DISCOVER THE FUTURE
Tomorrow just showed up.
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LIFE searches an organized record of a robot's day. Real-time code added November 10 lets developers connect their own cameras, while the full memory experiment remains an offline replay.
Robbyant's LingBot-Touch converts different tactile sensors into shared features. In the team's robot tests, raw sensor data could hurt performance, while encoded touch improved it. The percentages award credit for task steps, rather than counting only complete successes.
Sunharbo is the first FDA-approved FXIa inhibitor. Similar overall major-bleeding rates do not remove risks for older patients or during early treatment.
ASTRA joined separate components in space rather than simply unfolding a finished structure. The November 5 announcement describes a proof of concept for building beyond rocket fairing limits.
On the Texas DMV's public automated-vehicle register, Tesla Robotaxi moved ahead of Waymo just before midnight on Nov. 10 (Texas time), 1,302 vehicles to 1,297. By the morning of Nov. 12, the EVwire tracker showed Waymo back in front, 1,305 to 1,303. Registered vehicles are not the same as cars carrying riders. When the list first went public in May, Tesla had 42.
An investigation by China's Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily, published Nov. 11 and republished by 36Kr on Nov. 12, found that an "hour" of robot-training data can sell for anywhere from 5 yuan to over 1,000 yuan. After five or six layers of subcontracting, some of the people recording the footage earn as little as 8 yuan an hour, and the same clips are often copied and resold.
On Nov. 10, US startup Memories.ai launched Memories Upload, a gig platform that pays people to wear a sub-45-gram LUCI Pin camera and film first-person video of food prep, shelf stocking and repairs to train robots. Fortune reports $6 to $18 per task, and the company says beta users logged over 1 million hours in the first month.
SpaceX signed a deal with German equipment maker SINGULUS for heterojunction (HJT) solar-cell production lines, starting with one worth over €60 million due in the first half of 2027 and scaling toward more than 100 GW of equipment for its Starmind space-computing satellites. Elon Musk then claimed on X that 100 GW in space is roughly equal to 800 GW on Earth. Those comparisons are his own estimates.
On Nov. 11, Chengdu-based Yuefan Innovation held the first public flight of an air-ground delivery system: a drone carried a hot drink from a shop to a smart handoff station, and a ground robot delivered it to a customer in a city park. The company plans networks of one drone, three stations and 12 robots covering up to 20 km. Payload and cost figures weren't disclosed.
Chinese robotics company UBTech said Nov. 11 that Yongda Automobiles, a listed luxury-car dealer group, will buy 400 of its U1 Pro lifelike humanoid robots for delivery this year. It's the first large order UBTech has disclosed for its human-faced line. At the 169,800-yuan (about $23,800) retail price, that's roughly 68 million yuan (about $9.5 million). The robots are meant for showroom experiences, sales promotion and customer service; how much they'll actually do remains to be seen.
Conventional autonomous driving usually detects people and cars first, then plans a path in a separate step. End-to-end models try to put perception and decision-making in one network and output a driving trajectory directly. On November 11, Japan's TIER IV said it has released multiple end-to-end models around the open-source Autoware software, from camera-only versions to setups that can add LiDAR, radar, and high-definition maps, so automakers and developers can choose what they need. Some models are already integrated with Autoware. Closed-loop tests in real vehicles are still underway, and fully driverless operation remains a later goal.
Most robots are still made of rigid links and joints, so their shape is hard to change. On November 11, Colorado State University described flexible, trunk-like robots from associate professor Jianguo Zhao's group: stiff rods held by a web of tensioned cables rather than locked rigidly in place, so they can bend, collapse, and change shape. Each tube-like body has a gripping claw at both ends, used either to hold objects or to attach to another robot. The work appears in Nature Machine Intelligence. The machines still need a human pilot, though the team has shown that two robots can find each other and connect on their own.
In warehouses and airports, boxes come in all shapes and weights, and a robot's reach can collapse a stack. On November 11, Japan's NTT said it has built a physics-based "world model" that generates a short video of what would happen for each candidate action, then picks a move less likely to drop something. NTT says a small-robot shelf-loading test improved from 73.1% success to 92.3%. It plans field trials with Mujin on airport baggage. Those results are from NTT's own experiments.
Factory robots are great at repeating one motion but usually need reprogramming for anything new. On November 10, Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2.5, a robot 'brain' it says helps machines learn more kinds of tasks, faster. In a pilot with Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz, an Apollo 2 humanoid sorted parts on live car production lines in Hungary and Germany at a reported 96% success rate. That is a proof of concept, not a full rollout of humanoids, and all performance and safety figures come from DeepMind's own tests.