Robotics is moving forward like Unitree H1, breaking one speed record after another!

It is moving so fast that sometimes it is hard to keep up.

And on top of that, spring is event season, when everyone shows their muscles, and the number of robots per square meter is almost as high as the number of allergy sufferers at the start of April.

In general, everyone is singing and sneezing with excitement ;)

So are we! No time to wait.

Let’s get into it!

Researchers at Princeton built a soft rigid hybrid robot that uses 3D printed liquid crystal elastomers, flexible electronics, and origami-based folding design. Instead of motors or pneumatic tubes, the robot moves through targeted heating inside the material itself.

Their demo robot is a little crane that flaps its wings when electricity is applied. The trick is in the hinges. The material is printed in zones with different molecular alignment, then embedded electronics heat specific points so the structure folds exactly where it should.

The useful part is that it moved repeatedly without noticeable degradation, and the team says it can run programmable motion sequences while using embedded temperature sensors to correct small errors over time. That is a big deal for soft robotics, because soft robots are usually great right up to the moment they become floppy problems.

Robotics is slowly learning how to build motion into the material itself, not only into the mechanism around it. And when that matures, medical devices, delicate handling, and weird inspection jobs start looking very different.

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Unitree published a video saying its humanoid robot reached 10 m/s with a stated leg length of 0.8 meters and body weight of about 62 kilograms.

Now, speed alone does not make a useful humanoid. A robot that runs fast is still not automatically good at work. It still needs balance, energy control, decision making, safe operation, and some reason to exist beyond making humans feel slightly uneasy.

But still, this matters. Fast locomotion changes what people believe is possible. A few years ago, most humanoid news was basically “it walked and nobody died.” Now we are talking about sprinting. The field is moving from survival mode into performance mode.

And yes, it is still fair to ask the boring industrial question. Great, it can run. Can it do something useful after that. Because factories usually prefer a robot that shows up on time over a robot that thinks it is in the Olympics but.. actually in Poland we have a good example for that sprinter robot ;)

When idle, it looks like furniture. When activated, it reveals robotic arms and a camera, folds laundry on nearby surfaces, and then returns to lamp mode. It can also be controlled by voice or smartphone app.

This idea is actually smarter than it sounds. Most home robots fail not only because the task is hard, but because the device looks like it escaped from a lab. Syncere’s pitch is that a home robot should blend into the room instead of screaming “I am here to automate your private life.”

The company says Lume uses imitation learning and reinforcement learning to learn folding from human behavior. Safety is also built into the design through compliant motor controls, 360 degree awareness, covered joints, and shutters that hide sensors when the robot is not active.

This is one of those ideas that sounds ridiculous for about ten seconds, and then annoyingly logical. Because maybe the future home robot will not look like a humanoid assistant. Maybe it will look like a lamp that got tired of your nonsense.

Siemens and the startup Humanoid announced a real factory test of the HMND 01 Alpha, a wheeled humanoid robot deployed at Siemens’ electronics plant in Erlangen, Germany. The robot handled logistics tasks like picking, transporting, and placing containers for human operators.

According to Siemens, the robot met its target performance metrics. That included 60 moves per hour, more than 8 hours of uptime, and autonomous pick and place success rates above 90 percent. The system was built using NVIDIA’s physical AI stack, while Siemens positions its own Xcelerator portfolio as the factory layer that helps integrate robots into industrial operations.

This is where humanoid talk starts to get more serious. The wheels are doing a lot of the adult work here. It matters because this was tied to a real logistics task in a real factory with real metrics. That is much better than another slow-motion video of a robot carrying one box like it just discovered gravity.

Humanoids are not replacing everything tomorrow. But they are slowly being pushed into narrow, repetitive jobs where mobile manipulation can save time without forcing the whole factory to be rebuilt around them.

Chef Robotics says its systems have now completed 100 million servings in production at customer facilities across the US, Canada, and Europe. The company says that is about ten times more than all other food robotics companies combined.

A “serving” here does not mean a full finished meal. TechCrunch reports the company defines it as a portion of food deposited by its robots into a meal tray. Still, 100 million of those is not a lab stunt. That is a lot of real food moving through real production lines.

Chef also says this gives it the world’s largest real world food manipulation dataset and more in production deformable material training data than any other physical AI company. In simple words, every messy scoop of rice, curry, pasta, or whatever else humans insist on eating is making the system better.

This story matters because food is one of the hardest automation environments around. Objects change shape, texture, weight, and behavior constantly. So if a robot company is actually scaling there, not just making pretty videos, that deserves attention. Food robotics has been a graveyard for overpromises. Chef seems determined not to become another headstone.

That’s it for this week.

And usually, the boring real work is where the future really starts.

Have a good week.

From Wednesday, I’ll be at Hannover Messe, so if you’ll be there too and want to meet, just send me a message.

Cheers, Jacek!