RoboticsWaymo comes to Madrid aiming for its first riders in 2027On 20 October Waymo announced it is preparing a fully autonomous service in the Madrid region. It starts with manual driving of electric Jaguar I-PACE cars, and the first riders are a goal for 2027. The announcement names no permits and no partners.RoboticsWaymo is coming to Toronto: manual driving from the coming days, and first riders as a goal for 2028On 16 October Waymo announced it is preparing a fully autonomous service in Toronto. In the coming days the cars go out on the streets with a person behind the wheel to map them, and the first riders are a goal for 2028. The fleet partner is Element Fleet Management.RoboticsWaymo takes its first debt: a 5 billion dollar term loanPIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street lead the lenders, and Goldman Sachs arranged the loan. Earlier this year Waymo also closed 16 billion dollars of equity; the money is for expansion in the US and abroad.RoboticsThe man who built Alexa at Amazon becomes Boston Dynamics CEO from 7 OctoberBoston Dynamics announced on 6 October that Rohit Prasad takes over the company. He spent 12 years at Amazon, where he led Alexa and artificial general intelligence, and created the Amazon Nova models. The reading that Hyundai is putting in a product person, not a roboticist, is ours.RoboticsBoston Dynamics shows the new Atlas hand: 13 degrees of freedom and no pinkyFour fingers, one actuator type, touch sensors on the fingertips and palm, a load of over 100 pounds. The pinky is gone because the CTO asked the team to tape their two small fingers together for a day and report what they could not do. Per IEEE Spectrum, the goal now is how to make 100,000 of these hands a year.RoboticsAnthropic: robots can already do three quarters of physical work, but beat human cost on only 0.3 percentOn 30 September Anthropic published a robot exposure index, with task ratings made using Claude. Robots today can do 74 percent of physical tasks in the US, mostly in controlled settings. They are cheaper than humans for 0.3 percent of tasks, and at the past pace of price declines it will take 40 years to reach 10 percent.RoboticsWaymo presented its plan for London, but first it needs both national approval and the city's consentOn 24 September Waymo published its vision for a driverless service in London under the UK scheme for automated passenger services. The scheme needs approval from the Department for Transport and consent from Transport for London. For now there is no permit, and Waymo says it is ready to earn one.RoboticsThe makers of FLUX opened a model that predicts a robot's next move together with how it will lookFLUX 3 Action is a 7-billion-parameter model derived from Black Forest Labs' video and image generator. Per the company it leads the RoboLab-120 ranking with less than half the parameters of the previous best open model. The weights are free for research, and commercial use needs a separate licence.
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