THE UAF INDEX
The International Federation of Robotics estimates that the global stock of industrial robots in operation reached five million units in 2025. New installations rose to more than 600,000, an annual flow that adds to—but is smaller than—the installed base.
Chinese robotics maker AGIBOT says it and Chimelong have begun a large-scale deployment involving more than 300 robots across entertainment, education, visitor services and hotel operations. The announcement describes an ambitious live setting; it does not yet offer independent evidence of how…
Robotics coverage often begins with the body: can the machine walk, grasp, see or navigate? Deployment begins somewhere less cinematic. It begins with a worksite, a task boundary, a maintenance plan and a person who knows when to stop the machine.
Waymo is inviting riders in three more cities. A blind rider’s account complicates the idea that removing the human means surrendering freedom.
Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard preview describes a missing layer in physical autonomy: a common way for agents to discover, observe and control equipment that was
Robotics coverage likes the first successful movement. Deployment is defined by the thousandth cycle, the damaged sensor and the operator who knows when a task has
In September 2025, Google DeepMind described Gemini Robotics 1.5 as a step toward physical agents that perceive, plan, use tools and act across multi-step tasks. The language was ambitious; the important editorial question is what “plan” means when the world can push back.
Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics announcement marked a shift from describing the physical world to acting within it. The system was presented as a vision-language-action model, with a companion model for embodied reasoning and robotics programming.
Image classification and robotic grasping ask different things of vision. QT-Opt makes the action-and-feedback part explicit.
MIT’s 2007 traffic test exposed a wonderfully awkward problem: a driverless car could be too cautious. DARPA made autonomy answer to a road course.
