The Rundown Robotics is reporting that DoorDash has unveiled the in-house aircraft behind DoorDash Air, a six-rotor drone assembled in San Francisco, along with the kitchen handoffs, packaging and dispatch software designed to move a restaurant order from counter to backyard in about five minutes. It said the company estimates 80 percent of typical restaurant orders fit the drone's size and weight limits, and that limited early tests averaged under five minutes from restaurant to doorstep. DoorDash designed its loading systems, packaging and kitchen handoffs before the aircraft, with software coordinating drones, couriers and ground robots, The Rundown Robotics said. It added that Wing, which is expanding with Walmart, reports more than 1 million commercial deliveries, while Uber and Zipline are targeting 1 million daily deliveries by the end of 2029.
The Rundown Robotics is reporting that Dyna Robotics, a Redwood City, California, startup, has unveiled Taku, a wheeled, two-armed robot that took laundry from washer to shelf in an hour-long demo the company says was autonomous and uncut. It said Taku pairs two arms with four steerable wheels and a folding body, letting it reach into dryers and crouch to stock low shelves. According to the newsletter, Dyna says the robot loads and starts machines, folds towels, sorts stacks by size and retries failed grasps without help, while its Dyna-2.1 system tracks the room's changing workload and can pause folding when a dryer finishes.
The Rundown Robotics is reporting that ETH Zurich researchers taught a store-bought robotic hand to carry itself to work, using its five fingers to crawl, balance and operate a keyboard without an attached arm. It said the Soft Robotics Lab mounted a Raspberry Pi, motion sensor and battery on a commercial WUJI hand, creating a 1.8-pound robot with its fingers and joints untouched, and used reinforcement learning in simulation to coordinate its uneven fingers. The newsletter said the untethered hand crossed 14 indoor and outdoor surfaces, including grass, gravel and metal grating, and executed 29 of 32 keyboard commands.
The Rundown Robotics is reporting that MIT engineers built a wafer-thin robot the size of a stick of gum that uses living muscle cells to swim and flashes of light to steer through an underwater maze. It said the swimmer has two gel fins lined with genetically engineered mouse muscle cells that contract when exposed to blue light, and that researchers control each fin independently. The muscle films produced 20 times more force per unit of tissue volume than earlier 3D muscle designs and remained functional for more than 30 days in lab culture, it said.
The Rundown Robotics also reported that Figure AI released a clip of its retiring F.02 humanoids autonomously leaping into a Finnish arc furnace, with the recovered metal becoming limited-edition collectibles. It said Amazon plans to invest more than $100 million in an Indiana manufacturing hub to supply its warehouse robotics network, with the facility expected to open by 2028, and that Agility Robotics is exploring wheeled robots. The newsletter said Tesla is building hundreds of Optimus bots weekly, though hand manufacturing problems and supplier bottlenecks are complicating its push toward mass production. It also reported that Bill Gates told Ezra Klein that companies replacing workers with robots should pay equivalent payroll taxes to keep funding Social Security and Medicare.