Tag Archives: robotics

Argus Just Showed Up With 20 Eyes, 20 Legs, and No Rules

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The moment you see Argus rolling across a college lawn, you feel a kind of awe that’s equal parts scientific admiration and mild existential discomfort. It doesn’t look like a robot. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before, actually. It looks like a sea urchin crossed with a fever dream, or if you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last few years, it looks exactly like what happens when someone renders a biblically accurate angel and sends it out to navigate uneven terrain.

That’s not an exaggeration. The internet made the comparison almost immediately after Duke University’s General Robotics Lab unveiled Argus, and the parallel holds up. In the Book of Ezekiel, the ophanim, a type of divine being, are described as wheels covered in eyes, seeing in all directions simultaneously. Argus, named after the Greek mythological giant with a hundred eyes, does essentially the same thing, minus the divine mandate. It has 20 legs, each one telescoping and tipped with a camera, arranged at the vertices of a regular dodecahedron. No blind spots. No preferred orientation. No front or back.

Designer: Duke University General Robotics Lab

That last part is what keeps pulling me in, design-wise. We’ve spent decades building robots that mirror the logic of our own bodies: two legs, bilateral symmetry, a definitive forward direction. It made intuitive sense. We move front-to-back, so we assumed machines should too. Argus rejects that assumption entirely. The team at Duke built it around a principle they’re calling dynamic symmetry, which refers to how uniformly a robot can accelerate in any direction. Most robots are strongest and most efficient when moving the way they were designed to move. Argus has no such preference. It moves sideways, backward, forward, and diagonally with the same ease, which sounds like a minor technical distinction until you watch it roll through rough terrain, navigate around trees, and absorb collisions without losing its course. That’s when you realize how significant the gap is.

The design precedent here matters more than it might seem. Robotics has long borrowed from nature by mimicking the shapes that evolution produced: bipedal forms for humanoids, quadruped frames for terrain bots, insect geometries for swarm machines. But Argus is borrowing something different from nature. It’s borrowing from the radial logic of starfish and sea urchins, creatures that don’t have a front because every direction is equally valid. The Duke researchers describe Argus as an “existence proof,” a demonstration that a robot built for dynamic symmetry isn’t just theoretically interesting but practically deployable. Postdoctoral researcher Boxi Xia put it directly: “It produces a robot you can deploy in the wild, on uneven ground and in clutter, even in low-gravity settings.”

Low-gravity settings. That detail is doing a lot of quiet work in this conversation. The practical applications being discussed range from disaster response and search-and-rescue operations to planetary exploration, environments where the rules of conventional locomotion break down fast and all-directional agility becomes the difference between success and failure. A humanoid robot in a collapsed building still has to worry about which way it’s facing. Argus doesn’t.

I’ll admit the design is deeply strange to look at. It is not sleek. It is not elegant in any conventional sense. It doesn’t have the clean industrial confidence of Boston Dynamics’ machines or the deliberate anthropomorphism of recent humanoid models. It looks a little chaotic, frankly, like it was assembled by someone working from a very different set of aesthetic values, someone less interested in how the thing looks than in what the thing can do. And maybe that’s the point. Beauty in engineering doesn’t always wear the shape we expect. Sometimes it rolls across a lawn on 20 legs, sees absolutely everything, and changes the conversation entirely.

Argus is the kind of design that reminds you why robotics is still worth watching. Not because of what it looks like, but because of what it means for how we think about movement, perception, and the assumptions we’ve been quietly building into machines all along.

The post Argus Just Showed Up With 20 Eyes, 20 Legs, and No Rules first appeared on Yanko Design.

MIT Turned 12 Labubu Heads Into a Robot and It’s Watching You

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Nobody told MIT grad students to build a rolling sphere covered in twelve Labubu faces. They did it anyway, and now the rest of us have to sit with that. The project is called Labububot, and it comes from three graduate students at the MIT Media Lab: Miranda Li from the Personal Robots group, and Jake Read and Dimitar Dimitrov from the What’s Taking Form group. Together, they took the internet’s favorite ugly-cute collectible, multiplied it by twelve, and fused everything into a single spherical body that rolls around following people through hallways. The official description calls it “one of the rarest monsters on Earth,” and that phrasing alone tells you everything about the tone the team was going for.

The design is not subtle. Twelve identical Labubu faces stare outward from every angle simultaneously. When the thing moves, it does so with that particular brand of slow, deliberate motion that robots somehow always use when they want to feel unsettling. The MIT team leans into every bit of that discomfort, which is exactly what separates Labububot from most social robotics research you’ll come across.

Design: MIT Media Lab

Social robots usually chase approachability. They get rounded edges, pastel palettes, and soft digital expressions designed to lower your guard on contact. The whole field runs on the logic that comfort builds connection, and most research in this space reinforces that assumption without questioning it much. Labububot rejects that premise entirely. It is meant to provoke a reaction before it earns one, and the reaction it tends to get first is somewhere between amusement and mild dread. That’s a deliberately chosen emotional space, and it works.

The Labubu connection makes this sharper than it might otherwise be. The original toy built its following on a very specific kind of ugly-cute tension. It’s not conventionally adorable. It has sharp teeth, wide eyes, and a design that sits right at the border of charming and unsettling. That’s precisely why it resonated. The blind-box format added a layer of collector obsession on top, and after BLACKPINK’s Lisa was seen collecting them, the whole thing escalated into cultural phenomenon territory fast. The fact that it already carried that complicated emotional charge before MIT ever touched it makes the robot version feel like the natural next step, even if nobody saw it coming.

Scaling that same energy up to twelve faces on a rolling robot body is not an accident. The MIT team is clearly aware of what they’re working with. The official framing pitches Labububot as a “playful critique of social robots” and poses a question worth taking seriously: what do the monsters we make reveal about the monsters we are? For a project built around a pop culture collectible, that’s a surprisingly direct line of inquiry. It doesn’t answer the question so much as roll it directly toward you and wait.

The timing adds another dimension. Labubu started as a toy, became a fashion accessory, turned into a resale market, and has now arrived at experimental robotics research inside one of the most prestigious institutions on the planet. That arc is completely absurd and also perfectly logical if you’ve been watching how internet culture compresses timelines. Trends don’t climb ladders sequentially anymore. They collide with things that have no business intersecting, and occasionally the collision produces something genuinely interesting. The path from blind-box collectible to MIT thesis statement is ridiculous, and also makes complete sense.

Labububot will make its public debut this summer as a Grand Challenge finalist at the 2026 International Conference on Social Robotics in London. Moving from the controlled environment of an MIT hallway to a public conference floor is a meaningful shift. Real audiences bring expectations about what robots should look and feel like, and a twelve-faced Labubu sphere is going to challenge most of those expectations immediately.

Some people will read it as satire. Some will find it genuinely unnerving. A few will want to know if they can buy one. I’m not entirely outside that last group, which tells me the project landed exactly where it was supposed to. Labububot doesn’t ask you to like it. It just follows you down the hall until you decide how you feel.

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This 130cm Robot Just Took Buddhist Vows at a Seoul Temple

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There has been a lot of discussion lately about how Artificial Intelligence can affect all kinds of religion. From using ChatGPT to create sermons to having an AI give spiritual guidance (with one even pretending to be Jesus), there are a lot of gray areas that are open to debate and discussion by different sectors. But how would you feel if an AI robot actually joined your congregation?

South Korean monks at Jogyesa Temple in Seoul are facing that situation now as they ordained Gabi, the country’s first robot monk. Dressed in traditional grey-and-brown Buddhist robes, it joined the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism as part of the celebrations ahead of Buddha’s birthday later this May. South Korea joins its neighbor Japan, which previously had its own AI monk, Buddharoid, join a Kyoto temple, a sign that the intersection of faith and technology is becoming a growing trend across Asia, and that the question of AI’s role in religion is no longer purely theoretical.

Designer: Unitree Robotics

Gabi, whose name comes from a Korean term associated with compassion and mercy and is inspired by Siddhartha, stands 130 cm tall and is based on the Unitree G1 model developed by Chinese civilian robotics company Unitree Robotics. The G1 is a compact humanoid platform engineered with over 23 degrees of freedom, giving it a remarkably fluid range of motion. Built to replicate natural human movement, the robot can walk steadily, maintain balance, and perform deliberate, precise gestures with its articulated hands. It is also AI-powered, capable of processing and responding to verbal questions, which is exactly how it was able to respond to the senior monk during the ordination. It’s this combination of physical dexterity and responsive AI that made Gabi such a fitting presence at a Buddhist ceremony: its hands are capable of folding gracefully into the traditional prayer position, and its frame is nimble enough to perform a respectful bow, movements that carry deep spiritual meaning in Buddhist practice.

During the ceremony on May 6, Gabi did exactly that, folding its metallic hands and bowing respectfully alongside the other monks. When a senior monk asked if it would devote itself to Buddhism, it answered, “Yes, I will devote myself.” The monks then placed a traditional 108-bead rosary around its neck. In a small but telling concession to its mechanical nature, Gabi received a symbolic sticker instead of undergoing the customary incense burn, a reminder that, despite its robes and vows, it is still very much a machine.

Not everyone, however, is moved by the spectacle. The ordination has sparked debate among religious scholars and the public alike, with many questioning whether a machine can genuinely hold spiritual vows or embody the core Buddhist ideals of mindfulness, compassion, and the pursuit of enlightenment. Can a robot truly understand suffering, the very foundation of Buddhist teaching, when it cannot feel it? Critics also raise concerns about the trivialization of sacred rituals, arguing that ordination should remain a deeply human and intentional act. On the other side of the debate, however, supporters see Gabi as a creative and modern bridge, one that could engage younger generations with ancient teachings and make spirituality more accessible in an increasingly technology-driven world.

Whether you see Gabi as a bold leap into the future or a step too far, one thing is certain: this is just the beginning. Three more “spiritual cyborgs” are already set to join it at the temple for Buddha’s birthday celebrations on May 24. As AI continues to weave itself into every corner of human life, including our most sacred spaces, the line between the spiritual and the synthetic grows thinner by the day. What does it mean for a machine to seek enlightenment, or to offer compassion, when it was never capable of suffering to begin with? Perhaps the real question isn’t whether a robot can be a monk, but what it reveals about us that we’re the ones doing the ordaining.

The post This 130cm Robot Just Took Buddhist Vows at a Seoul Temple first appeared on Yanko Design.

This 130cm Robot Just Took Buddhist Vows at a Seoul Temple

Posted on by

There has been a lot of discussion lately about how Artificial Intelligence can affect all kinds of religion. From using ChatGPT to create sermons to having an AI give spiritual guidance (with one even pretending to be Jesus), there are a lot of gray areas that are open to debate and discussion by different sectors. But how would you feel if an AI robot actually joined your congregation?

South Korean monks at Jogyesa Temple in Seoul are facing that situation now as they ordained Gabi, the country’s first robot monk. Dressed in traditional grey-and-brown Buddhist robes, it joined the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism as part of the celebrations ahead of Buddha’s birthday later this May. South Korea joins its neighbor Japan, which previously had its own AI monk, Buddharoid, join a Kyoto temple, a sign that the intersection of faith and technology is becoming a growing trend across Asia, and that the question of AI’s role in religion is no longer purely theoretical.

Designer: Unitree Robotics

Gabi, whose name comes from a Korean term associated with compassion and mercy and is inspired by Siddhartha, stands 130 cm tall and is based on the Unitree G1 model developed by Chinese civilian robotics company Unitree Robotics. The G1 is a compact humanoid platform engineered with over 23 degrees of freedom, giving it a remarkably fluid range of motion. Built to replicate natural human movement, the robot can walk steadily, maintain balance, and perform deliberate, precise gestures with its articulated hands. It is also AI-powered, capable of processing and responding to verbal questions, which is exactly how it was able to respond to the senior monk during the ordination. It’s this combination of physical dexterity and responsive AI that made Gabi such a fitting presence at a Buddhist ceremony: its hands are capable of folding gracefully into the traditional prayer position, and its frame is nimble enough to perform a respectful bow, movements that carry deep spiritual meaning in Buddhist practice.

During the ceremony on May 6, Gabi did exactly that, folding its metallic hands and bowing respectfully alongside the other monks. When a senior monk asked if it would devote itself to Buddhism, it answered, “Yes, I will devote myself.” The monks then placed a traditional 108-bead rosary around its neck. In a small but telling concession to its mechanical nature, Gabi received a symbolic sticker instead of undergoing the customary incense burn, a reminder that, despite its robes and vows, it is still very much a machine.

Not everyone, however, is moved by the spectacle. The ordination has sparked debate among religious scholars and the public alike, with many questioning whether a machine can genuinely hold spiritual vows or embody the core Buddhist ideals of mindfulness, compassion, and the pursuit of enlightenment. Can a robot truly understand suffering, the very foundation of Buddhist teaching, when it cannot feel it? Critics also raise concerns about the trivialization of sacred rituals, arguing that ordination should remain a deeply human and intentional act. On the other side of the debate, however, supporters see Gabi as a creative and modern bridge, one that could engage younger generations with ancient teachings and make spirituality more accessible in an increasingly technology-driven world.

Whether you see Gabi as a bold leap into the future or a step too far, one thing is certain: this is just the beginning. Three more “spiritual cyborgs” are already set to join it at the temple for Buddha’s birthday celebrations on May 24. As AI continues to weave itself into every corner of human life, including our most sacred spaces, the line between the spiritual and the synthetic grows thinner by the day. What does it mean for a machine to seek enlightenment, or to offer compassion, when it was never capable of suffering to begin with? Perhaps the real question isn’t whether a robot can be a monk, but what it reveals about us that we’re the ones doing the ordaining.

The post This 130cm Robot Just Took Buddhist Vows at a Seoul Temple first appeared on Yanko Design.

This 40-Pound Robot Dog Can Carry 143 Pounds of Cargo

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Robot dogs have been having a moment for a few years now. From Boston Dynamics’ Spot strutting through construction sites to viral videos of four-legged machines dancing to pop songs, the quadruped robot has gone from fringe sci-fi concept to a fixture of the modern tech conversation. But most of what we’ve seen has felt like proof of concept, interesting to watch but not quite ready to show up and do real work. Unitree’s new As2 feels like the machine that finally closes that gap.

Unitree, the Chinese robotics firm behind the popular Go2 robot dog, just unveiled the As2, and the spec sheet alone is enough to make you stop scrolling. At about 18 kilograms, roughly 40 pounds with its battery included, the As2 is compact enough to move through tight spaces, yet built to handle a standing payload of up to 65 kilograms. That’s more than 143 pounds sitting on top of a 40-pound robot, which is genuinely impressive and a little hard to picture until you actually see it in action. For continuous walking with a load, it handles up to 15 kilograms and keeps going for over 13 kilometers. Its battery, a 648Wh, 15,000mAh unit, gives the As2 more than four hours of runtime when unloaded, covering over 20 kilometers. For an industrial robot, that’s a serious range.

Designer: Unitree

Speed-wise, it hits over 5 meters per second, roughly 11 miles per hour, which is faster than most people jog. It can climb stairs up to 25 centimeters high, tackle slopes at 40 degrees, and mount vertical platforms as high as 50 centimeters. The torque output sits at approximately 90 N·m with a torque-to-weight ratio of about 5 N·m/kg, driven by low-inertia inner rotor motors paired with industrial-grade crossed roller bearings. The engineering here is dense and deliberate. This isn’t a toy built to look capable; it’s a machine built to actually be capable.

What I find most interesting about the As2, though, is how Unitree is positioning it. The tagline is “Compact Size, Industrial Capability,” but the word they keep coming back to is “companion.” That’s a deliberate choice, and it tells you something about where the company sees this going. The robot dog market has largely split into two camps: big industrial machines that feel cold and utilitarian, and smaller consumer products that are more novelty than anything else. The As2 seems to be genuinely trying to live in the middle, built tough enough for real environments with an IP54 weatherproofing rating and an operating range from -20°C to 50°C, but designed with a level of approachability that suggests Unitree has a broader audience in mind.

The platform is also open, which matters more than it might seem. The As2 supports large AI models for what Unitree calls “embodied AI interaction,” essentially giving developers the tools to build autonomous behavior on top of the hardware. The EDU model can even be expanded with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX, which opens the door to more complex AI applications. GPS and 4G are built in, though disabled by default. It runs on an 8-core CPU and comes in three configurations, AIR, PRO, and EDU, each scaled for different use cases from general exploration to full industrial deployment.

What strikes me about the As2 is that it represents a shift in tone for robot dogs as a category. The conversation around this technology has often leaned either dystopian, think surveillance and military use, or dismissive, as if legged robots are just expensive novelties. The As2 doesn’t entirely escape those conversations, but it does reframe them a bit. A machine this capable, this portable, and this open as a development platform has real potential in search and rescue, agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and logistics. The vision of a robot companion that is genuinely useful rather than just impressive is within reach, and the As2 is one of the better arguments for it.

Whether Unitree can translate this hardware into widespread, practical adoption is a different question entirely. But as a statement of where robot dogs are heading, the As2 is worth paying attention to.

The post This 40-Pound Robot Dog Can Carry 143 Pounds of Cargo first appeared on Yanko Design.

Fauna Robotics Just Built the First Humanoid You’d Want Home

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Picture a humanoid robot, and you probably imagine something sleek, vaguely threatening, or at least a little cold. Maybe it’s built for a factory floor, towering and intimidating, or designed to look eerily human in a way that triggers that uncanny valley feeling. Either way, it’s not exactly something you’d want hanging around your living room.

That’s what makes Sprout so different. This portable humanoid from Fauna Robotics just launched out of stealth mode, and it’s taking a completely opposite approach to robot design. Instead of trying to look impressively human or industrial, Sprout leans into something that feels refreshingly approachable and, dare I say it, genuinely charming.

Designer: Fauna Robotics

Standing just 3.5 feet tall and weighing about 50 pounds, Sprout is compact and lightweight in ways that most humanoid robots simply aren’t. But what really sets it apart are those antenna-like eyebrows perched on its wide, rectangular head. They move up and down like little windshield wipers, giving this robot an expressive quality that feels more Pixar character than sterile machine.

The eyebrows work alongside a 360-degree LED facial display that animates with different light patterns and colors, plus body language that includes walking, kneeling, crawling, and sitting. Together, these features create a communication style that doesn’t rely on mimicking human faces or voices alone. Instead, Sprout uses a whole vocabulary of movement and light to express what it’s doing or feeling, which somehow makes it feel less like a failed attempt at humanity and more like its own friendly creature.

The design philosophy here clearly draws inspiration from beloved fictional robots like Baymax from Big Hero 6 or Rosie from The Jetsons, characters designed to feel helpful rather than threatening. Fauna Robotics wrapped the whole thing in a soft, padded exterior that’s safe to touch, and the company emphasizes that Sprout is built to operate in shared human spaces, around adults, children, and even pets.

This isn’t just a cute toy, though. The Creator Edition that’s shipping now is aimed at developers, researchers, and institutions that want to experiment with embodied AI in real-world settings. Sprout comes with some serious tech under that friendly exterior, including an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin processor with 64GB, stereoscopic vision, four time-of-flight sensors, a directional microphone array, and dual speakers.

Early customers are already putting Sprout to work. Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU are all testing applications across retail, entertainment, home services, and research. The robot can navigate both indoor and outdoor environments without needing restricted zones, and its battery runs for about 3 to 3.5 hours before needing a swap. The price tag sits at $50,000 for the Creator Edition, which positions it as a serious development platform rather than a consumer product ready for mass adoption. But that’s kind of the point. Fauna Robotics is building the foundation for what humanoid robots could become once they leave the factory and start mingling with regular people in everyday spaces.

What strikes me most about Sprout is how it sidesteps the whole debate about whether robots should look human. By embracing a more abstract, expressive design, it avoids that creepy almost-human trap while still feeling relatable and engaging. Those eyebrows, as simple as they are, do more emotional heavy lifting than a thousand attempts at realistic facial expressions.

The broader question, of course, is whether we’re ready for robots like this in our lives. But maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the better question is whether robots are ready for us, designed in ways that make interaction feel natural rather than forced or unsettling. Sprout suggests that the path forward might not be about making robots that look like people, but rather creating robots that feel like they belong in the spaces where people actually live, work, and play.

With its soft exterior, expressive features, and human-scale design, Sprout represents a different vision of what personal robotics could look like. Whether it succeeds in changing minds about humanoid robots remains to be seen, but those articulated eyebrows are certainly making a compelling argument.

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