With the ICRA deadline only a few days away, it's a great time to look over my guide for how to fake a robotics paper: - Don’t let other people run comparisons. If other people can try your model out, they’ll quickly uncover its limitations. If you can keep your model secret, that’s best. - Control the environment of your demo carefully. Lighting, objects, initial robot configuration, and so on. This lets you overfit the demo scene and get really nice, smooth, high quality motions. - Never show your failures. This one might seem obvious — why would I show failures? — but if people can see where your model fails, they can start to see the limits of what you can do. Only strong robotics papers and results can show failures with confidence. - If you have to let other people run comparisons, choose the people carefully. Make sure they’re only happening in the right circumstances, ones your model supports as roughly in distribution. Absolutely don’t do what Physical Intelligence or NVIDIA do and open source your model so anyone can benchmark it. - When working on the results section of your research paper or blog post, you may be tempted to include some baselines. This is a good idea; just be careful to choose weak baselines so you look good. - On the same note: cherry-pick your benchmarks. There are a ton of robotics benchmarks out there, and they all test subtly different things. Importantly, these differences (obviously don't do these things please)

Announcing Maven Robotics' $100M Series A, led by RoboStrategy Follow @mavenrobotics and CEO @hamzaderbas as they come out of stealth today. Read the TechCrunch article here:

London's got that physical AI aura now! 😮‍💨 Just got back from London, where I got to visit some brilliant robotics companies, talk to insanely ambitious founders, and even pull off a physical AI gathering (mostly thanks to @JacklouisP and @RoboStrategy) that drew a seriously good robotics crowd. Apologies to everyone stuck on the waiting list. Next time I'll make sure the event is bigger, London is clearly starting to live and breathe robotics. We had deep-tech investors, founders and researchers in the room (King's Cross is home to Google DeepMind, after all). Thanks again to everyone who showed up, you rock! 🎸 I used to be in London once a quarter. Right now I decided to be there once a month. There's so much happening that it's hard to keep up. London, until next time! 🇬🇧 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

@JacklouisP @alexgkendall @Uber Yep! Just make sure you have the most recent version of the Uber app and that your AV preference is turned on: 1. Open Uber 2. Tap Account 3. Tap Settings 4. Tap Autonomous Vehicles in Ride Preferences 5. Toggle on your AV preference

When Will a Humanoid Break the Decathlon World Record? Here's why that question matters 1. The decathlon is the closest thing to a real fitness test for a humanoid body, 10 events, 1 machine, 0 swaps, which also compares to human performance 2. It demands nearly every hard problem in robotics at once, strength, dexterity, endurance, balance, and survivability 3. Nobody's close, and I'll show you exactly why 4. I wrote the actual rule book for this challenge, and it's stricter than you'd think🧵

After so many demos, models, pilots, robots are still struggling to land real deployments with real customers. Until now. Today we’re excited to share that our robots have successfully crossed the ROI threshold, and Din Tai Fung, one of the highest revenue per location restaurant chain in the US, is rolling out Dyna robots across its extensive restaurant network. This brings our rollouts across hotels, logistics, data centers, and many other use cases to a fleet that reaches hundreds of robots by the first half of 2027. And we’re just getting started. It’s been a wild year, and today we’re double clicking on the battlefield stories and sharing a few learnings about scaling robot deployments. We are just scratching the surface. Read the full blog post:

London is calling! ☎ Next week I’ll be in London, creating content to tell the stories of the coolest robotics startups along the Thames. I thought it would be cool to organize a physical AI gathering: to talk about what’s trending right now (it changes literally every month), catch up with my clients and portfolio companies from London, and meet completely new people. After a quick chat with @JacklouisP from @RoboStrategy, we decided: WE’RE DOING IT. So if: a) you’re obsessed with robotics b) you’re building something in your garage or in a university lab c) you invest in physical AI companies ... then I think I’ve just filled up your calendar for 1st September (Tuesday next week) from 6 to 10 p.m. 🔗 Here's the link to signup: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →