Today spans the whole robotics gamut, from a phone-trainable home humanoid for harried parents to biohybrid aquabots powered by living muscle cells. We've also got a state-of-the-union on factory automation, a warehouse startup betting on real deployments over lab demos, and humanoids picking up a racket.

In today’s roundup

• Meet Flourish One, the Raspberry Pi-powered humanoid built for busy parents — The Robot Report
  A $3,555 Raspberry Pi-powered home humanoid promising phone-trained, cloud-personalized chore automation is an ambitious bet on whether households will pay for helping hands.
• State of Robots in Manufacturing — The Robot Report
  A useful survey of where factory automation actually stands, weighing incremental technology gains against the much-hyped potential of humanoids and AI on the line.
• Insta360 cameras can now turn your videos into explorable 3D worlds — DroneDJ
  Turning ordinary video into explorable 3D worlds hints at cheaper scene capture that could feed robot mapping and simulation, not just travel memories.
• Powered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through a watery maze — TechXplore Robotics
  MIT shows a single layer of muscle cells can propel a paper-thin swimmer, pointing toward small, efficient biohybrid robots designed around biology's own actuators.
• Venus flytrap-inspired 'robot hand' material senses objects and grasps them under light — TechXplore Robotics
  KAIST's flytrap-inspired material merges sensing skin and grasping muscle into one light-activated system, blurring the line between a robot's perception and its actuation.
• Humanoid Badminton: Learning Dynamic Racket Skills from Limited Human Motion Data — arXiv cs.RO
  Teaching humanoids badminton from limited human motion data is a punishing test of split-second decisions and whole-body coordination that few control systems can survive.
• Destro AI raises seed funding for robot-agnostic warehouse workflow platform — Automated Warehouse
  Destro AI's seed round backs a robot-agnostic warehouse platform, betting that production deployments rather than flashy demos are what actually wins customers.
• Powered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through watery maze — MIT News Robotics
  MIT's own account of the muscle-powered aquabot lays out a design approach for building small, efficient biohybrid robots that navigate a watery maze.

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The Daily Grind · RobotCafe · robotcafe.com