Brian Heater
Some robotics challenges have immediately clear applications. Others are more focused on helping systems solve broader challenges. Teaching small robots to play soccer against one another fits firmly into the latter category.
The authors of a new paper detailing the use of reinforcement learning to teach MIT’s Mini Cheetah...
Manipulation and sensing have long been considered two key pillars for unlocking robotics’ potential. There’s a fair bit of overlap between the two, of course. As grippers have become a fundamental element of industrial robotics, these systems require the proper mechanisms for interacting with the world around them.
Vision...
I don’t love devoting the first several paragraphs of this newsletter to Amazon every week, but no one is making waves — both good and bad — in the robotics space quite like the little mom-and-pop bookseller from Seattle, Washington. This is one of the bad weeks. It’s...
It took some evasive maneuvering to get us here — the building out of a small-scale hardware ecosystem, coupled with a couple big-ticket acquisitions and a partnership with one of its largest potential competitors. But suddenly, Google emerging as competitive in the smartwatch space doesn’t seem an altogether...
Following last week’s Google event, a colleague commented to me that the Pixel 7 wasn’t as big an upgrade as the Pixel 6. This is an objectively true statement. But also, it’s fine. Whatever you think about the yearly refresh cycle hardware makers are locked into, we’ve all...
“What a lot of people tell me is ‘hardware is hard,’” Eliot Horowitz explains. “I have a really big problem with that statement.”
The Viam Robotics CEO and MongoDB co-founder describes purchasing a Universal Robotics’ UR5 robot arm and programming it to play chess. “I don’t think hardware is...
What constitutes a big phone in 2022? It’s been a moving target for a number of years now — albeit a target that has been steadily moving in a single direction. It’s tough to determine the exact average display size, but most flagship smartphone screens generally fall somewhere...
As with the Pixel Watch, we’ll be bringing more in-depth thoughts with a full review in the near future. Now, however, seems like as good a time as any to offer up some initial thoughts (and pictures) of the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro.
First is the price....
I sat out Friday’s big Tesla AI event. I was actually looking forward to seeing what the company had cooked up after months of teasing, but a combination of rogue stomach virus and the most inconvenient event timing (Friday at 9:15 PM EDT) outside of something held on...
Hardware season is in full force, and now is Google’s time to shine. The company got in the habit of showing its hand months in advance, and we’ve already gotten a reasonably good look at the two headliners. First up is the latest addition to the Pixel smartwatch...
