"Earth is the cradle of humanity
but one cannot live in the cradle forever"
-- taken from a letter written by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1911
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Ex…
Waymo says it has built an ASIC chip that will improve its robotaxis' reflexes and navigational skills and help it diversify away from companies like Nvidia (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-…
12th European TramDriver Championship in Warsaw
Probably the best thing happend today
https://youtube.com/live/R1PeT9Zeiow
> Experience the best moments of the 12th European TramDriver Championship in Warsaw in full - featuring all 52 competition runs by 25 teams from 24 nations.
Blackstone agrees to invest an undisclosed sum in South Korea-based Futronic, which makes actuators used in industrial robots, sources say at a ~$675M valuation (Manuel Baigorri/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree's stock surged 629% in early trading in its Shanghai debut on Wednesday, after raising ~$904M in its IPO (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-18/unitree-robotics-se…
ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, a retrofit autonomous control appliance that mounts on excavators (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/17/gr
The Chinese city of Hangzhou deploys traffic-control robots that operate autonomously, using cameras and radar to signal traffic and flag violations (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-puts-robocops-traffic-duty-minus-arrest-…