Reinforcement Learning
Reward-driven robot training — simulation-heavy locomotion policies, real-world fine-tuning, and the sample-efficiency problem.
Coverage (8 articles)
- Boston Dynamics Atlas GR3 Hand: 13-DOF Specs for Tool Use — Boston Dynamics unveiled the GR3 hand for its electric Atlas humanoid on October 1, 2026. The four-fingered design delivers 13 degrees of freedom with direct ac
- NVIDIA Expands Open Physical AI Stack with OpenUSD for Humanoids — NVIDIA released updates to its open physical AI stack on September 30, 2026, built around OpenUSD and Omniverse for reusable digital twins in humanoid training
- Skild AI S1 Soccer Skills Emerge from 140 Years of Self-Play — Skild AI announced September 23 that its S1 foundation model learned complex humanoid soccer behaviors through self-play in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. The policy, traine
- Hugging Face LeRobot GR00T N1.7 Integration and Microduck Biped Launch — Hugging Face updated its LeRobot library in July 2026 to support NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7 VLA model for fine-tuning. In late August, its Pollen Robotics team opened
- SimTac & DexSkin: Biomorphic Tactile Arrays and Hybrid MPC for Sim-to-Real — November 2025 arXiv paper SimTac (Zhang et al., King’s College London/BIT) introduces a physics-based MPM simulator for vision-based biomorphic tactile sensors
- Pi0.7 and Helix: VLA Transformers Advance Zero-Shot Dexterous Manipulation — Physical Intelligence's π₀.7 (April 2026) and Figure AI's Helix (February 2025) represent state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, achieving open-w
- ThorArena Benchmark Exposes Force-Aware Gaps in Humanoid Controllers — ThorArena, a new benchmark from TU Munich, tests how humanoid robots handle physical contact by replaying real human forces in simulation. The results expose ma
- Apptronik Robot Park Powers Apollo 3 Humanoid Data Factory — Apptronik's 90,000 sq ft Austin Robot Park, opened June 30 2026, deploys Apollo 2 fleets to generate real-world datasets for Gemini Robotics VLA models, acceler
Related robot platforms
- Microduck — Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face) · Specialty