Boston Dynamics launches next generation Stretch robot. BOSTON - November 3, 2026 - Boston Dynamics has unveiled Stretch Gen 2, the next generation of its autonomous mobile trailer unloading robot. Built on insights from first-generation deployments, Stretch Gen 2 introduces major hardware and structural upgrades engineered to maximize uptime and streamline maintenance in high-volume logistics environments. As a first mover in the robotic unloading space, Stretch is the market leader and has more deployments than any competitive product in the logistics industry. The team analyzed data from more than 100,000 operating hours and tens of millions of boxes that Stretch has already unloaded to target the most common causes of unplanned downtime. The result is a robot hardened for durability and an updated modular design that enables "plug and play" part swaps for easier maintenance and serviceability. "Our customers count on Stretch to keep freight moving, and every hour a robot sits idle is an hour of work that piles up on the dock," said Brian Donnelly, Vice President & General Manager of Logistics Robotics at Boston Dynamics. "With Gen 2, we focused on the things that actually took robots offline in the real world. We made it tougher, we made it simpler to service, and we made sure it keeps getting better long after it's deployed." The hardware changes start with reliability. Stretch Gen 2 uses heavy-duty automotive-grade connectors that hold up to the vibration of rapid, high-torque box handling and driving over uneven floors. An upgraded gripper with new valve systems and more precise sensing improves grasping and placement to optimize fast-paced picks. New continuous rotation joints move beyond 360° so they no longer hit hard stops, which previously caused mechanical stress. Cutting 81 percent of the internal cabling - about a half-mile's worth - removes the biggest source of intermittent electrical faults and wiring wear. The emergency stop now sits lower and is recessed, and the exterior panels were made with new materials so a falling box is far less likely to trip an unintentional safety stoppage or break a panel. Stretch Gen 2 is re-engineered to reduce the frequency of service calls, but when maintenance is needed it goes much faster. A full swerve drive swap, for example, now takes about one hour instead of a full day. Dynamic cables and complex harnesses are gone, and standardized high-strength fasteners cut down on tool changes and hands-on repair time. New onboard diagnostics and maintenance tools put more routine service in the hands of a customer's own maintenance team, so robots stay on the dock with less reliance on outside support. The new robot also runs on a redesigned onboard computing platform that is constantly improving. Regular software releases bring gains in case detection, motion planning, pick strategies and world modeling across an entire fleet, with no hardware changes required. Stretch Gen 2 unloads up to 1000 cases per hour, a rate highly dependent on factors like case weight and how neat or disorderly cases are stacked, with a multipick feature that pushes performance to peak rates. Its battery lasts two shifts and a fast charger gets it to 90 percent charge in about 75 minutes. Onboard lighting means it works in dark trailers, and its pre-trained vision system detects most packages from day one with no programming needed. About Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics is the global leader in AI-enabled mobile robots that tackle the toughest industrial and safety challenges. Its robots are equipped with advanced mobility, dexterity and intelligence, enabling automation in unstructured, unsafe or hard-to-traverse spaces. Boston Dynamics has three robots in its portfolio: Spot(R), a quadruped that conducts industrial inspections, manages facility performance data and keeps people out of harm's way; Stretch(R), a box-moving robot for logistics and retail customers; and Atlas(R), its electric humanoid platform currently in early production. For more information on its company and its technologies, please visit bostondynamics.com.

South Korea chaebols shift AI spending to sales. Sat, October 31, 2026 at 4:29 PM GMT-7 · Rates & Macro · Compiled by Adalytica Engine v1.12 · Reviewed by Vadim Skritskii South Korea's biggest industrial groups are reshaping next year's plans around one theme: turning AI spending into sales and profit before Chinese rivals and U.S. policy shifts erode their edge. That pivot matters because the country's largest conglomerates are no longer treating AI as a capex race alone. They are trying to monetize the spending spree across semiconductors, energy, data centers, robotics and mobility at a time when global demand is still strong but margins, supply chains and trade rules are getting harder to navigate. Samsung Electronics, SK Group and LG Group are each moving to stitch AI deeper into their core businesses, while Hyundai Motor is stepping up local competition abroad and Hanwha and HD Hyundai are expanding in the United States. The push comes as South Korea's chipmakers have already reaped windfall profits from AI demand, with the country's semiconductor sector benefiting from the global build-out of data centers and advanced memory. Samsung's 2027 plan is expected to center on extending the AI-memory boom with more high-end supply such as HBM4, while also aligning with big tech customers developing their own AI chips. The group is also under pressure to lift weaker businesses including foundry, System LSI, smartphones and consumer electronics, as it tries to recycle semiconductor cash into future growth. SK is moving toward what it calls an "AI full-stack provider" strategy, linking SK Hynix's AI memory strength with power, energy, data centers, telecoms and business-process automation across the group. The company is also leaning into energy security for AI infrastructure, including LNG, LPG and nuclear investments, as power demand from data centers becomes a bottleneck. LG is pitching a similar "One LG" model, tying together cooling, batteries, data-center construction and operations, and even physical AI applications across robotics, sensing and actuators. For investors, the message is that the group wants AI exposure without relying solely on chips, which should help spread risk if memory cycles cool. Hyundai Motor is responding to Chinese automakers' push into Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia by emphasizing localization, new EV models and robotics. Boston Dynamics is set to enlarge its U.S. robotics center tenfold, a sign the group is betting physical AI can become a second growth engine alongside electric vehicles and PBVs. The industrial backdrop also remains supportive. South Korean chip stocks have been buoyed by the AI surge, and market data show semiconductor leaders still trading above their 200-day moving averages even after recent pullbacks. But the broader AI trade has become more volatile, with sentiment gauges showing sharper swings as investors weigh whether the spending boom is turning into durable earnings. The next catalyst is the sequence of corporate plan-setting meetings, management reshuffles and year-end strategy reviews across the chaebols, followed by signals on U.S. trade policy, AI capex and demand from global cloud providers. For investors, the key question is no longer who is spending on AI, but who can prove it is paying off. | Entity | Gains | Losses | | Samsung, SK, LG | | AI-linked revenue growth | | Pressure to monetize spending | | Hyundai Motor | | New EV and robotics runway | | Chinese export competition | | Hanwha, HD Hyundai | | U.S. expansion opportunities | | Higher execution and capex risk |

Google DeepMind builds a dancing robot from a single text prompt. AI agents running on Gemini 4 Argon and the Antigravity platform designed, simulated, and built a 12-DoF robot without manual CAD Sponsored: Vera - AI-powered prediction market intelligence, built for serious analysts Explore Vera Most robots start life as a stack of CAD files, a whiteboard full of joint diagrams, and an engineering team that hasn't slept much. Google DeepMind's latest one started as a sentence. On October 31, 2026, DeepMind showed off a physical dancing robot that AI agents designed, simulated, and built from one plain-English prompt. Nobody on the team touched a manual CAD workflow. From prompt to dance floor. The robot has 12 degrees of freedom, or DoF. A degree of freedom is one independent direction a machine can move. A robot with 12 of them has a dozen separate axes it can bend, twist, or rotate through, which is plenty to pull off something that passes for choreography. Given the date of the demo, DeepMind gave the robot a Halloween theme. AI agents handled the project end-to-end, moving from a text description to a design, through simulation, and on to a physical build. Two pieces of DeepMind technology powered the effort. The first is Gemini 4 Argon, a model announced in late September 2026 and released broadly in mid-October 2026. Gemini 4 Argon is built for complex reasoning that unfolds across many steps. It has a particular focus on robotics simulation and on generating accurate representations from video inputs. AI, tech, and the markets they move - in one daily briefing. Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy. The second piece is Antigravity, a development platform DeepMind launched in 2025. Antigravity is designed for autonomous coding and for orchestrating work across multiple systems. Together, they reflect what the research describes as a move toward agent-first environments in robotics. In that kind of setup, AI agents are the primary operators, and humans step back into a supervisory role. The Boston Dynamics connection. The project was led by Aaron Saunders, who previously served as VP of Engineering at Boston Dynamics before joining DeepMind. The dancing robot also extends a line of robotics work at DeepMind. In September 2025, the lab introduced RoboBallet, a system aimed at improving how collaborative robots work together in manufacturing settings. RoboBallet focused on coordination: getting multiple machines to share a workspace efficiently. The October 2026 demonstration pushes further upstream, into the question of how robots get designed in the first place. Why a dancing robot is more serious than it looks. Hardware design has traditionally been one of the most labor-intensive parts of building a robot. Every joint, motor placement, and structural element typically requires careful manual modeling before anything gets fabricated. Removing manual CAD from that loop, even for a relatively simple 12-DoF machine, attacks a major bottleneck. For the wider tech sector, the demonstration is another data point in the race over embodied AI. That term refers to AI systems that act in the physical world, not just on a screen. Gemini 4 Argon has only been broadly available since mid-October 2026, which means outside developers are just beginning to test what it can do. Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how Cryptobriefing create and review content, see its Editorial Policy.