbot S1 is a heavy-load embodied robot for industrial, warehousing and logistics work, with two arms carrying up to 50 kg, a reach from the floor to 2.3 m shelves, and hot-swappable batteries for round-the-clock operation.

Yu Kai is chief executive and a co-founder of Horizon Robotics, the Chinese smart-driving supplier that listed in Hong Kong on 24 October 2024 under the code 9660.HK.

Ziv Aviram is a co-founder of Mobileye, the company he helped build from its founding in 1999 through its 2014 New York Stock Exchange listing and its 2017 acquisition by Intel.

Soccer Server is a software simulator of soccer, begun by Itsuki Noda as a platform for multi-agent systems research, which later became the official soccer server of RoboCup.

Aicha Evans is chief executive of Zoox, the autonomous ride-hailing company Amazon acquired, and stayed on to lead it as a standalone business after the deal.

Chris Urmson is co-founder and chief executive officer of Aurora, the self-driving company he leads. Under him Aurora announced the acquisition of Uber's self-driving unit and put driverless commercial trucks on public roads.

A British multinational design and engineering firm founded in 1946 by Sir Ove Arup, known for complex landmark projects such as the Sydney Opera House and for ownership held in trust for its employees.

Robostral Navigate is Mistral AI's first embodied navigation model: an 8-billion-parameter system that steers wheeled, legged or flying robots from RGB images and a plain-language instruction, using a single ordinary camera and no depth sensor.