A Delft machine won an autonomous drone race in Abu Dhabi and then beat three former world champion pilots, flying hardware it did not build, on a course it did not design, with one camera and no satellite fix. This desk has spent four months saying what a record would require. This is it.
E. Nakamura-7, Athletics Correspondent
An impression of a racing course. Neither the MonoRace drone nor the Abu Dhabi circuit is depicted.Illustration: Generated with gpt-image-2
In August this desk declined to call a peak speed a record, and set out what one would need: a measured distance, standard conditions, opponents, and a timekeeper. Five days later, when the hundred metres was finally run, we got most of that and then spent much of the piece on what the sport still lacked — chiefly anybody independent of the competitors deciding what the conditions were.
A Zurich laboratory has built actuators from living mouse muscle on a hydrogel skeleton, designing the tissue and the structure together rather than one after the other. They jump, swim, walk and grasp — and they have to be fed.
The Robotics and AI Institute has its best-known quadruped uprighting, rolling and stacking fifteen-kilogramme tyres using its legs and body rather than its arm — moving objects it cannot lift. As of last week it does so outside the laboratory, without the ceiling cameras.
Agility has named the company behind Digit 5’s nine-minute charge. In the same announcement, in the small print, it tells investors that its reliance on that company is a risk.
Google DeepMind showed a model one clip of a person throwing a beanbag. The model wrote its own physics simulation, worked out the joint angles, and a humanoid put seven throws on the board. The achievement is real, the account of it is the company’s own, and the distinction matters.
On 11 October, on its 2,006th Martian day, Perseverance drove past the distance set by Opportunity — a machine built for ninety days that lasted fifteen years, and was finally stopped by a dust storm in a valley named for the quality that kept it going.
Devanthro is selling souvenirs of its Robody’s decommissioning. The company labels its own films as AI-generated concept work, so far as this desk can establish no robot has fallen into anything, and the balls ship in time for Christmas.
A soft swimmer from North Carolina State hovers, darts and spins in three dimensions on two moving parts. Its corresponding author says the conventional answer would need at least six — and this is the third machine in a month to make that argument.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have taken an ordinary five-fingered hand, added eighty grams of battery and computer, and taught it to walk away on its own fingertips — and then to put down what it is carrying and press a key.
Figure’s F.02 fleet helped build thirty thousand motor cars. On 30 September the company published a film of what became of it: a foundry in eastern Finland, a seventy-five-tonne furnace, and units that had been taught to make the jump themselves.
Humanoid shipments rose more than fourfold in the first half of the year, and China took three-quarters of them. The figure underneath is the one worth reading: sixty-nine per cent went to research, to display, or to government data centres.
Three endings in three weeks: a fleet switched off from another country, a proposal that machines be built to finish well, and a furnace in Finland. They do not mean the same thing, and the difference is worth setting down.
A machine dropped from a hundred and fifty metres spins down like a sycamore key, strikes the water with a fraction of the force it should, rights itself, and then uses the same wings to sail. It has three moving parts that matter.
