As a mere earthling, I remember watching in fascination as Sojourner sent back photos of the Martian surface during the summer of 1997. I was not alone. The servers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab slowed to a crawl when they got more than 47 million hits (a record number!) from people attempting to download those early images of the Red Planet. To be fair, it was the late 1990s, the Internet was still young, and most people were using dial-up modems. By the end of the 83-day mission, Sojourner had sent back 550 photos and performed more than 15 chemical analyses of Martian rocks and soil.

Sojourner, of course, remains on Mars. Pictured here is Marie Curie, its twin. Functionally identical, either one of the rovers could have made the voyage to Mars, but one of them was bound to become the famous face of the mission, while the other was destined to be left behind in obscurity. Did I write this piece because I feel a little bad for Marie Curie? Maybe. But it also gave me a chance to revisit this pioneering Mars mission, which established that robots could effectively explore the surface of planets and captivate the public imagination.

On 4 July 1997, the Mars Pathfinder parachuted through the Martian atmosphere and bounced about 15 times on glorified airbags before finally coming to a rest. The lander, renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, carried precious cargo stowed inside. The next day, after the airbags retracted, the solar-powered Sojourner eased its way down the ramp, the first human-made vehicle to roll around on the surface of another planet. (It wasn’t the first extraterrestrial body, though. The Soviet Lunokhod rovers conducted two successful missions on the moon in 1970 and 1973. The Soviets had also landed a rover on Mars back in 1971, but communication was lost before the PROP-M ever deployed.)

This giant sandbox at JPL provided Marie Curie with an approximation of Martian terrain. Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images

The six-wheeled, 10.6-kilogram, microwave-oven-size Sojourner was equipped with three low-resolution cameras (two on the front for black-and-white images and a color camera on the rear), a laser hazard–avoidance system, an alpha-proton X-ray spectrometer, experiments for testing wheel abrasion and material adherence, and several accelerometers. The robot also demonstrated the value of the six-wheeled “rocker-bogie” suspension system that became NASA’s go-to design for all later Mars rovers. Sojourner never roamed more than about 12 meters from the lander due to the limited range of its radio.

Pathfinder had landed in Ares Vallis, an assumed ancient floodplain chosen because of the wide variety of rocks present. Scientists hoped to confirm the past existence of water on the surface of Mars. Sojourner did discover rounded pebbles that suggested running water, and later missions confirmed it.

A highlight of Sojourner’s 83-day mission on Mars was its encounter with a rock nicknamed Barnacle Bill [to the rover’s left]. JPL/NASA

As its first act of exploration, Sojourner rolled forward 36 centimeters and encountered a rock, dubbed Barnacle Bill due to its rough surface. The rover spent about 10 hours analyzing the rock, using its spectrometer to determine the elemental composition. Over the next few weeks, while the lander collected atmospheric information and took photos, the rover studied rocks in detail and tested the Martian soil.

Meanwhile back on Earth, engineers at JPL used Marie Curie to mimic Sojourner’s movements in a Mars-like setting. During the original design and testing of the rovers, the team had set up giant sandboxes, each holding thousands of kilograms of playground sand, in the Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL. They exhaustively practiced the remote operation of Sojourner, including an 11-minute delay in communications between Mars and Earth. (The actual delay can vary from 7 to 20 minutes.) Even after Sojourner landed, Marie Curie continued to help them strategize.

Initially, Sojourner was remotely operated from Earth, which was tricky given the lengthy communication delay. Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images

During its first few days on Mars, Sojourner was maneuvered by an Earth-based operator wearing 3D goggles and using a funky input device called a Spaceball 2003. Images pieced together from both the lander and the rover guided the operator. It was like a very, very slow video game—the rover sometimes moved only a few centimeters a day. NASA then turned on Sojourner’s hazard-avoidance system, which allowed the rover some autonomy to explore its world. A human would suggest a path for that day’s exploration, and then the rover had to autonomously avoid any obstacles in its way, such as a big rock, a cliff, or a steep slope.

JPL designed Sojourner to operate for a week. But the little rover that could kept chugging along for 83 Martian days before NASA finally lost contact, on 7 October 1997. The lander had conked out on 27 September. In all, the mission collected 1.2 gigabytes of data (which at the time was a lot) and sent back 10,000 images of the planet’s surface.

NASA held on to Marie Curie with the hopes of sending it on another mission to Mars. For a while, it was slated to be part of the Mars 2001 set of missions, but that didn’t happen. In 2015, JPL transferred the rover to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

The Pathfinder mission was the second one in NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin’s Discovery Program, which embodied his “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy of making NASA more nimble and efficient. (The first Discovery mission was to the asteroid Eros.) In the financial climate of the early 1990s, the space agency couldn’t risk a billion-dollar loss if a major mission failed. Goldin opted for smaller projects; the Pathfinder mission’s overall budget, including flight and operations, was capped at US $300 million.

RELATED: How NASA Built Its Mars Rovers

In his 2014 book Curiosity: An Inside Look at the Mars Rover Mission and the People Who Made It Happen (Prometheus), science writer Rod Pyle interviews Rob Manning, chief engineer for the Pathfinder mission and subsequent Mars rovers. Manning recalled that one of the best things about the mission was its relatively minimal requirements. The team was responsible for landing on Mars, delivering the rover, and transmitting images—technically challenging, to be sure, but beyond that the team had no constraints.

Sojourner was succeeded by the rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Shown here are four mission spares, including Marie Curie [foreground]. JPL-Caltech/NASA

The real mission was to prove to Congress and the American public that NASA could do groundbreaking work more efficiently. Behind the scenes, there was a little bit of accounting magic happening, with the “faster, better, cheaper” missions often being silently underwritten by larger, older projects. For example, the radioisotope heater units that kept Sojourner’s electronics warm enough to operate were leftover spares from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, so they were “free.”

Not only was the Pathfinder mission successful but it captured the hearts of Americans and reinvigorated an interest in exploring Mars. In the process, it set the foundation for the future missions that allowed the rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity (which, incredibly, is still operating nearly 13 years after it landed) to explore even more of the Red Planet.

To name its first Mars rovers, NASA launched a student contest in March 1994, with the specific guidance of choosing a “heroine.” Entry essays were judged on their quality and creativity, the appropriateness of the name for a rover, and the student’s knowledge of the woman to be honored as well as the mission’s goals. Students from all over the world entered.

Twelve-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, Conn., won for her essay on Sojourner Truth, while 18-year-old Deepti Rohatgi of Rockville, Md., came in second for hers on Marie Curie. Truth was a Black woman born into slavery at the end of the 18th century. She escaped with her infant daughter and two years later won freedom for her son through legal action. She became a vocal advocate for civil rights, women’s rights, and alcohol temperance. Curie was a Polish-French physicist and chemist famous for her studies of radioactivity, a term she coined. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, as well as the first person to win a second Nobel.

NASA subsequently recognized several other women with named structures. One of the last women to be so honored was Nancy Grace Roman, the space agency’s first chief of astronomy. In May 2020, NASA announced it would name the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope after Roman; the space telescope is set to launch as early as October 2026, although the Trump administration has repeatedly said it wants to cancel the project.

Related: A Trillion Rogue Planets and Not One Sun to Shine on Them

These days, NASA tries to avoid naming its major projects after people. It quietly changed its naming policy in December 2022 after allegations came to light that James Webb, for whom the James Webb Space Telescope is named, had fired LGBTQ+ employees at NASA and, before that, the State Department. A NASA investigation couldn’t substantiate the allegations, and so the telescope retained Webb’s name. But the bar is now much higher for NASA projects to memorialize anyone, deserving or otherwise. (The agency did allow the hopping lunar robot IM-2 Micro Nova Hopper, built by Intuitive Machines, to be named for computer-software pioneer Grace Hopper.)

And so Marie Curie and Sojourner will remain part of a rarefied clique. Sojourner, inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2003, will always be the celebrity of the pair. And Marie Curie will always remain on the sidelines. But think about it this way: Marie Curie is now on exhibit at one of the most popular museums in the world, where millions of visitors can see the rover up close. That’s not too shabby a legacy either.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2025 print issue.

Curator Matthew Shindell of the National Air and Space Museum first suggested I feature Marie Curie. I found additional information from the museum’s collections website, an article by David Kindy in Smithsonian magazine, and the book After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007) by Smithsonian curator Martin Collins.

NASA has numerous resources documenting the Mars Pathfinder mission, such as the mission website, fact sheet, and many lovely photos (including some of Barnacle Bill and a composite of Marie Curie during a prelaunch test).

Curiosity: An Inside Look at the Mars Rover Mission and the People Who Made It Happen (Prometheus, 2014) by Rod Pyle and Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet (Hyperion, 2005) by planetary scientist Steve Squyres are both about later Mars missions and their rovers, but they include foundational information about Sojourner.

As a mere earthling, I remember watching in fascination as Sojourner sent back photos of the Martian surface during the summer of 1997. I was not alone. The servers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab slowed to a crawl when they got more than 47 million hits (a record number!) from people attempting to download those early images of the Red Planet. To be fair, it was the late 1990s, the Internet was still young, and most people were using dial-up modems. By the end of the 83-day mission, Sojourner had sent back 550 photos and performed more than 15 chemical analyses of Martian rocks and soil.

Sojourner, of course, remains on Mars. Pictured here is Marie Curie, its twin. Functionally identical, either one of the rovers could have made the voyage to Mars, but one of them was bound to become the famous face of the mission, while the other was destined to be left behind in obscurity. Did I write this piece because I feel a little bad for Marie Curie? Maybe. But it also gave me a chance to revisit this pioneering Mars mission, which established that robots could effectively explore the surface of planets and captivate the public imagination.

On 4 July 1997, the Mars Pathfinder parachuted through the Martian atmosphere and bounced about 15 times on glorified airbags before finally coming to a rest. The lander, renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, carried precious cargo stowed inside. The next day, after the airbags retracted, the solar-powered Sojourner eased its way down the ramp, the first human-made vehicle to roll around on the surface of another planet. (It wasn’t the first extraterrestrial body, though. The Soviet Lunokhod rovers conducted two successful missions on the moon in 1970 and 1973. The Soviets had also landed a rover on Mars back in 1971, but communication was lost before the PROP-M ever deployed.)

This giant sandbox at JPL provided Marie Curie with an approximation of Martian terrain. Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images

The six-wheeled, 10.6-kilogram, microwave-oven-size Sojourner was equipped with three low-resolution cameras (two on the front for black-and-white images and a color camera on the rear), a laser hazard–avoidance system, an alpha-proton X-ray spectrometer, experiments for testing wheel abrasion and material adherence, and several accelerometers. The robot also demonstrated the value of the six-wheeled “rocker-bogie” suspension system that became NASA’s go-to design for all later Mars rovers. Sojourner never roamed more than about 12 meters from the lander due to the limited range of its radio.

Pathfinder had landed in Ares Vallis, an assumed ancient floodplain chosen because of the wide variety of rocks present. Scientists hoped to confirm the past existence of water on the surface of Mars. Sojourner did discover rounded pebbles that suggested running water, and later missions confirmed it.

A highlight of Sojourner’s 83-day mission on Mars was its encounter with a rock nicknamed Barnacle Bill [to the rover’s left]. JPL/NASA

As its first act of exploration, Sojourner rolled forward 36 centimeters and encountered a rock, dubbed Barnacle Bill due to its rough surface. The rover spent about 10 hours analyzing the rock, using its spectrometer to determine the elemental composition. Over the next few weeks, while the lander collected atmospheric information and took photos, the rover studied rocks in detail and tested the Martian soil.

Meanwhile back on Earth, engineers at JPL used Marie Curie to mimic Sojourner’s movements in a Mars-like setting. During the original design and testing of the rovers, the team had set up giant sandboxes, each holding thousands of kilograms of playground sand, in the Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL. They exhaustively practiced the remote operation of Sojourner, including an 11-minute delay in communications between Mars and Earth. (The actual delay can vary from 7 to 20 minutes.) Even after Sojourner landed, Marie Curie continued to help them strategize.

Initially, Sojourner was remotely operated from Earth, which was tricky given the lengthy communication delay. Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images

During its first few days on Mars, Sojourner was maneuvered by an Earth-based operator wearing 3D goggles and using a funky input device called a Spaceball 2003. Images pieced together from both the lander and the rover guided the operator. It was like a very, very slow video game—the rover sometimes moved only a few centimeters a day. NASA then turned on Sojourner’s hazard-avoidance system, which allowed the rover some autonomy to explore its world. A human would suggest a path for that day’s exploration, and then the rover had to autonomously avoid any obstacles in its way, such as a big rock, a cliff, or a steep slope.

JPL designed Sojourner to operate for a week. But the little rover that could kept chugging along for 83 Martian days before NASA finally lost contact, on 7 October 1997. The lander had conked out on 27 September. In all, the mission collected 1.2 gigabytes of data (which at the time was a lot) and sent back 10,000 images of the planet’s surface.

NASA held on to Marie Curie with the hopes of sending it on another mission to Mars. For a while, it was slated to be part of the Mars 2001 set of missions, but that didn’t happen. In 2015, JPL transferred the rover to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

The Pathfinder mission was the second one in NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin’s Discovery Program, which embodied his “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy of making NASA more nimble and efficient. (The first Discovery mission was to the asteroid Eros.) In the financial climate of the early 1990s, the space agency couldn’t risk a billion-dollar loss if a major mission failed. Goldin opted for smaller projects; the Pathfinder mission’s overall budget, including flight and operations, was capped at US $300 million.

RELATED: How NASA Built Its Mars Rovers

In his 2014 book Curiosity: An Inside Look at the Mars Rover Mission and the People Who Made It Happen (Prometheus), science writer Rod Pyle interviews Rob Manning, chief engineer for the Pathfinder mission and subsequent Mars rovers. Manning recalled that one of the best things about the mission was its relatively minimal requirements. The team was responsible for landing on Mars, delivering the rover, and transmitting images—technically challenging, to be sure, but beyond that the team had no constraints.

Sojourner was succeeded by the rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Shown here are four mission spares, including Marie Curie [foreground]. JPL-Caltech/NASA

The real mission was to prove to Congress and the American public that NASA could do groundbreaking work more efficiently. Behind the scenes, there was a little bit of accounting magic happening, with the “faster, better, cheaper” missions often being silently underwritten by larger, older projects. For example, the radioisotope heater units that kept Sojourner’s electronics warm enough to operate were leftover spares from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, so they were “free.”

Not only was the Pathfinder mission successful but it captured the hearts of Americans and reinvigorated an interest in exploring Mars. In the process, it set the foundation for the future missions that allowed the rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity (which, incredibly, is still operating nearly 13 years after it landed) to explore even more of the Red Planet.

To name its first Mars rovers, NASA launched a student contest in March 1994, with the specific guidance of choosing a “heroine.” Entry essays were judged on their quality and creativity, the appropriateness of the name for a rover, and the student’s knowledge of the woman to be honored as well as the mission’s goals. Students from all over the world entered.

Twelve-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, Conn., won for her essay on Sojourner Truth, while 18-year-old Deepti Rohatgi of Rockville, Md., came in second for hers on Marie Curie. Truth was a Black woman born into slavery at the end of the 18th century. She escaped with her infant daughter and two years later won freedom for her son through legal action. She became a vocal advocate for civil rights, women’s rights, and alcohol temperance. Curie was a Polish-French physicist and chemist famous for her studies of radioactivity, a term she coined. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, as well as the first person to win a second Nobel.

NASA subsequently recognized several other women with named structures. One of the last women to be so honored was Nancy Grace Roman, the space agency’s first chief of astronomy. In May 2020, NASA announced it would name the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope after Roman; the space telescope is set to launch as early as October 2026, although the Trump administration has repeatedly said it wants to cancel the project.

Related: A Trillion Rogue Planets and Not One Sun to Shine on Them

These days, NASA tries to avoid naming its major projects after people. It quietly changed its naming policy in December 2022 after allegations came to light that James Webb, for whom the James Webb Space Telescope is named, had fired LGBTQ+ employees at NASA and, before that, the State Department. A NASA investigation couldn’t substantiate the allegations, and so the telescope retained Webb’s name. But the bar is now much higher for NASA projects to memorialize anyone, deserving or otherwise. (The agency did allow the hopping lunar robot IM-2 Micro Nova Hopper, built by Intuitive Machines, to be named for computer-software pioneer Grace Hopper.)

And so Marie Curie and Sojourner will remain part of a rarefied clique. Sojourner, inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2003, will always be the celebrity of the pair. And Marie Curie will always remain on the sidelines. But think about it this way: Marie Curie is now on exhibit at one of the most popular museums in the world, where millions of visitors can see the rover up close. That’s not too shabby a legacy either.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2025 print issue.

Curator Matthew Shindell of the National Air and Space Museum first suggested I feature Marie Curie. I found additional information from the museum’s collections website, an article by David Kindy in Smithsonian magazine, and the book After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007) by Smithsonian curator Martin Collins.

NASA has numerous resources documenting the Mars Pathfinder mission, such as the mission website, fact sheet, and many lovely photos (including some of Barnacle Bill and a composite of Marie Curie during a prelaunch test).

Curiosity: An Inside Look at the Mars Rover Mission and the People Who Made It Happen (Prometheus, 2014) by Rod Pyle and Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet (Hyperion, 2005) by planetary scientist Steve Squyres are both about later Mars missions and their rovers, but they include foundational information about Sojourner.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

[Boston Dynamics]

[LimX Dynamics]

Thanks, Jinyan!

[University of Massachusetts Amherst]

Thanks, Julia!

[RIVR]

We will have more on this robot shortly, but for now, this is all you need to know.

[Pintobotics]

Some pretty awesome quadruped parkour here—haven’t seen the wall running before.

[Paper] via [Science Robotics]

This is fun, and also useful, because it’s all about recovering from unpredictable and forceful impacts.

What is that move at 0:06, though?! Wow.

[Unitree]

Maybe an option for all of those social robots that are now not social?

[RoboHearts]

Oh, good, another robot I want nowhere near me.

[SDU Biorobotics Lab, University of Southern Denmark]

While this “has become the first humanoid robot to skillfully use chopsticks,” I’m pretty skeptical of the implied autonomy. Also, those chopsticks are cheaters.

[ROBOTERA]

Looks like Westwood Robotics had a fun time at ICRA!

[Westwood Robotics]

[Dusty Robotics]

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

[Boston Dynamics]

[LimX Dynamics]

Thanks, Jinyan!

[University of Massachusetts Amherst]

Thanks, Julia!

[RIVR]

We will have more on this robot shortly, but for now, this is all you need to know.

[Pintobotics]

Some pretty awesome quadruped parkour here—haven’t seen the wall running before.

[Paper] via [Science Robotics]

This is fun, and also useful, because it’s all about recovering from unpredictable and forceful impacts.

What is that move at 0:06, though?! Wow.

[Unitree]

Maybe an option for all of those social robots that are now not social?

[RoboHearts]

Oh, good, another robot I want nowhere near me.

[SDU Biorobotics Lab, University of Southern Denmark]

While this “has become the first humanoid robot to skillfully use chopsticks,” I’m pretty skeptical of the implied autonomy. Also, those chopsticks are cheaters.

[ROBOTERA]

Looks like Westwood Robotics had a fun time at ICRA!

[Westwood Robotics]

[Dusty Robotics]

As drones evolve into critical agents across defense, disaster response, and infrastructure inspection, they must become more adaptive, secure, and resilient. Traditional AI methods fall short in real-world unpredictability. This whitepaper from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) explores how Embodied AI – AI that integrates perception, action, memory, and learning in dynamic environments, can revolutionize drone operations. Drawing from innovations in GenAI, Physical AI, and zero-trust frameworks, TII outlines a future where drones can perceive threats, adapt to change, and collaborate safely in real time. The result: smarter, safer, and more secure autonomous aerial systems.

Download this free whitepaper now!

As drones evolve into critical agents across defense, disaster response, and infrastructure inspection, they must become more adaptive, secure, and resilient. Traditional AI methods fall short in real-world unpredictability. This whitepaper from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) explores how Embodied AI – AI that integrates perception, action, memory, and learning in dynamic environments, can revolutionize drone operations. Drawing from innovations in GenAI, Physical AI, and zero-trust frameworks, TII outlines a future where drones can perceive threats, adapt to change, and collaborate safely in real time. The result: smarter, safer, and more secure autonomous aerial systems.

Download this free whitepaper now!

Less than three years ago, these were bare fields in humble Ellabell, Georgia. Today, the vast Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant is exactly what people imagine when they talk about the future of EV and automobile manufacturing in America.

I’ve driven the 2026 Hyundai Ioniq9 here from nearby Savannah, a striking three-row electric SUV with everything it takes to succeed in today’s market: up to 530 kilometers (335 miles) of efficient driving range, the latest features and tech, and a native NACS connector that lets owners—finally—hook into Tesla Superchargers with streamlined Plug and Charge ease.

The success of the Ioniq9 and popular Ioniq5 crossover is deeply intertwined with the US $7.6 billion Metaplant, whose inaugural 2025 Ioniq5 rolled off its assembly line in October. That includes the Ioniq models’ full eligibility for $7,500 consumer tax credits for U.S.-built EVs with North American batteries, although the credits are on the Trump administration’s chopping block. Still, the factory gives Hyundai a bulwark and some breathing room against potential tariffs and puts the South Korean automaker ahead of many rivals.

With 11 cavernous buildings and a massive 697,000 square meters (7.5 million square feet) of space, it’s set to become America’s largest dedicated plant for EVs and hybrids, with capacity for 500,000 Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis models per year. (Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory can produce 375,000.) Company executives say this is North America’s most heavily automated factory, bar none, a showcase for AI and robotic tech.

The factory is also environmentally friendly, as I see when I roll into the factory: “Meta Pros,” as Hyundai calls its workers, can park in nearly 1,900 spaces beneath solar roofs, shielded from the baking Georgia sun that provides up to 5 percent of the plant’s electricity. The automaker has a target of obtaining 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources. Those include hydrogen trucks from the Hyundai-owned Xcient, the world’s first commercialized hydrogen fuel-cell semis. A fleet of 21 trucks haul parts here from area suppliers, taking advantage of 400-kilometer driving ranges with zero tailpipe emissions. The bulk of finished vehicles are shipped by rail rather than truck, trimming fossil-fuel emissions and the automaker’s carbon footprint.

At the docks, some of the plant’s 850 robots unload parts from the hydrogen trucks. About 300 automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, glide around the factory with no tracks required, smartly avoiding human workers. As part of an AI-based procurement and logistics system, the AGVs automatically allocate and ferry parts to their proper work stations for just-in-time delivery, saving space, time, and money otherwise used to stockpile parts.

“They’re delivering the right parts to the right station at the right time, so you’re no longer relying on people to make decisions,” says Jerry Roach, senior manager of general assembly.

The building blocks of a modern unibody car chassis, called “bodies in white,” are welded by an army of 475 robots at Hyundai’s new plant.Hyundai

I’ve seen AGVs in action around the world, but the Metaplant shows me a new trick: A pair of sled-like AGVs slide below these electric Hyundais as they roll off the line. They grab and hoist their wheels and autonomously ferry the finished Hyundais to a parking area, with no need for a human driver.

Some companies have strict policies about pets at work. Here, Spots—robotic quadrupeds designed by Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics—use 360-degree vision and “athletic intelligence” to sniff out potential defects on car welds. Those four-legged friends may soon have a biped partner: Atlas, the humanoid robots from Boston Dynamics whose breathtaking physical skills—including crawling, cartwheeling, and even breakdance moves—have observers wondering if autoworkers are next in line to be replaced by AI. Hyundai executives say that’s not the case, even as they plan to deploy Atlas models (non-union of course) throughout their global factories. With RGB cameras in their charming 360-degree swiveling heads, Atlas robots are being trained to sense their environments, avoid collisions, and manipulate and move parts in factories in impressively complex sequences.

The welding shop alone houses 475 industrial robots, among about 850 in total. I watch massive robots cobble together “bodies in white,” the building blocks of every car chassis, with ruthless speed and precision. A trip to the onsite steel stamping plant reveals a facility so quiet that no ear protection is required. Here, a whirling mass of robots stamp out roofs, fenders, and hoods, which are automatically stored in soaring racks overhead.

Roach says the Metaplant offered a unique opportunity to design an electrified car plant from the ground up, rather than retrofit an existing factory that made internal-combustion cars, which even Tesla and Rivian were forced to do in California and Illinois, respectively.

Regarding automation replacing human workers, Roach acknowledges that some of it is inevitable. But robots are also freeing humans from heavy lifting and repetitive, mindless tasks that, for decades, made factory work both hazardous and unfulfilling.

He offers a technical first as an example: A collaborative robot—sophisticated enough to work alongside humans with no physical separation for safety—installs bulky doors on the assembly line. It’s a notoriously cumbersome process to perform without scratching the pretty paint on a door or surrounding panels.

“Guess what? Robots do that perfectly,” Roach says. “They always put the door in the exact same place. So here, that technology makes sense.”

It also frees people to do what they’re best at: precision tasks that require dexterous fingers, vision, intelligence, and skill. “I want my people doing craftsmanship,” Roach says.

The plant currently employs 1,340 Meta Pros at an annual average pay of $58,100. That’s 25 percent higher than average in Bryan County, Ga. Hyundai’s annual local payroll has already reached $497 million. The company foresees an eventual 8,500 jobs on site and another 7,000 indirect jobs for local suppliers and businesses.

On the battery front, Hyundai is currently sourcing cells from Georgia and SK On, with some Ioniq5 batteries imported from Hungary. But the Metaplant campus includes the HL-GA battery company. The $4 billion plant, a joint operation with LG Energy Solutions, plans to produce nickel-cobalt-magnesium cells beginning next year, assembled into packs on site by Hyundai’s Mobis subsidiary. Hyundai is also on track to open a second $5 billion battery plant in Georgia, a joint operation with SK On. It’s all part of Hyundai’s planned $21 billion in U.S. investment between now and 2028—more than the $20 billion it invested since entering the U.S. market in 1986. Even a robot could crunch those numbers and come away impressed.

Less than three years ago, these were bare fields in humble Ellabell, Georgia. Today, the vast Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant is exactly what people imagine when they talk about the future of EV and automobile manufacturing in America.

I’ve driven the 2026 Hyundai Ioniq9 here from nearby Savannah, a striking three-row electric SUV with everything it takes to succeed in today’s market: up to 530 kilometers (335 miles) of efficient driving range, the latest features and tech, and a native NACS connector that lets owners—finally—hook into Tesla Superchargers with streamlined Plug and Charge ease.

The success of the Ioniq9 and popular Ioniq5 crossover is deeply intertwined with the US $7.6 billion Metaplant, whose inaugural 2025 Ioniq5 rolled off its assembly line in October. That includes the Ioniq models’ full eligibility for $7,500 consumer tax credits for U.S.-built EVs with North American batteries, although the credits are on the Trump administration’s chopping block. Still, the factory gives Hyundai a bulwark and some breathing room against potential tariffs and puts the South Korean automaker ahead of many rivals.

With 11 cavernous buildings and a massive 697,000 square meters (7.5 million square feet) of space, it’s set to become America’s largest dedicated plant for EVs and hybrids, with capacity for 500,000 Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis models per year. (Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory can produce 375,000.) Company executives say this is North America’s most heavily automated factory, bar none, a showcase for AI and robotic tech.

The factory is also environmentally friendly, as I see when I roll into the factory: “Meta Pros,” as Hyundai calls its workers, can park in nearly 1,900 spaces beneath solar roofs, shielded from the baking Georgia sun that provides up to 5 percent of the plant’s electricity. The automaker has a target of obtaining 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources. Those include hydrogen trucks from the Hyundai-owned Xcient, the world’s first commercialized hydrogen fuel-cell semis. A fleet of 21 trucks haul parts here from area suppliers, taking advantage of 400-kilometer driving ranges with zero tailpipe emissions. The bulk of finished vehicles are shipped by rail rather than truck, trimming fossil-fuel emissions and the automaker’s carbon footprint.

At the docks, some of the plant’s 850 robots unload parts from the hydrogen trucks. About 300 automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, glide around the factory with no tracks required, smartly avoiding human workers. As part of an AI-based procurement and logistics system, the AGVs automatically allocate and ferry parts to their proper work stations for just-in-time delivery, saving space, time, and money otherwise used to stockpile parts.

“They’re delivering the right parts to the right station at the right time, so you’re no longer relying on people to make decisions,” says Jerry Roach, senior manager of general assembly.

The building blocks of a modern unibody car chassis, called “bodies in white,” are welded by an army of 475 robots at Hyundai’s new plant.Hyundai

I’ve seen AGVs in action around the world, but the Metaplant shows me a new trick: A pair of sled-like AGVs slide below these electric Hyundais as they roll off the line. They grab and hoist their wheels and autonomously ferry the finished Hyundais to a parking area, with no need for a human driver.

Some companies have strict policies about pets at work. Here, Spots—robotic quadrupeds designed by Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics—use 360-degree vision and “athletic intelligence” to sniff out potential defects on car welds. Those four-legged friends may soon have a biped partner: Atlas, the humanoid robots from Boston Dynamics whose breathtaking physical skills—including crawling, cartwheeling, and even breakdance moves—have observers wondering if autoworkers are next in line to be replaced by AI. Hyundai executives say that’s not the case, even as they plan to deploy Atlas models (non-union of course) throughout their global factories. With RGB cameras in their charming 360-degree swiveling heads, Atlas robots are being trained to sense their environments, avoid collisions, and manipulate and move parts in factories in impressively complex sequences.

The welding shop alone houses 475 industrial robots, among about 850 in total. I watch massive robots cobble together “bodies in white,” the building blocks of every car chassis, with ruthless speed and precision. A trip to the onsite steel stamping plant reveals a facility so quiet that no ear protection is required. Here, a whirling mass of robots stamp out roofs, fenders, and hoods, which are automatically stored in soaring racks overhead.

Roach says the Metaplant offered a unique opportunity to design an electrified car plant from the ground up, rather than retrofit an existing factory that made internal-combustion cars, which even Tesla and Rivian were forced to do in California and Illinois, respectively.

Regarding automation replacing human workers, Roach acknowledges that some of it is inevitable. But robots are also freeing humans from heavy lifting and repetitive, mindless tasks that, for decades, made factory work both hazardous and unfulfilling.

He offers a technical first as an example: A collaborative robot—sophisticated enough to work alongside humans with no physical separation for safety—installs bulky doors on the assembly line. It’s a notoriously cumbersome process to perform without scratching the pretty paint on a door or surrounding panels.

“Guess what? Robots do that perfectly,” Roach says. “They always put the door in the exact same place. So here, that technology makes sense.”

It also frees people to do what they’re best at: precision tasks that require dexterous fingers, vision, intelligence, and skill. “I want my people doing craftsmanship,” Roach says.

The plant currently employs 1,340 Meta Pros at an annual average pay of $58,100. That’s 25 percent higher than average in Bryan County, Ga. Hyundai’s annual local payroll has already reached $497 million. The company foresees an eventual 8,500 jobs on site and another 7,000 indirect jobs for local suppliers and businesses.

On the battery front, Hyundai is currently sourcing cells from Georgia and SK On, with some Ioniq5 batteries imported from Hungary. But the Metaplant campus includes the HL-GA battery company. The $4 billion plant, a joint operation with LG Energy Solutions, plans to produce nickel-cobalt-magnesium cells beginning next year, assembled into packs on site by Hyundai’s Mobis subsidiary. Hyundai is also on track to open a second $5 billion battery plant in Georgia, a joint operation with SK On. It’s all part of Hyundai’s planned $21 billion in U.S. investment between now and 2028—more than the $20 billion it invested since entering the U.S. market in 1986. Even a robot could crunch those numbers and come away impressed.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

[DRAGON Lab]

Thanks, Moju!

[Designing Emergence Lab]

[CMU]

Spot is getting some AI upgrades to help it with industrial inspection.

[Boston Dynamics]

[UMich]

[Tool as Interface]

Thanks, Haonan!

[Universal Robots]

[RoMeLa]

[LimX Dynamics]

[RoboDesign Lab]

[TED]

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

[DRAGON Lab]

Thanks, Moju!

[Designing Emergence Lab]

[CMU]

Spot is getting some AI upgrades to help it with industrial inspection.

[Boston Dynamics]

[UMich]

[Tool as Interface]

Thanks, Haonan!

[Universal Robots]

[RoMeLa]

[LimX Dynamics]

[RoboDesign Lab]

[TED]

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

[ DARPA ]

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Thanks, Jinyan!

[ DEEP Robotics ]

The sound in this video is either excellent or terrible, I’m not quite sure which.

[ TU Berlin ]

[ FALCON ]

[ Carnegie Mellon University ]

[ MIT ]

[ Sanctuary AI ]

[ Canvas ] via [ Universal Robots ]

[ Torc ]

This Stanford Robotics Center talk is by Jonathan Hurst at Agility Robotics, on “Humanoid Robots: From the Warehouse to Your House.”

[ Stanford ]

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

[ DARPA ]

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Thanks, Jinyan!

[ DEEP Robotics ]

The sound in this video is either excellent or terrible, I’m not quite sure which.

[ TU Berlin ]

[ FALCON ]

[ Carnegie Mellon University ]

[ MIT ]

[ Sanctuary AI ]

[ Canvas ] via [ Universal Robots ]

[ Torc ]

This Stanford Robotics Center talk is by Jonathan Hurst at Agility Robotics, on “Humanoid Robots: From the Warehouse to Your House.”

[ Stanford ]

Being long and skinny and wiggly is a strategy that’s been wildly successful for animals, ever since there have been animals, more or less. Roboticists, eternally jealous of biology, have taken notice of this, and have spent decades trying to build robotic versions of snakes, salamanders, worms, and more. There’s been some success, of a sort, although most of the robotic snakes and whatnot that we’ve seen have been for things like disaster relief, which is kind of just what you do when you have a robot with a novel movement strategy but without any other obvious practical application.

Dan Goldman at Georgia Tech has been working on bioinspired robotic locomotion for as long as anyone, and as it turns out, that’s exactly the amount of time that it takes to develop a long and skinny and wiggly robot with a viable commercial use case. Goldman has a new Atlanta-based startup called Ground Control Robotics (GCR) that’s bringing what are essentially giant robotic arthropods to agricultural crop management.

- YouTube

I’m not entirely sure what you’d call this—a robotic giant centipede might be the easiest description to agree on, I guess? But Goldman tells us that he doesn’t consider his robots to be bioinspired as much as they’re “robophysical” models of living systems. “I like the idea of carefully studying the animals,” Goldman says. “We use the models to test biological principles, discover new phenomena with them, and then bring those insights into hardened robots which can go outside of the lab.”

The robot itself is not that complicated, at least on the scale of how complicated robots usually are. It’s made up of a head with some sensors in it plus a handful of identical cable-connected segments, each with a couple of motors for leg actuation. On paper, this works out to be a lot of degrees of freedom, but you can get surprisingly good performance using relatively simple control techniques.

“Centipede robots, like snake robots, are basically swimmers,” Goldman says. The key difference is that adding legs expands the different kinds of environments through which swimming robots can move. The right pattern of lifting and lowering the legs generates a fluidlike thrust force that helps the robot to push off more stuff as it moves to make its motion more consistent and reliable. “We created a new kind of mechanism to take actuation away from the centerline of the robot to the sides, using cables back and forth,” says Goldman. “When you tune things properly, the robot goes from being stiff to unidirectionally compliant. And if you do that, what you find is almost like magic—this thing swims through arbitrarily complex environments with no brain power.”

The complex environments that the robot is designed for are agricultural. Think sensing and weed control in fields, but don’t think about gentle rolling hills lined with neat rows of crops. That kind of farming is very amenable to automation at scale, and there are plenty of robotics companies in that space already. Not all plants grow in well-kept rows on mostly flat ground, however: Perennial crops, where the plant itself sticks around and you harvest stuff off of it every year, can be much more complicated to manage. This is especially true for crops like wine grapes, which can grow on very steep and often rocky slopes. Those kinds of environments are an opportunity for GCR’s robots, offering an initial use case that brings the robot from academic curiosity to something with unique commercial potential.

Wiggly antennae-like structures help the robot to climb over obstacles taller than itself.Ground Control Robotics

“Robotics researchers tend to treat robots as one-off demonstrations of a theory or principle,” Goldman says. “You get the darn thing to work, you submit it to [the International Conference on Robotics and Automation], and then you go onto the next thing. But we’ve had to build in robustness from the get-go, because our robots are experimental physics tools.” Much of the research that Goldman does in his lab is on using these robo-physical models to try to systematically test and (hopefully) understand how animals move the way that they do. “And that’s where we started to see that we could have these robots not just be laboratory toys,” says Goldman, “but that they could become a minimum viable product.”

According to GCR, there is currently no automated solution for weed control around scraggly bushy or vinelike plants (like blueberries or strawberries or grapes), and farmers can spend an enormous amount of money having humans crawl around under the plants to check health and pull weeds. GCR estimates that weed control for blueberries in California can run US $300 per acre or more, and strawberries are even worse, sometimes more than $1,000 per acre. It’s not a fun job, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find humans willing to do it. For farmers who don’t want to spray pesticides, there aren’t a lot of good options, and GCR thinks that its robotic centipedes could fill that niche.

An obvious question with any novel robotic mobility system is whether you could accomplish basically the same thing with a system that’s much less novel. Like, quadrupeds are getting pretty good these days, why not just use one of them? Or a wheeled robot, for that matter? “We want to send the robot as close to the crops as possible,” says Goldman. “And we don’t want a bigger, clunkier machine to destroy those fields.” This gets back to the clutter problem: A robot large enough to ignore clutter could cause damage, and most robots small enough not to damage clutter become a nightmare of a control problem.

When most of the obstacles that robots encounter are at a comparable scale to themselves, control becomes very difficult. “The terrain reaction forces are almost impossible to predict,” explains Goldman, which means that the robot’s mobility regime gets dominated by environmental noise. One approach would be to try to model all of this noise and the resulting dynamics and implement some kind of control policy, but it turns out that there’s a much simpler strategy: more legs. “It’s possible to generate reliable motion without any sensing at all,” says Goldman, “if we have a lot of legs.”

For this design of robot, adding more legs is easy, which is another advantage of this type of mobility over something like a quadruped. Each of GCR’s robots will cost a lot less than you probably think—likely in the thousand-dollar range, because the leg modules themselves are relatively cheap, and most of the intelligence is mechanical rather than sense-based or compute-based. The concept is that a decentralized swarm of these robots would operate in fields 24/7—just scouting for now, where there’s still a substantial amount of value, and then eventually physically ripping out weeds with some big robotic centipede jaws (or maybe even lasers!) for a lower cost than any other option.

Eventually, these robots will operate autonomously in swarms, and could also be useful for applications like disaster response.Ground Control Robotics

Ground Control Robotics is currently working with a blueberry farmer and a vineyard owner in Georgia on pilot projects to refine the mobility and sensing capabilities of the robots within the next few months. Obviously, there are options to expand into disaster relief (for real) and perhaps even military applications, although Goldman tells us that different environments might require different limb configurations or the ability to tuck the limbs away entirely. I do appreciate that GCR is starting with an application that will likely take a lot more work but also a lot more potential. It’s not often that we get to see such a direct transition between novel robotics research and a commercial product, and while it’s certainly going to be a challenge, I’ve already put my backyard garden on the waiting list.

Being long and skinny and wiggly is a strategy that’s been wildly successful for animals, ever since there have been animals, more or less. Roboticists, eternally jealous of biology, have taken notice of this, and have spent decades trying to build robotic versions of snakes, salamanders, worms, and more. There’s been some success, of a sort, although most of the robotic snakes and whatnot that we’ve seen have been for things like disaster relief, which is kind of just what you do when you have a robot with a novel movement strategy but without any other obvious practical application.

Dan Goldman at Georgia Tech has been working on bioinspired robotic locomotion for as long as anyone, and as it turns out, that’s exactly the amount of time that it takes to develop a long and skinny and wiggly robot with a viable commercial use case. Goldman has a new Atlanta-based startup called Ground Control Robotics (GCR) that’s bringing what are essentially giant robotic arthropods to agricultural crop management.

- YouTube

I’m not entirely sure what you’d call this—a robotic giant centipede might be the easiest description to agree on, I guess? But Goldman tells us that he doesn’t consider his robots to be bioinspired as much as they’re “robophysical” models of living systems. “I like the idea of carefully studying the animals,” Goldman says. “We use the models to test biological principles, discover new phenomena with them, and then bring those insights into hardened robots which can go outside of the lab.”

The robot itself is not that complicated, at least on the scale of how complicated robots usually are. It’s made up of a head with some sensors in it plus a handful of identical cable-connected segments, each with a couple of motors for leg actuation. On paper, this works out to be a lot of degrees of freedom, but you can get surprisingly good performance using relatively simple control techniques.

“Centipede robots, like snake robots, are basically swimmers,” Goldman says. The key difference is that adding legs expands the different kinds of environments through which swimming robots can move. The right pattern of lifting and lowering the legs generates a fluidlike thrust force that helps the robot to push off more stuff as it moves to make its motion more consistent and reliable. “We created a new kind of mechanism to take actuation away from the centerline of the robot to the sides, using cables back and forth,” says Goldman. “When you tune things properly, the robot goes from being stiff to unidirectionally compliant. And if you do that, what you find is almost like magic—this thing swims through arbitrarily complex environments with no brain power.”

The complex environments that the robot is designed for are agricultural. Think sensing and weed control in fields, but don’t think about gentle rolling hills lined with neat rows of crops. That kind of farming is very amenable to automation at scale, and there are plenty of robotics companies in that space already. Not all plants grow in well-kept rows on mostly flat ground, however: Perennial crops, where the plant itself sticks around and you harvest stuff off of it every year, can be much more complicated to manage. This is especially true for crops like wine grapes, which can grow on very steep and often rocky slopes. Those kinds of environments are an opportunity for GCR’s robots, offering an initial use case that brings the robot from academic curiosity to something with unique commercial potential.

Wiggly antennae-like structures help the robot to climb over obstacles taller than itself.Ground Control Robotics

“Robotics researchers tend to treat robots as one-off demonstrations of a theory or principle,” Goldman says. “You get the darn thing to work, you submit it to [the International Conference on Robotics and Automation], and then you go onto the next thing. But we’ve had to build in robustness from the get-go, because our robots are experimental physics tools.” Much of the research that Goldman does in his lab is on using these robo-physical models to try to systematically test and (hopefully) understand how animals move the way that they do. “And that’s where we started to see that we could have these robots not just be laboratory toys,” says Goldman, “but that they could become a minimum viable product.”

According to GCR, there is currently no automated solution for weed control around scraggly bushy or vinelike plants (like blueberries or strawberries or grapes), and farmers can spend an enormous amount of money having humans crawl around under the plants to check health and pull weeds. GCR estimates that weed control for blueberries in California can run US $300 per acre or more, and strawberries are even worse, sometimes more than $1,000 per acre. It’s not a fun job, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find humans willing to do it. For farmers who don’t want to spray pesticides, there aren’t a lot of good options, and GCR thinks that its robotic centipedes could fill that niche.

An obvious question with any novel robotic mobility system is whether you could accomplish basically the same thing with a system that’s much less novel. Like, quadrupeds are getting pretty good these days, why not just use one of them? Or a wheeled robot, for that matter? “We want to send the robot as close to the crops as possible,” says Goldman. “And we don’t want a bigger, clunkier machine to destroy those fields.” This gets back to the clutter problem: A robot large enough to ignore clutter could cause damage, and most robots small enough not to damage clutter become a nightmare of a control problem.

When most of the obstacles that robots encounter are at a comparable scale to themselves, control becomes very difficult. “The terrain reaction forces are almost impossible to predict,” explains Goldman, which means that the robot’s mobility regime gets dominated by environmental noise. One approach would be to try to model all of this noise and the resulting dynamics and implement some kind of control policy, but it turns out that there’s a much simpler strategy: more legs. “It’s possible to generate reliable motion without any sensing at all,” says Goldman, “if we have a lot of legs.”

For this design of robot, adding more legs is easy, which is another advantage of this type of mobility over something like a quadruped. Each of GCR’s robots will cost a lot less than you probably think—likely in the thousand-dollar range, because the leg modules themselves are relatively cheap, and most of the intelligence is mechanical rather than sense-based or compute-based. The concept is that a decentralized swarm of these robots would operate in fields 24/7—just scouting for now, where there’s still a substantial amount of value, and then eventually physically ripping out weeds with some big robotic centipede jaws (or maybe even lasers!) for a lower cost than any other option.

Eventually, these robots will operate autonomously in swarms, and could also be useful for applications like disaster response.Ground Control Robotics

Ground Control Robotics is currently working with a blueberry farmer and a vineyard owner in Georgia on pilot projects to refine the mobility and sensing capabilities of the robots within the next few months. Obviously, there are options to expand into disaster relief (for real) and perhaps even military applications, although Goldman tells us that different environments might require different limb configurations or the ability to tuck the limbs away entirely. I do appreciate that GCR is starting with an application that will likely take a lot more work but also a lot more potential. It’s not often that we get to see such a direct transition between novel robotics research and a commercial product, and while it’s certainly going to be a challenge, I’ve already put my backyard garden on the waiting list.

The main assumption about humanoid robotics that the industry is making right now is that the most realistic near-term pathway to actually making money is in either warehouses or factories. It’s easy to see where this assumption comes from: Repetitive tasks requiring strength or flexibility in well-structured environments is one place where it really seems like robots could thrive, and if you need to make billions of dollars (because somehow that’s how much your company is valued at), it doesn’t appear as though there are a lot of other good options.

Cartwheel Robotics is trying to do something different with humanoids. Cartwheel is more interested in building robots that people can connect with, with the eventual goal of general-purpose home companionship. Founder Scott LaValley describes Cartwheel’s robot as “a small, friendly humanoid robot designed to bring joy, warmth, and a bit of everyday magic into the spaces we live in. It’s expressive, emotionally intelligent, and full of personality—not just a piece of technology but a presence you can feel.”

This rendering shows the design and scale of Cartwheel’s humanoid prototype.Cartwheel

Historically, making a commercially viable social robot is a huge challenge. A little less than a decade ago, a series of social home robots (backed by a substantial amount of investment) tried very, very hard to justify themselves to consumers and did not succeed. Whether the fundamental problems with the concept of social home robots (namely, cost and interactive novelty) have been solved at this point isn’t totally clear, but Cartwheel is making things even more difficult for themselves by going the humanoid route, legs and all. That means dealing with all kinds of problems from motion planning to balancing to safety, all in a way that’s reliable enough for the robot to operate around children.

LaValley is arguably one of the few people who could plausibly make a commercial social humanoid actually happen. His extensive background in humanoid robotics includes nearly a decade at Boston Dynamics working on the Atlas robots, followed by five years at Disney, where he led the team that developed Disney’s Baby Groot robot.

In humanoid robot terms, there’s quite a contrast between the versions of Atlas that LaValley worked on (DRC Atlas in particular) and Baby Groot. They’re obviously designed and built to do very different things, but LaValley says that what really struck him was how his kids reacted when he introduced them to the robots he was working on. “At Boston Dynamics, we were known for terrifying robots,” LaValley remembers. “I was excited to work on the Atlas robots because they were cool technology, but my kids would look at them and go, ‘That’s scary.’ At Disney, I brought my kids in and they would light up with a big smile on their face and ask, ‘Is that really Baby Groot? Can I give it a hug?’ And I thought, this is the type of experience I want to see robots delivering.” While Baby Groot was never a commercial project, for LaValley it marked a pivotal milestone in emotional robotics that shaped his vision for Cartwheel: “Seeing how my kids connected with Baby Groot reframed what robots could and should evoke.”

The current generation of commercial humanoids is pretty much the opposite of what LaValley is looking for. You could argue that this is because they’re designed to do work, rather than be anyone’s friend, but many of the design choices seem to be based on the sort of thing that would be the most eye-catching to the public (and investors) in a rather boringly “futuristic” way. And look, there are plenty of good reasons why you might want to very deliberately design a humanoid with commercial (or at least industrial) aspirations to look or not look a certain way, but for better or worse, nobody is going to like those robots. Respect them? Sure. Think they’re cool? Probably. Want to be friends with them? Not likely. And for Cartwheel, this is the opportunity, LaValley says. “These humanoid robots are built to be tools. They lack personality. They’re soulless. But we’re designing a robot to be a humanoid that humans will want in their day-to-day lives.”

Eventually, Cartwheel’s robots will likely need to be practical (as this rendering suggests) in order to find a place in people’s homes.Cartwheel

Yogi is one of Cartwheel’s prototypes, which LaValley describes as having “toddler proportions,” which are the key to making it appear friendly and approachable. “It has rounded lines, with a big head, and it’s even a little chubby. I don’t see a robot when I see Yogi; I see a character.” A second prototype, called Speedy, is a bit less complicated and is intended to be more of a near-term customizable commercial platform. Think something like Baby Groot, except available as any character you like, and to companies who aren’t Disney. LaValley tells us that a version of Speedy with a special torso designed for a “particular costume” is headed to a customer in the near future.

As the previous generation of social robots learned the hard way, it takes a lot more than good looks for a robot to connect with humans over the long term. Somewhat inevitably, LaValley sees AI as one potential answer to this, since it might offer a way of preserving novelty by keeping interactions fresh. This extends beyond verbal interactions, too, and Cartwheel is experimenting with using AI for whole-body motion generation, where each robot behavior will be unique, even under the same conditions or when given the same inputs.

While Cartwheel is starting with a commercial platform, the end goal is to put these small social humanoids into homes. This means considering safety and affordability in a way that doesn’t really apply to humanoids that are designed to work in warehouses or factories. The small size of Cartwheel’s robots will certainly help with both of those things, but we’re still talking about a robot that’s likely to cost a significant amount—certainly more than a major appliance, although perhaps not as much as a new car, is as much as LaValley was willing to commit to at this point. With that kind of price comes high expectations, and for most people, the only way to justify buying a home humanoid will be if it can somehow be practical as well as lovable.

LaValley is candid about the challenge here: “I don’t have all the answers,” he says. “There’s a lot to figure out.” One approach that’s becoming increasingly common with robots is to go with a service model, where the robot is essentially being rented in the same way that you might pay for the services of a housekeeper or gardener. But again, for that to make sense, Cartwheel’s robots will have to justify themselves financially. “This problem won’t be solved in the next year, or maybe not even in the next five years,” LaValley says. “There are a lot of things we don’t understand—this is going to take a while. We have to work our way to understanding and then addressing the problem set, and our approach is to find development partners and get our robots out into the real world.”

Cartwheel

Cartwheel has been in business for three years now, and got off the ground by providing robotics engineering services to corporate customers. That, along with an initial funding round, allowed LaValley to bootstrap the development of Cartwheel’s own robots, and he expects to deliver a couple dozen variations on Speedy to places like museums and science centers over the next 12 months.

The dream, though, is small home robots that are both companionable and capable, and LaValley is even willing to throw around terms like “general purpose.” “Capability increases over time,” he says, “and maybe our robots will be able to do more than just play with your kids or pick up a few items around the house. I see all robots eventually moving towards general purpose. Our strategy is not to get to general purpose on day one, or even get into the home day one. But we’re working towards that goal. That’s our north star.”

The main assumption about humanoid robotics that the industry is making right now is that the most realistic near-term pathway to actually making money is in either warehouses or factories. It’s easy to see where this assumption comes from: Repetitive tasks requiring strength or flexibility in well-structured environments is one place where it really seems like robots could thrive, and if you need to make billions of dollars (because somehow that’s how much your company is valued at), it doesn’t appear as though there are a lot of other good options.

Cartwheel Robotics is trying to do something different with humanoids. Cartwheel is more interested in building robots that people can connect with, with the eventual goal of general-purpose home companionship. Founder Scott LaValley describes Cartwheel’s robot as “a small, friendly humanoid robot designed to bring joy, warmth, and a bit of everyday magic into the spaces we live in. It’s expressive, emotionally intelligent, and full of personality—not just a piece of technology but a presence you can feel.”

This rendering shows the design and scale of Cartwheel’s humanoid prototype.Cartwheel

Historically, making a commercially viable social robot is a huge challenge. A little less than a decade ago, a series of social home robots (backed by a substantial amount of investment) tried very, very hard to justify themselves to consumers and did not succeed. Whether the fundamental problems with the concept of social home robots (namely, cost and interactive novelty) have been solved at this point isn’t totally clear, but Cartwheel is making things even more difficult for themselves by going the humanoid route, legs and all. That means dealing with all kinds of problems from motion planning to balancing to safety, all in a way that’s reliable enough for the robot to operate around children.

LaValley is arguably one of the few people who could plausibly make a commercial social humanoid actually happen. His extensive background in humanoid robotics includes nearly a decade at Boston Dynamics working on the Atlas robots, followed by five years at Disney, where he led the team that developed Disney’s Baby Groot robot.

In humanoid robot terms, there’s quite a contrast between the versions of Atlas that LaValley worked on (DRC Atlas in particular) and Baby Groot. They’re obviously designed and built to do very different things, but LaValley says that what really struck him was how his kids reacted when he introduced them to the robots he was working on. “At Boston Dynamics, we were known for terrifying robots,” LaValley remembers. “I was excited to work on the Atlas robots because they were cool technology, but my kids would look at them and go, ‘That’s scary.’ At Disney, I brought my kids in and they would light up with a big smile on their face and ask, ‘Is that really Baby Groot? Can I give it a hug?’ And I thought, this is the type of experience I want to see robots delivering.” While Baby Groot was never a commercial project, for LaValley it marked a pivotal milestone in emotional robotics that shaped his vision for Cartwheel: “Seeing how my kids connected with Baby Groot reframed what robots could and should evoke.”

The current generation of commercial humanoids is pretty much the opposite of what LaValley is looking for. You could argue that this is because they’re designed to do work, rather than be anyone’s friend, but many of the design choices seem to be based on the sort of thing that would be the most eye-catching to the public (and investors) in a rather boringly “futuristic” way. And look, there are plenty of good reasons why you might want to very deliberately design a humanoid with commercial (or at least industrial) aspirations to look or not look a certain way, but for better or worse, nobody is going to like those robots. Respect them? Sure. Think they’re cool? Probably. Want to be friends with them? Not likely. And for Cartwheel, this is the opportunity, LaValley says. “These humanoid robots are built to be tools. They lack personality. They’re soulless. But we’re designing a robot to be a humanoid that humans will want in their day-to-day lives.”

Eventually, Cartwheel’s robots will likely need to be practical (as this rendering suggests) in order to find a place in people’s homes.Cartwheel

Yogi is one of Cartwheel’s prototypes, which LaValley describes as having “toddler proportions,” which are the key to making it appear friendly and approachable. “It has rounded lines, with a big head, and it’s even a little chubby. I don’t see a robot when I see Yogi; I see a character.” A second prototype, called Speedy, is a bit less complicated and is intended to be more of a near-term customizable commercial platform. Think something like Baby Groot, except available as any character you like, and to companies who aren’t Disney. LaValley tells us that a version of Speedy with a special torso designed for a “particular costume” is headed to a customer in the near future.

As the previous generation of social robots learned the hard way, it takes a lot more than good looks for a robot to connect with humans over the long term. Somewhat inevitably, LaValley sees AI as one potential answer to this, since it might offer a way of preserving novelty by keeping interactions fresh. This extends beyond verbal interactions, too, and Cartwheel is experimenting with using AI for whole-body motion generation, where each robot behavior will be unique, even under the same conditions or when given the same inputs.

While Cartwheel is starting with a commercial platform, the end goal is to put these small social humanoids into homes. This means considering safety and affordability in a way that doesn’t really apply to humanoids that are designed to work in warehouses or factories. The small size of Cartwheel’s robots will certainly help with both of those things, but we’re still talking about a robot that’s likely to cost a significant amount—certainly more than a major appliance, although perhaps not as much as a new car, is as much as LaValley was willing to commit to at this point. With that kind of price comes high expectations, and for most people, the only way to justify buying a home humanoid will be if it can somehow be practical as well as lovable.

LaValley is candid about the challenge here: “I don’t have all the answers,” he says. “There’s a lot to figure out.” One approach that’s becoming increasingly common with robots is to go with a service model, where the robot is essentially being rented in the same way that you might pay for the services of a housekeeper or gardener. But again, for that to make sense, Cartwheel’s robots will have to justify themselves financially. “This problem won’t be solved in the next year, or maybe not even in the next five years,” LaValley says. “There are a lot of things we don’t understand—this is going to take a while. We have to work our way to understanding and then addressing the problem set, and our approach is to find development partners and get our robots out into the real world.”

Cartwheel

Cartwheel has been in business for three years now, and got off the ground by providing robotics engineering services to corporate customers. That, along with an initial funding round, allowed LaValley to bootstrap the development of Cartwheel’s own robots, and he expects to deliver a couple dozen variations on Speedy to places like museums and science centers over the next 12 months.

The dream, though, is small home robots that are both companionable and capable, and LaValley is even willing to throw around terms like “general purpose.” “Capability increases over time,” he says, “and maybe our robots will be able to do more than just play with your kids or pick up a few items around the house. I see all robots eventually moving towards general purpose. Our strategy is not to get to general purpose on day one, or even get into the home day one. But we’re working towards that goal. That’s our north star.”

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

Today I learned that “hippotherapy” is not quite what I wanted it to be.

[ Kuka ]

[ MIT News ]

[ GitHub ] via [ Human Centered Autonomy Lab ]

Thanks, Haonan!

[ EPFL ]

[ Paper ] via [ Singapore University of Technology and Design ]

I like the idea of a humanoid that uses jumping as a primary locomotion mode not because it has to, but because it’s fun.

[ PAL Robotics ]

I had not realized how much nuance there is to digging stuff up with a shovel.

[ Intelligent Motion Laboratory ]

[ Michigan Robotics ]

If you have a humanoid robot and you’re wondering how it should communicate, here’s the answer.

[ Pollen ]

Whose side are you on, Dusty?

Even construction robots should be mindful about siding with the Empire, though there can be consequences!

- YouTube

[ Dusty Robotics ]

This Michigan Robotics Seminar is by Danfei Xu from Georgia Tech, on “Generative Task and Motion Planning.”

[ Michigan Robotics ]

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

Today I learned that “hippotherapy” is not quite what I wanted it to be.

[ Kuka ]

[ MIT News ]

[ GitHub ] via [ Human Centered Autonomy Lab ]

Thanks, Haonan!

[ EPFL ]

[ Paper ] via [ Singapore University of Technology and Design ]

I like the idea of a humanoid that uses jumping as a primary locomotion mode not because it has to, but because it’s fun.

[ PAL Robotics ]

I had not realized how much nuance there is to digging stuff up with a shovel.

[ Intelligent Motion Laboratory ]

[ Michigan Robotics ]

If you have a humanoid robot and you’re wondering how it should communicate, here’s the answer.

[ Pollen ]

Whose side are you on, Dusty?

Even construction robots should be mindful about siding with the Empire, though there can be consequences!

- YouTube

[ Dusty Robotics ]

This Michigan Robotics Seminar is by Danfei Xu from Georgia Tech, on “Generative Task and Motion Planning.”

[ Michigan Robotics ]

At an event in Dortmund, Germany today, Amazon announced a new robotic system called Vulcan, which the company is calling “its first robotic system with a genuine sense of touch—designed to transform how robots interact with the physical world.” In the short to medium term, the physical world that Amazon is most concerned with is its warehouses, and Vulcan is designed to assist (or take over, depending on your perspective) with stowing and picking items in its mobile robotic inventory system.

In two upcoming papers in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Amazon researchers describe how both the stowing and picking side of the system operates. We covered stowing in detail a couple of years ago, when we spoke with Aaron Parness, the director of applied science at Amazon Robotics. Parness and his team have made a lot of progress on stowing since then, improving speed and reliability over more than 500,000 stows in operational warehouses to the point where the average stowing robot is now slightly faster than the average stowing human. We spoke with Parness to get an update on stowing, as well as an in-depth look at how Vulcan handles picking, which you can find in this separate article. It’s a much different problem, and well worth a read.

Stowing is the process by which Amazon brings products into its warehouses and adds them to its inventory so that you can order them. Not surprisingly, Amazon has gone to extreme lengths to optimize this process to maximize efficiency in both space and time. Human stowers are presented with a mobile robotic pod full of fabric cubbies (bins) with elastic bands across the front of them to keep stuff from falling out. The human’s job is to find a promising space in a bin, pull the plastic band aside, and stuff the thing into that space. The item’s new home is recorded in Amazon’s system, the pod then drives back into the warehouse, and the next pod comes along, ready for the next item.

Different manipulation tools are used to interact with human-optimized bins.Amazon

The new paper on stowing includes some interesting numbers about Amazon’s inventory-handling process that helps put the scale of the problem in perspective. More than 14 billion items are stowed by hand every year at Amazon warehouses. Amazon is hoping that Vulcan robots will be able to stow 80 percent of these items at a rate of 300 items per hour, while operating 20 hours per day. It’s a very, very high bar.

After a lot of practice, Amazon’s robots are now quite good at the stowing task. Parness tells us that the stow system is operating three times as fast as it was 18 months ago, meaning that it’s actually a little bit faster than an average human. This is exciting, but as Parness explains, expert humans still put the robots to shame. “The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities.” High density is important because it means that more stuff can fit into warehouses that are physically closer to more people, which is especially relevant in urban areas where space is at a premium. The best humans can get very creative when it comes to this physical three-dimensional “Tetris-ing,” which the robots are still working on.

Where robots do excel is planning ahead, and this is likely why the average robot stower is now able to outpace the average human stower—Tetris-ing is a mental process, too. In the same way that good Tetris players are thinking about where the next piece is going to go, not just the current piece, robots are able to leverage a lot more information than humans can to optimize what gets stowed where and when, says Parness. “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.”

Essentially, robots are far better at optimization within the planning side of Tetrising, while humans are (still) far better at the manipulation side, but that gap is closing as robots get more experienced at operating in clutter and contact. Amazon has had Vulcan stowing robots operating for over a year in live warehouses in Germany and Washington state to collect training data, and those robots have successfully stowed hundreds of thousands of items.

Stowing is of course only half of what Vulcan is designed to do. Picking offers all kinds of unique challenges too, and you can read our in-depth discussion with Parness on that topic right here.

At an event in Dortmund, Germany today, Amazon announced a new robotic system called Vulcan, which the company is calling “its first robotic system with a genuine sense of touch—designed to transform how robots interact with the physical world.” In the short to medium term, the physical world that Amazon is most concerned with is its warehouses, and Vulcan is designed to assist (or take over, depending on your perspective) with stowing and picking items in its mobile robotic inventory system.

In two upcoming papers in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Amazon researchers describe how both the stowing and picking side of the system operates. We covered stowing in detail a couple of years ago, when we spoke with Aaron Parness, the director of applied science at Amazon Robotics. Parness and his team have made a lot of progress on stowing since then, improving speed and reliability over more than 500,000 stows in operational warehouses to the point where the average stowing robot is now slightly faster than the average stowing human. We spoke with Parness to get an update on stowing, as well as an in-depth look at how Vulcan handles picking, which you can find in this separate article. It’s a much different problem, and well worth a read.

Stowing is the process by which Amazon brings products into its warehouses and adds them to its inventory so that you can order them. Not surprisingly, Amazon has gone to extreme lengths to optimize this process to maximize efficiency in both space and time. Human stowers are presented with a mobile robotic pod full of fabric cubbies (bins) with elastic bands across the front of them to keep stuff from falling out. The human’s job is to find a promising space in a bin, pull the plastic band aside, and stuff the thing into that space. The item’s new home is recorded in Amazon’s system, the pod then drives back into the warehouse, and the next pod comes along, ready for the next item.

Different manipulation tools are used to interact with human-optimized bins.Amazon

The new paper on stowing includes some interesting numbers about Amazon’s inventory-handling process that helps put the scale of the problem in perspective. More than 14 billion items are stowed by hand every year at Amazon warehouses. Amazon is hoping that Vulcan robots will be able to stow 80 percent of these items at a rate of 300 items per hour, while operating 20 hours per day. It’s a very, very high bar.

After a lot of practice, Amazon’s robots are now quite good at the stowing task. Parness tells us that the stow system is operating three times as fast as it was 18 months ago, meaning that it’s actually a little bit faster than an average human. This is exciting, but as Parness explains, expert humans still put the robots to shame. “The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities.” High density is important because it means that more stuff can fit into warehouses that are physically closer to more people, which is especially relevant in urban areas where space is at a premium. The best humans can get very creative when it comes to this physical three-dimensional “Tetris-ing,” which the robots are still working on.

Where robots do excel is planning ahead, and this is likely why the average robot stower is now able to outpace the average human stower—Tetris-ing is a mental process, too. In the same way that good Tetris players are thinking about where the next piece is going to go, not just the current piece, robots are able to leverage a lot more information than humans can to optimize what gets stowed where and when, says Parness. “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.”

Essentially, robots are far better at optimization within the planning side of Tetrising, while humans are (still) far better at the manipulation side, but that gap is closing as robots get more experienced at operating in clutter and contact. Amazon has had Vulcan stowing robots operating for over a year in live warehouses in Germany and Washington state to collect training data, and those robots have successfully stowed hundreds of thousands of items.

Stowing is of course only half of what Vulcan is designed to do. Picking offers all kinds of unique challenges too, and you can read our in-depth discussion with Parness on that topic right here.