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James Chen is a robotics reporter who spent 5 years in hardware engineering at Fanuc before switching to journalism. He writes about industrial automation and tweets too much.
IndustrialThe Dutch chipmaking equipment giant is trading at its cheapest relative valuation in over a decade, even as its stock climbs to fresh records.
James Chen · 6 hours ago · 5 min
One team taught Unitree G1 robots to skip rope together. Another found a simple architectural tweak that makes humanoids move and grab things 3.5x faster. Both matter more than the headlines suggest.
James Chen · 22 hours ago · 9 min
A new framework from arXiv claims to give monocular cameras the spatial precision of LiDAR. The approach is technically interesting, but the real test is whether it holds up outside a lab.
James Chen · Yesterday · 7 min
New research from NASA JPL and university labs shows reinforcement learning can teach rovers to handle loose soil without getting stuck, cutting energy use by 37% on sandy slopes.
James Chen · 2 days ago · 6 min
One uses graph-based reasoning to auto-generate rewards; the other fuses human language and physical corrections. Both beat expert-designed baselines.
James Chen · 2 days ago · 5 min
Two new papers suggest we're getting closer to drones that can adapt to any payload or configuration without manual tuning. The real question is whether the hardware can keep up.
James Chen · 2 days ago · 8 min
Two new papers tackle the geometry problem that's kept cheap, wide-angle cameras from reaching their potential in autonomous systems.
James Chen · 3 days ago · 5 min
Researchers are finally treating the math behind robot arm movements as what it actually is: a geometry problem, not just an optimization grind.
James Chen · 3 days ago · 5 min
Researchers are finding ways to shrink vision-language-action models and add safety guarantees without sacrificing performance. The catch? We're still mostly talking about lab benchmarks.
James Chen · 3 days ago · 8 min
Two new papers tackle the unglamorous but critical problem of getting robots to plan complex tasks without choking on computational overhead.
James Chen · 3 days ago · 6 min
Three new papers suggest we've been overcomplicating how robots decide what to do next, and the fix might be surprisingly simple.
James Chen · 4 days ago · 6 min
The UK's AI Minister made the media rounds, but if you were hoping for concrete robotics investment numbers or deployment targets, you'll have to keep waiting.
James Chen · 4 days ago · 5 min
After 25,000 miles of real-world testing, the data shows Apple's in-car platform is doing more for human-robot interaction than most dedicated robotics companies.
James Chen · 5 days ago · 4 min
When one of the world's biggest market makers starts talking about building custom chips for AI, industrial automation companies should pay attention.
James Chen · 6 days ago · 4 min
Dan Schulman's comments at Bloomberg Tech 2026 are vague on timeline and numbers, but the direction is clear.
James Chen · 6 days ago · 4 min
A senior Goldman executive says AI investment is a fundamental market force. The real question is whether that capital will flow to hardware or stay stuck in software.
James Chen · 5 Jun · 5 min
At the Northeast National Security Conference, officials called for rapid innovation pathways while manufacturers grapple with the harder problem of actually building things domestically.
James Chen · 5 Jun · 4 min
A batch of new reinforcement learning papers suggests we're getting closer to robots that train themselves, but the real test is whether any of this works outside the lab.
James Chen · 5 Jun · 4 min
New research suggests robots could maintain orientation awareness with far less sensor data than conventional wisdom demands.
James Chen · 5 Jun · 4 min
The company is finally charging for AI, but the real story is where it's headed next.
James Chen · 5 Jun · 6 min
Employees are adopting AI faster than ever, but productivity gains remain murky at best, and cognitive fatigue is becoming a real problem.
James Chen · 4 Jun · 2 min
Researchers are finally addressing the gap between what self-driving systems predict and what they actually do about it.
James Chen · 4 Jun · 5 min
European driving data and a novel 'negative space' approach from MIT suggest we've been thinking about city navigation wrong.
James Chen · 4 Jun · 5 min
A library quadruped and a budget LiDAR system both tackle the same problem: knowing when to trust your sensors and when to admit you're lost.
James Chen · 4 Jun · 5 min
