Walden Robotics: a TRI spinout

Walden Robotics came out of stealth on July 15 as a spinout from Toyota Research Institute. IEEE Spectrum reported $300 million in funding and a $1.1 billion valuation.

When explaining the choice of wheels over legs, CEO Russ Tedrake focused on how much of the addressable market a wheeled base could cover. Tedrake also pointed to three practical features: battery weight low in the base adds stability, the base can hold more battery capacity, and the design can build on factory safety cases for autonomous mobile robots.

Digit at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada

Agility Robotics says Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada signed a Robots-as-a-Service agreement after what the company called a successful Digit pilot. TMMC plans to use Digit in manufacturing, supply-chain and logistics operations.

In the announcement, Agility describes Digit as a general-purpose humanoid for repetitive, process-based manufacturing work. The company says its system can fit into factories without expensive retrofits and use AI to learn additional workflows.

Atlas in a TRI–Boston Dynamics research project

A separate Toyota connection comes through a joint research project between Toyota Research Institute and Boston Dynamics. The announced work combines TRI’s Large Behavior Models with the Atlas robot in pursuit of general-purpose humanoid capabilities.

The teams say they are developing end-to-end policies that take language instructions and carry out manipulation tasks over longer sequences. They report that these policies coordinate stepping, precise foot placement, crouching, center-of-mass shifts and self-collision avoidance. The researchers describe those movements as important to mobile manipulation in realistic settings.

Sources

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