Whisker’s AI-powered litter robot thinks my cats swapped bodies
The greatest invention in pet tech in recent years is the litter robot. A machine that scoops your kitties' poop so you don't have to…
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The greatest invention in pet tech in recent years is the litter robot. A machine that scoops your kitties' poop so you don't have to…
As heterogeneous robotic systems deploy across diverse urban zones, maintaining safety amid complex human-robot interactions remains a critical challenge. We present a unified framework that bridges systematic hazard analysis and runtime enforcement using hazard-informed safety envelopes. Rather than treating safety as a static constraint isolated within individual software modules, we introduce a cross-layer safety transformation process spanning symbolic, spatial, and dynamic world models. We show how this representation naturally interfaces with physical AI runtime harnesses to guarantee safe urban mobility.
An autonomous robot efficiently exploring an unknown environment, such as looking for water sources on Mars, faces two simultaneous demands: building an accurate information map while quickly finding the regions of greatest value, and paying for every meter of travel and the cost of every measurement it takes. Classical information-seeking and reward-seeking criteria address only one of these objectives at a time. Here, we propose Expected Free Energy (EFE), the principled action-selection objective from active inference, as a unifying criterion for budgeted robotic informative path planning. Maintaining a Gaussian-process belief over the information field, our agent plans continuous trajectories that minimize expected free energy under hard path-length constraints. The results from multiple realizations show that EFE-based planning yields accurate posterior maps and locates the highest-value regions simultaneously, outperforming information-theoretic baselines under the same settings. In robotic exploration, these unified, easy-to-tune principled information-gathering strategies facilitate autonomous deployment while enforcing efficiency and resource constraints.
We present a survey of the past and future of AI Scientists: machines capable of automating science. AI Scientists can originate hypotheses, deduce their consequences, design and execute experiments, interpret their results, and revise their beliefs. Such systems are integrated scientific agents, connected to the literature, formal knowledge, mathematical models, simulations, data-analysis systems and physical laboratories. Adam was the first machine to make novel scientific discoveries through cycles of hypothesis formation and physical experimentation. Eve established the architecture of the modern self-driving laboratory. Foundation models, autonomous agents and laboratory robotics now make it possible to build systems far more general than either Adam or Eve. The central problem is no longer whether individual components of science can be automated. They can. The problem is integration. AI Scientists must combine neural learning with logic, probability, mathematics, causal reasoning, simulation, experimental design, robotics and formal scientific records. AI Scientists have the potential to transform science: to make science faster, cheaper, more systematic and more reproducible. AI Scientists could investigate systems too complicated for unaided human science, and enable thousands of AI scientists to work together on single problems. The Nobel Turing Challenge sets the goal of developing by 2050 AI systems capable of automating Nobel-quality discoveries. Progress is ahead of schedule. When we succeed it will create a new form of science and transform the world.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved promising performance in robotic manipulation. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate generalization on static manipulation tasks and largely overlook dynamic interaction scenarios. To address this gap, we present ReflexBench, a benchmark for reaction-critical manipulation. ReflexBench contains six dynamic tasks and introduces an evaluation framework that decouples simulator stepping from robot control while supporting configurable latency under synchronous and asynchronous inference. Building upon ReflexBench, we propose ReflexVLA, an efficient VLA model designed for reaction-critical manipulation without large-scale robot-data pretraining. ReflexVLA enhances temporal reasoning through latent future prediction and multi-frame temporal fusion within the vision backbone, while reducing deployment latency through batched visual encoding and CUDA Graph replay. Experiments show that ReflexVLA consistently improves dynamic manipulation performance while maintaining competitive accuracy on standard static manipulation benchmarks, and real-world experiments further demonstrate its effectiveness under practical deployment conditions. Project website: https://reflexvla.github.io
Learn how to automate legacy web applications that need human-like interaction using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser Tool and Strands Agents. This walkthrough covers a reference architecture for an AI-powered digital worker that drives legacy interfaces through secure, isolated browser sessions while preserving human oversight and full audit trails.
Learn how First Orion, a branded communications company, shifted from brittle script-based UI testing to AI-driven QA automation with Amazon Nova Act. By describing tests in plain English instead of maintaining selector-based code, they cut QA cycle times, freed engineering capacity, and caught regressions earlier.
The open source ecosystem is making it easier for AI enthusiasts and developers to build, customize and run increasingly capable agents locally. Throughout August, NVIDIA is celebrating the partners and open source communities moving local AI forward, along with the models, applications and tools emerging across the ecosystem. That includes NVIDIA’s latest open models, software […]
In July, NVIDIA joined more than 200 companies and organizations in signing “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” an open letter arguing that AI leadership will be measured not by any single frontier model but by whether an open ecosystem reaches every sector.
Members of the Open Secure AI Alliance — now more than 120 organizations strong — are developing new guidelines to strengthen agentic AI cybersecurity as the annual Black Hat conference begins in Las Vegas today. The Linux Foundation today shared a Request for Comments on Shared AI Findings Exchange (SAFE), a proposed set of guidelines […]
Gemini Robotics ER 2 helps robots reason, collaborate, and solve real-world tasks. It represents a step change in video understanding, tool orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration for robotic applications.
At this week’s AI Summit in San Francisco, South Korean President Jae Myung Lee and some of the country’s top business leaders and researchers are meeting with NVIDIA and ecosystem partners to chart Korea’s AI progress. Building on NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Korea last month, this week’s discussions and announcements advance […]
Before a healthcare robot can be useful in the real world, it has to learn how the physical world pushes back. Anatomy varies. Instruments bend, press, slip and interact with tissue. Imaging can be noisy or incomplete. And the rare, edge scenarios developers most need to understand don’t appear on schedule. That creates one of […]
From open models to real-time simulation, AI and graphics breakthroughs are transforming media, content creation and robotics.
Google and AIM launched ATL Saathi, a Gemini-powered AI tool empowering Indian educators in robotics labs.
Every year, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) reveals where thousands of AI researchers have decided to put their work. This year’s accepted papers reveal a clear direction: open frontier models and open AI infrastructure have become foundational to how modern AI science gets done. NVIDIA had 74 papers accepted at ICML 2026. Approximately […]
Nations have long invested in domestic infrastructure to advance their economies, protect and use their data, and take advantage of technology opportunities in areas such as transportation, communications, commerce, entertainment and healthcare. AI, the most important technology of our time, is turbocharging innovation across every facet of society. Countries are investing in AI capabilities so […]