Nic Conley

Nic Conley I make stuff on the internet.

09/17/2026

This robot learned how to do a job by copying a person who wore sensor gloves while working

Meet OM-1 from a company called Reward AI They say it runs on industrial arms and humanoids without being retrained for either one and that it never saw a single piece of robot data while learning

And the whole system is built around the hand They built a wearable called the Omnibody Hand which has seven degrees of freedom and people can wear it while doing normal tasks The gloves carry tactile sensors that read how hard you push proximity sensors that measure distance before anything is touched and cameras built into the hand itself so the picture stays steady through fast movement There are no staged demos and no lab setup So working cooking sorting all of it can become training data

Heres where it gets insane On a conveyor belt a person spots an object reaches grips it and throws that object in a bin in a fraction of a second Miss any part of that and the recording is worthless So they recorded touch distance and hand motion at the speed a hand actually moves

But the craziest part The company says OM-1 doesnt need to be retrained for a new robot You put the same policy in a different robot and it can still work

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09/13/2026

NASA just demonstrated a spacecraft navigating without GPS by using other satellites and space debris as landmarks

Meet FALCON built by NASA and EraDrive It was tested on four small satellites that make up NASAs Starling mission

And it runs on cameras that were already on the satellite Falcon uses star tracker cameras the ones normally pointed at stars to tell a satellite which way its facing and points them at other satellites and pieces of debris instead Then it matches what it sees against a list of twenty thousand known objects stored onboard Once falcon knows what its looking at it can work out where the spacecraft is

Heres where it gets insane In three days FALCON didnt just find itself It improved the predicted orbits of more than two hundred other objects with no instructions from Earth

But the craziest part GPS doesnt work well far from Earth so spacecraft out there usually depend on tracking from the ground Falcon used the traffic floating around it as a map

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09/10/2026

A robot came off an assembly line and walked away on its own and machines built most of it

Meet IRON a full-size humanoid from XPeng the Chinese company that makes electric cars It has seventy six degrees of freedom in the body twenty one in each hand and three of XPengs own chips on board so it runs its AI itself instead of being driven by someone off camera

And no humanoid has ever been built this way Until now machines like this were assembled by hand one at a time XPeng ran IRON through an automotive line instead with over eighty percent of the core processes automated on the same quality systems they use for cars

Heres where it gets insane XPeng wants to build more than 1000 robots every month on the way to a million a year by 2030

But the craziest part Every machine like this was made once and shown off This one came from a factory that can make the next one identical

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09/09/2026

Theres a building in Maine where the farm moves above your head and half an acre of it grows as much as two hundred and fifty acres of field

Meet Vertical Harvest a four story farm built on a former parking lot in Westbrook just outside Portland It has space for forty-two thousand trays each tracked with an RFID tag riding conveyors up across and around the building on a loop from seed to harvest

And the plants dont rely on the windows for light The front window is for people not plants They dont see sunlight at all The first facility which they built in Wyoming had windows facing southward and sunlight was the problem It heated one side of the building more than the other created pockets of different temperatures on the floor and plants a few feet apart grew at different rates So in Maine they sealed the whole thing and ran it on LEDs

Heres where it gets insane The system tracks each tray and continuously manages its light water nutrients and growing conditions About ninety five percent of the water gets recycled And it runs year round in a state that spends half the year frozen

But the craziest part Farming used to depend on whether the sun showed up but this building removes that possibility entirely

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09/05/2026

Engineers built a drone that turns nearly invisible without camouflage by spinning its entire body

Meet Phantom Twist which runs on a single motor and a single propeller that spins one way while the entire airframe spins the other hitting twenty-five rotations a second On a normal drone the blades blur but the body stays fixed so your eye still catches it

And thats where the layout does the real work Human eyes need about a tenth of a second to lock onto an image so anything moving faster than that just blurs The team spread the battery circuit board and counterweight far apart at different heights and angles which means that when the whole thing rotates none of those parts ever overlap They sweep across the background instead and the drone reads as a semi-transparent cloud

Heres where it gets insane
A computer generated roughly twenty thousand layouts that could actually fly then scored every one against a model of the human visual system until it found the hardest to see No person designed this shape

But the craziest part
Every stealth system ever built was designed to beat a sensor This one was designed to beat human vision

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09/05/2026

Dyson put a camera inside a toothbrush and it decides where to spray while youre brushing

Meet CameraJet from Dyson the company that makes vacuum cleaners and hair dryers It costs five hundred dollars with a one-hundred thousand pixel macro lens concealed in the brush head all pointed at your teeth

And what runs behind that lens is doing real work It examines twenty-eight frames per second and a model trained on four hundred seventy thousand images of teeth examines every frame for the gaps between your teeth where plaque starts forming Once the machine detects that it sprays a stream of mouthrinse through the opening in less than one hundred milliseconds and uses less pressure compared to water flossers

Heres where it gets insane Sixteen million lines of code Six years of engineering A tank that refills in three seconds all compressed into an object that you hold for two minutes a day

But the craziest part There is now a camera inside your toothbrush running computer vision on your teeth in real time

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08/31/2026

Skild AI trained a robot brain from the internet and it works on machines it has never seen before

Meet S1 from Skild AI a Pittsburgh company that raised one point four billion dollars in January at a fourteen billion dollar valuation Skild says S1 learns a task it has never seen from a single video prompt with no fine tuning at all

And the length is the part that shouldnt work Robots have been copying short demonstrations for a while now Usually a few seconds just long enough to grab twist or pour Ten minutes is a different problem entirely because every step compounds the error in the step before it and by minute nine the machine is usually lost Skild says S1 holds the whole sequence

Heres where it gets insane They didnt train it by having humans puppet robots through tasks They trained it on human videos pulled from the internet and physics simulations because there are only so many hours people can spend driving a robot by hand and there is no limit on video

But the craziest part For years the bottleneck in robotics wasnt the robots It was that nobody had enough examples to show them Turns out the examples were sitting on the internet the whole time

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08/27/2026

Theres a two-armed robot that folds laundry loads dishes and fetches from the fridge and it costs sixteen hundred and eighty eight dollars

Meet Nori A3 It has seven degrees of freedom in each arm four cameras on the grippers head and neck and a lidar that maps the room out to thirty nine feet while scanning twelve times a second Six to eight hours on a charge

And they got there by refusing to buy the expensive part Every humanoid runs on actuators the motors inside the joints and theyre the reason these machines cost twenty thousand dollars and up Nori skipped them They used cheap servos and made up the gap in control software then put the whole thing on a wheeled base with a lift instead of legs which kills the two most expensive problems in robotics at once

Heres where it gets insane You dont code it You train it through a laptop app and that skill uploads to a marketplace built into the robot Any other Nori downloads it and runs it

But the craziest part Every skill anyone teaches one of these becomes available to all of them Teach one and the rest already know it

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08/25/2026

A humanoid robot learned tennis from five hours of amateur footage and it holds rallies against real players

Meet Galbot a Beijing company backed by CATL that built its name on robots with no legs at all Their flagship rolls on wheels and stocks shelves Then they trained a walking humanoid to play what Chinese media is calling the worlds first fully autonomous robot tennis

And the way they trained it breaks every rule Teaching a robot a sport normally means capturing perfect motion from professionals This team recorded five amateur players inside a space ten feet by sixteen seventeen times smaller than a tennis court and only captured fragments What they got was a forehand a backhand a side shuffle nothing complete no real matches The robot worked out how to combine those pieces on its own through reinforcement learning

Heres where it gets insane It reacts to balls moving thirty four miles an hour with millisecond timing and hit ninety six percent forehand success in simulation before it ever touched a court This week they revealed ET1 their first bipedal robot on the floor in Beijing

But the craziest part The company that pulled this off had never built a walking robot They ran it on somebody elses hardware a Unitree G1 trained on five amateurs swinging a racket in a room

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08/23/2026

A robot dog just outran Usain Bolt’s top speed, and now they’re selling a different model you assemble at home

Meet Black Panther X, from MirrorMe in Shanghai, the team whose last robot raced an Olympic sprinter in an MrBeast video and nearly won. 12 modular joints that snap together like Lego, 9 miles an hour, 18 pounds standing, and it does 720 degree flips

And that’s where it stops being a product. Most quadrupeds ship sealed. This one ships as parts, with open ports and open code. The shells are 3D printable, so you can reprint the body yourself, then bolt on FPV cameras, lights, sensors, whatever you’re building toward. It climbs stairs and takes 30 degree slopes

Here’s where it gets insane. 30 days before that race, their robot topped out at 23 miles an hour. By race day it hit 30. That’s a machine getting 28 percent faster in a single month

But the craziest part? The fastest robot dog in the world came out of this lab. Now they’re making it possible for anyone to build one

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