Robotics has a flywheel problem: better robots need better data, better training + better evaluation - all feeding each other. At Exploit, @quack_builder of @openroboto shows how Bittensor can connect that loop: from human demonstrations → open model competition → working robots in the real world:

Robotics is moving from demos to an investable, competitive AI frontier. @haitzu maps where the field stands now at Exploit - from data + training to physical deployment - before formally unveiling a new Bittensor robotics subnet being built by Pylon Partners. Don't miss it:

Robotic Automatic Cycle Parking System in Japan. This is Insane 🤯 In Japan, you don't Park your bicycle on the Street. It literally gets Swallowed by a Futuristic Underground Robot Vault. Tap a button, and the Floor literally Opens up to Store your Bicycle 15 meters deep in a Storm-proof, Theft-proof cylinder. Stored and retrieved in under 14 seconds flat. Brilliant. The future is officially here while the rest of us are still fighting over rusty bike racks. 🇯🇵🔥 Need to Learn a Lot from Japan !!! #FI#

Robotics basics straight from Stanford! 😮‍💨 This free from Stanford University is a great starting point to kinematics, dynamics, control, motion planning, trajectory generation, and design. There is no better way to get into robotics than through a legend like Oussama Khatib from Stanford Robotics Center. Oussama Khatib is one of robotics founding legends. He was reseaching human-centered robotics when the field was still obsessed with industrial cages and safety barriers. His work on haptic feedback and dynamic control made robots safe to work alongside humans. 16 lectures grounded in the actual mathematics robots need to move safely and work with people. That's what you can find inside: → Spatial transformations → Forward & inverse kinematics → Jacobians, velocity propagation, and singularities → Trajectory generation → Motion planning → Newton-Euler and Lagrangian methods → Manipulation, and compliance, → Applications in vision-based robotics and whole-body control Access it here for free and recommend to your robotics buddy: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Robotics beginners unite! 😎 Here's a free course on the basics of robotics, including sensors and autonomous mobile bots. Everyone who studied robotics or EE knows MATLAB very well. I've been using it for designing motors and robots back in the day. @MathWorks created a 17-video playlist teaching robotics using real robotic platforms, and other educational kits. Learn how to design, simulate, and control robots. They cover robot navigation with encoders, obstacle detection with IR sensors, vision-based autonomy, smart motor fine-tuning, virtual world simulation, and even modeling wheel-legged robots. Very good for someone just getting started and looking for a low entry-point course totally for free. Simulink modeling for control, Stateflow for state machines, hardware support packages, external mode debugging, virtual simulation before physical deployment. You can actually work on real robotics platforms! This is how you start in robotics! 🔗 Free YouTube vid library: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Robotics and AI startup Lyte, founded by ex-Face ID engineers, raised $165M led by Maverick Silicon at a $1.6B valuation, taking its total funding to $272M (@heysamantha / Bloomberg) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

Robotics deep dive: THE MAGNET CHOKEPOINT Every high-torque joint in a humanoid turns on a neodymium-iron-boron magnet, and a motor buried in a hip or a knee runs hot. Heat is what demagnetises NdFeB. The fix is dysprosium and terbium, the heavy rare earths, alloyed in at a few percent to hold coercivity at operating temperature. They are the reason the magnet survives a shift. The number everyone quotes is mining: the IEA puts China at 60% of global mined production of magnet rare earths in 2024. Sixty percent is a share you can compete with: the ore is not rare and it is not only in China. The number that decides anything is the next one in the same report. China was 91% of global refined output, and 94% of sintered permanent magnet production. That gap, 60 to 91, is the whole subject. Mining is digging. Separation is chemistry, and the rare earths are chemically near-identical by design of the periodic table, so you take them apart by running the liquor through hundreds of solvent-extraction stages in series, each stage nudging the mixture a fraction of a percent toward pure. It is slow and capital-heavy, and it concentrates thorium in the tailings. Thorium is radioactive. The tailings pond is what a Western separation project actually gets fought over, and that fight does not run on a budget cycle. How long it takes: Lynas commissioned a heavy separation circuit in Malaysia and produced dysprosium oxide in May 2025, terbium in June. First time either had been separated commercially anywhere outside China, ever. Rated capacity, up to 1,500 tonnes a year. Magnets are one node in a robot's supply chain and not the only concentrated one. It is the node with the longest replacement time. The clock, checked 21 July 2026. China's April 2025 licensing regime on seven rare earths, dysprosium and terbium among them, is still in force; the IEA's account of what it did is that export volumes fell sharply through April and May and carmakers outside China cut utilisation or stopped lines. The October 2025 expansion, which added a 0.1% de minimis rule and a foreign direct product rule reaching magnet technology, was suspended on 7 November 2025 and the suspension runs to 10 November 2026. It has not been extended. In June Beijing put MP Materials and USA Rare Earth on its own control list. The IEA's 2026 outlook has European dysprosium and terbium trading at around five times Chinese domestic prices. That is the price of the truce while it holds.

Robotics deep dive: HUMANOID CHOKEPOINTS Almost every supply-chain post about humanoids has one country in it. Trace five critical inputs one at a time and they land in four different places. Magnets first, because that is where the argument usually stops. Every high-torque joint runs on sintered NdFeB, and on the IEA's 2024 figures China holds 91% of refined output and 94% of sintered permanent magnets, against 60% of the mining. Mining is the distributed part, and the chokepoint is the chemistry. The precision reducer is the node almost nobody names. Nabtesco states on its own site that it holds approximately 60% of the global market for the precision reduction gears in industrial robot joints. Harmonic Drive Systems is the incumbent on the strain-wave side. Both Japanese, both sitting on decades of gear grinding, heat treatment and yield that nobody has replicated at price. There is no mine to open here. Optimus runs 14 linear actuators; per-robot screw counts get estimated anywhere from 14 to more than 40, at $1,350 to $2,700 each. A planetary roller screw is a micron-tolerance ground part, and only a handful of firms anywhere make them to that standard: Japanese, German, Swiss, with Chinese entrants scaling into it now. The constraint is grinding capacity and the people who can run it. Compute inverts the picture. Nvidia designs Jetson Thor in California and cannot manufacture it. Roughly 92% of the world's sub-10nm logic capacity sits on one island. Battery cells go back to China: over 80% of global cell capacity, about 99% of LFP. A McKinsey component map, reported by Forbes in June, puts it the same way: China is overwhelmingly dominant in exactly one category, magnets for motors, while bearings, driver boards and sensors have suppliers in several countries. So it is four dependencies, held by parties with different export regimes, different politics and no shared interest in coordinating. A supply chain with one chokepoint is one negotiation. Reshoring the magnets still leaves you asking Japan for the gearboxes and Taiwan for the brain.

Robotics deep dive: WHY JAPAN LOST THE HUMANOID LEAD Honda began humanoid research in 1986. P2 walked unaided in December 1996, the first bipedal robot to do it without a tether. ASIMO arrived in November 2000, 120cm and 43kg, down from P3's 160cm and 130kg. Nobody could ever buy one. That is the pattern, and it repeats across all three programmes. Sony's QRIO was developed, marketed and never sold. On 26 January 2006, inside Howard Stringer's restructuring, Sony ended AIBO and stopped QRIO in the same announcement. Toyota's first humanoid, unveiled in 2004, played the trumpet; it performed at the 2005 Aichi Expo. ASIMO's seventh and last generation shipped in 2011. Development stopped in 2018, reported by Nikkei, NHK and Kyodo rather than announced as a product decision. Then March 2011, iRobot announced on the 18th that it was sending PackBots and Warriors to Fukushima Daiichi. American PackBots went into the reactor buildings in April. Quince, built by Chiba Institute of Technology, Tohoku University and the International Rescue System Institute, got inside in June, two months later. The version that circulates is that Japan had no robots. That part is wrong: JAERI had built a radiation-hardened machine after the 1999 Tokai criticality accident and it was on site. Japan's machines had never been proven in the field, because Japanese makers are barred from exporting military robots, while PackBot and Talon had spent a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Japan's transmit-power limits did not lift for the emergency either. Procurement, export control and radio spectrum. None of that is an engineering failure. SCHAFT, a University of Tokyo spinout, won the DARPA Trials in December 2013 with 27 points, three weeks after Google bought it for a reported $20M. It did not compete in the June 2015 finals, won by Korea's Team KAIST. Alphabet closed SCHAFT in November 2018 after failing to find a buyer. Honda's Takahide Yoshiike wrote the epitaph himself: "instead of getting hung up on developing ASIMO as a perfect package of all functions, we would like to provide value to society as soon as possible by focusing first on individual functions." Japan kept the part that had customers. Nabtesco puts its own share of the precision reduction gears inside medium and large robot joints at about 60%. The demonstrations left, the gearboxes stayed.