Technology Trends
Where robotics and AI technologies came from, which approaches now compete or converge, and what problems remain unresolved.
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Technology Trends
September 4, 2026
Technology Trends in Humanoid Robots
Tesla Optimus and Figure 03 have moved onto factory floors, and Boston Dynamics' Atlas has switched from hydraulic to fully electric. Unitree is driving a price war, while 1X's NEO is starting to teach itself in the home using a video world model. A look at the competitive landscape and the open problems that remain.
Trends · 9 min
Technology Trends
September 4, 2026
Technology Trends in World Models
A 'World Model' learns the dynamics of an environment and simulates the future inside its own head. From Ha & Schmidhuber's VAE+RNN, through DreamerV3, Genie 3, and Sora, to the JEPA architecture championed by Yann LeCun — this piece maps the split between generative and non-generative approaches, and the shared wall of physical consistency both sides run into.
Trends · 8 min
Technology Trends
August 26, 2026
Technology Trends in VLA (Vision-Language-Action)
Vision-Language-Action folds camera input and natural-language instructions into a single model that outputs robot actions directly. From RT-2 to OpenVLA to Physical Intelligence's π0 lineage, surveying the spread of a design philosophy that refuses to separate perception from control.
Trends · 9 min
Technology Trends
August 20, 2026
Technology Trends in Navigation
From the classical pipeline of maps, costmaps, and path planning, to end-to-end approaches via reinforcement learning, to foundation models built on Vision-Language models. Surveying where autonomous mobile robot navigation stands today.
Trends · 7 min
Technology Trends
August 14, 2026
Technology Trends in Local LLMs
Ollama's monthly download count grew 520x in three years. Surveying how the rapid rise of open-weight models and maturing quantization techniques are turning large language models into something that runs on a home PC.
Trends · 7 min
Technology Trends
August 8, 2026
Technology Trends in Semantic Segmentation
From transformer-based SegFormer and Mask2Former to the Segment Anything family, which can carve out any object from a prompt. Surveying where segmentation stands as it moves away from fixed classes.
Trends · 6 min
Technology Trends
August 2, 2026
Technology Trends in Object Detection
The YOLO family moving toward NMS-free designs, and transformer-based detectors like RF-DETR, which broke 60 mAP on COCO. Surveying the state of object detection in 2026, all the way to open-vocabulary detection driven by nothing but a text prompt.
Trends · 6 min
Technology Trends
July 27, 2026
Technology Trends in Visual-SLAM
From classical feature-point methods to deep-learning-based end-to-end estimation, and on to a reinvention of map representation via 3D Gaussian Splatting/NeRF. Surveying where Visual-SLAM — self-localization and mapping from cameras alone — stands today.
Trends · 6 min
Technology Trends
July 21, 2026
Technology Trends in LiDAR-SLAM
From the LOAM lineage to direct methods like FAST-LIO, and on to D-LIO, published in 2026. Surveying the evolution of LiDAR-and-IMU-based self-localization and mapping, set against newbot's own implementation.
Trends · 6 min
Technology Trends
July 17, 2026
Technology Trends in SLAM
From filter-based methods to graph optimization, and now to learning-based, AI-native approaches. Tracing the lineage of SLAM (simultaneous self-localization and mapping) and where current research stands.
Trends · 7 min