🚨🤖 Robotics Weekly Digest (May 21, 2025)
From humanoid brawls to bots that learn in a day—this week, robotics felt more alive than ever. Welcome to this week’s wildest updates from the frontlines of physical AI 👇
NVIDIA pushes “physical AI” even harder. At COMPUTEX, Jensen Huang unveiled Isaac GR00T N1.5—an upgraded foundation model for humanoid reasoning—and the GR00T-Dreams blueprint that spins up huge synthetic-motion datasets from a single image, compressing a three-month training cycle into 36 hours. The model shows markedly higher success rates on material-handling and manufacturing tasks and will ship on Jetson Thor later this year.
Robot boxing kicks off ICRA 2025. Day 1 in Atlanta opened with a crowd-pleasing humanoid boxing match organized by UFB (Ultimate Fighting Bots) and built by Frodobots. More updates on ICRA from the OpenMind team perspective coming soon. X (formerly Twitter)
More on NVIDIA: Jensen Quotes. Takeaway: “Physical AI and robotics will bring about the next industrial revolution.” Bonus quote: “The humanoid robot is likely the only robot that will work.” Nvidia News
Extreme balancing for humanoids. Researchers from Tsinghua University debuted HuB, a unified framework that lets Unitree G1 nail tricky one-leg poses (“Bruce Lee kick”, “Swallow balance”) even under soccer-ball hits, thanks to motion-refinement, balance-aware policy learning and sim-to-real robustness training. GitHub
Persona AI raised US $27 million (Unity Growth, Tides Ventures co-led) to build purpose-built humanoids for shipyards and heavy industry, introducing validation for a more novel vertical where industrial precision can be applied in physically demanding environments. The Robot Report
The Rise of Soft Robotics. MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus champions soft robotics—from sausage-casing “ingestible” bots to a silicone-flippered sea-turtle drone—powered by liquid-neural networks and a “text-to-robot” design pipeline. Wall Street Journal
Taiwan launched a NT$10 billion (US $331 M) five-year “Smart Robotics Industry Promotion Plan” to counter its aging workforce, aiming to 12-fold the service-robot sector’s value. Taipei Times
Purdue’s “Purdubik’s Cube” shattered the world record, solving a Rubik’s cube in 0.103 s—faster than a blink and eclipsing Mitsubishi’s 2024 mark. NDTV
TokenFi will tokenize Rice Robotics’ Floki Minibot M1 on 23 May, the first AI robot offered as a real-world-asset token—highlighting the growing AI-meets-blockchain wave. X (formerly Twitter)
POSTECH haptics give operators robot “super-powers.” The new POstick-KF (force) and POstick-VF (visuo-tactile) tools pair kinesthetic feedback, AR and digital twins so factory workers can feel and guide remote robots with real-tool familiarity. Interesting Engineering
From NVIDIA’s leap in humanoid learning to ICRA’s robot boxing spectacle, it’s clear that robotics is no longer confined to labs, but bleeding into all different aspects of culture, industry, and imagination. This week, we saw industrial verticals heat up, soft robotics stretch the imagination, and national strategies go all-in. Stay tuned as physical AI contines to reshape industries by dropping us a like or subscribing for more breakthroughs that feel straight out of sci-fi.