Robot Mall

The world's first Robot Mall opened in Beijing's Yizhuang and has a total area of about 4,000 square meters across four floors, showcasing seven major categories and more than 50 robot brands, covering various fields including medical, industrial, bionic, and humanoid robots. Visitors can interact with various types of robots, including robot dogs and robot hands, as well as compete with robot athletes in football, basketball and chess.

There are showcases of a one-stop service process for robot part replacement, diagnostics, and remote operation and maintenance, and a high-end negotiation space to facilitate precise industry matchmaking and support business cooperation. In 2024, China accounted for two-thirds of global robot patent applications and produced 556,000 industrial robots, remaining the world's top manufacturer.

More information:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202508/1340351.shtml

World Humanoid Robot Games

China kicked off the three-day long World Humanoid Robot Games on Friday, looking to showcase its advances in artificial intelligence and robotics with 280 teams from 16 countries. Robots competed in sports such as track and field, and table tennis, as well as tackled robot-specific challenges from sorting medicines and handling materials to cleaning services.

Teams came from countries including the United States, Germany and Brazil, with 192 representing universities and 88 from private enterprises such as China's Unitree and Fourier Intelligence. Competing teams used robots from Chinese manufacturers such as Booster Robotics.

More information:

https://www.reuters.com/sports/robots-race-play-football-crash-collapse-chinas-robot-olympics-2025-08-15/

Smartphone Audio Guide for Visual Impaired

Tactile paving for people with visual impairments in Japan has recently been enhanced with audio guidance, as the developers of the technology aim to improve the lives of people with partial sight and assist sighted tourists. The new braille blocks are marked with black stickers in special patterns. By scanning the coded blocks with a smartphone camera and app, users can listen to audio information about the location and its surroundings. The system was jointly developed by the laboratory of Kanazawa Institute of Technology and Tokyo-based W&M systems LLC.

Those behind the technology hope it can also be made available to tourists and foreigners as they walk the streets of Japan, whether they are sighted or not. The special braille blocks were first introduced in Kanazawa, central Japan, in 2019 and have since been installed in other areas, appearing at train stations, pedestrian streets and public offices in 10 prefectures, including Tokyo and Osaka, as of April. The developers plan to make the system available in multiple languages and are considering enabling it to answer questions by incorporating generative artificial intelligence capabilities.

More information:

https://japantoday.com/category/national/speaking-tactile-sidewalks-enrich-lives-of-visually-impaired

Generated Video Teaches Robots

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers developed a video generation model to produce demonstration videos to teach robots to perform specific tasks. Users provide a text command and an image of the current scene to produce a demonstration video tailored to the robot's specific task and environment, with no additional training required. RIGVid's success rate across tasks was 85%, outperforming other robot imitation methods.

RIGVid’s approach for extracting an object’s motion from a generated video, based on model-based six DoF object pose tracking, also outperformed alternative methods for trajectory extraction using optical flow and sparse keypoints. The improvement was apparent on challenging tasks, like sweeping dirt or placing a thin spatula into a pan, where the other methods struggled with object occlusion.

More information:

https://siebelschool.illinois.edu/news/RIGVid

AI in Ancient Weaving Style

Hironori Fukuoka of Fukuoka Weaving in Kyoto, Japan, is turning to AI and Sony Computer Science Laboratories to help keep the ancient Nishijinori kimono-weaving technique alive, using the technology as a collaborator.

Nishijinori's repetitive and geometric patterns are conducive to digital translations, and Fukuoka views AI as useful in identifying new motifs to define the angular lines of traditional patterns.

More information:

https://apnews.com/article/japan-kyoto-ai-nishijinori-tradition-kimono-6c95395a5197ce3dd97b87afa6ac5cc7

Wristband Hand Gestures Interaction

Meta has developed a prototype wristband that uses electromyography to detect electrical signals from forearm muscles, enabling touch-free control of digital devices. These signals, generated by alpha motor neurons before physical movement occurs, allow the device to interpret user intent.

In particular, the device operates using surface electromyography, a non-invasive way to track the electrical activity of muscles. The wristband captures the signals externally and can move cursors, open apps, or even transcribe air-written text in real time.

More information:

https://mashable.com/article/meta-research-device-wrist-control

Fully Autonomous Farm

Farms are moving toward full autonomy thanks to advances in AI, robotics, and digital tools. High costs and the lack of broadband Internet in rural areas, however, pose major obstacles.

Technologies being deployed on farms include autonomous tractors, robots and drones capable of picking fragile fruits, sensors that provide soil analysis, virtual fences to rein in livestock, and remote sensing and image analytics tools.

More information:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/autonomous-farming-ai-95657bd1

Interactive Media for Cultural Heritage

Recently, the latest edited book I co-authored with colleagues from CYENS – Centre of Excellence and the University of Cyprus was published by Springer Series on Cultural Computing. The book is entitled ‘Interactive Media for Cultural Heritage’ and presents the full range of interactive media technologies and their applications in Digital Cultural Heritage. It offers a forum for interaction and collaboration among the interactive media and cultural heritage research communities.

The aim of this book is to provide a point of reference for the latest advancements in the different fields of interactive media applied in Digital Cultural Heritage research, ranging from visual data acquisition, classification, analysis and synthesis, 3D modelling and reconstruction, to new forms of interactive media presentation, visualization and immersive experience provision via extended reality, collaborative spaces, serious games and digital storytelling.

More information:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-61018-9

Brain-like Navigation in Robots

LENS (Locational Encoding with Neuromorphic Systems) uses brain-inspired computing to set a new, low-energy benchmark for robotic place recognition. To run these neuromorphic systems, they designed specialised algorithms that learn more like humans do, processing information in the form of electrical spikes, like the signals used by real neurons.

In the study, researchers developed a system that was able to recognise locations along an 8 km journey but using only 180KB of storage, almost 300 times less than other systems. LENS combines a brain-like spiking neural network with a special camera that only reacts to movement and a low-power chip, all on one small robot.

More information:

https://www.qut.edu.au/news?id=200450