DoorDash has introduced a drone designed to deliver restaurant meals. The company says its new aircraft can carry approximately 80 percent of the restaurant orders placed through its service. In preliminary testing, it reportedly transported meals from the restaurant to the customer’s door in less than five minutes. That is impressive. It may even be fast enough to deliver the french fries while they still possess some resemblance to french fries. But DoorDash apparently discovered that building an aircraft capable of carrying lunch was not the entire problem. Someone still has to load the burrito. DoorDash Started on the Ground When DoorDash recently announced DoorDash Air, much of the attention naturally went to the aircraft. It has six propellers, weighs less than 55 pounds and…

A school district in western New York recently decided to spend about $60,000 on a humanoid AI robot named Sally. Sally was going to high school. The Salamanca City Central School District planned to use her to help students learn about artificial intelligence, robotics and technology. Students might ask her questions about programming or work with the technology that makes a humanoid robot function. That sounds reasonable enough. Then people outside the classroom began paying attention. Teachers questioned whether robots belonged in schools. Parents raised concerns. State officials got involved. There were questions about privacy, surveillance, safety and whether artificial intelligence might eventually replace teachers. Then someone discovered that the company making Sally has a corporate relationship with a company known for making realistic sex…

This one:

The challenge becomes managing the systems that manage drones. And maybe the systems that manage the systems that manage the drones.

Researchers and regulators have already recognized that managing future drone traffic will require far more than identification and tracking. Proposed UAS Traffic Management (UTM) systems include services for flight authorization, monitoring, conflict resolution, emergency response, and dynamic rerouting. In many ways the challenge resembles managing a transportation network rather than simply controlling aircraft

One drone is relatively simple.
Ten drones require coordination.
One hundred drones require automation.
One thousand drones require sophisticated management systems.
Hundreds of thousands of drones create an entirely new infrastructure challenge.

(Part two of a series.) For now, most drones still feel occasional. A neighbor flies one over the park. A real estate agent photographs a property. A police department uses one to monitor traffic after an accident. Firefighters deploy one during a wildfire. A stadium uses aerial camera coverage during a sporting event. Somewhere nearby, Amazon is probably testing another delivery route. Individually, none of these seem especially disruptive. Together, they may eventually become something very different. One of the reasons drones still feel manageable is that there are relatively few of them operating simultaneously in most places. The systems remain fragmented, experimental, and somewhat isolated from each other. But infrastructure problems often arrive gradually and then all at once. Roads worked well when there…

Most robot demonstrations, especially humanoid robots,  are carefully staged. The floor is clean. The lighting is controlled. The sensors are calibrated. The battery is fully charged. The software has been updated. The Wi-Fi works. Someone nearby knows how to reboot the system if things suddenly become “unexpected.” Then the robot walks across the stage carrying a box, folding a towel, or waving at the audience, and everyone focuses on the machine itself. But the robot is often the easy part. What matters is everything around it. That may be one of the biggest misunderstandings in the public discussion about robotics. We tend to imagine the machine as an independent mechanical worker — something like Rosie from The Jetsons — operating largely on its own intelligence…

(And Why That Matters) For years, we’ve been told that robots were coming for our homes. They would cook, clean, fold laundry, walk the dog, and maybe even offer the occasional piece of advice—something between a helpful assistant and a mechanical companion. That didn’t happen. At least not in the way we imagined. Instead, robots showed up somewhere else entirely. Not in our kitchens. Not in our living rooms. But in warehouses, factories, hospitals, and supply chains—the quiet infrastructure of modern life. And that turns out to be far more important than the original expectation. Walk into a modern warehouse today, and you won’t see science fiction. You’ll see something more interesting. Shelves moving across the floor on their own.Robots gliding through aisles, carrying products…

I went to an outdoor event where fireworks were supposed to be the closing attraction. But we didn’t get traditional fireworks with the booms and bangs and the smell of gunpowder in the air. The show started normally enough. Families on blankets. Folding chairs. Someone’s portable speaker playing music slightly too loud. Instead of fireworks, what showed up was a display by a number of drones. It started small — hundreds of lights in the sky. Then the formation expanded to what looked like thousands… maybe more than that. They rose quietly, arranged themselves into a perfect American flag, dissolved into an eagle, then reassembled into something that looked suspiciously like a corporate sponsor’s logo. It was beautiful. Precise. Complex in its transitions. Almost unnervingly…

Where the Real Robotics Revolution Begins — Part 6   The End of the Beginning For years, robots have dazzled us in lab demos and YouTube clips — backflipping humanoids, graceful drones, and warehouse arms that move with almost human rhythm. Yet for all that spectacle, most of those machines still live behind fences or under supervision. They can impress but not yet endure. If the first five parts of this series traced the journey from imagination to implementation — from Rosie the Robot to the tireless warehouse picker — this final chapter lands where it all converges: the quiet, unglamorous, and often invisible work of making robots reliable. The real revolution won’t arrive with a press release. It’ll arrive when robots become so dependable,…

Robots Part 5 When Help Comes With a Price Tag For decades, robots lived behind fences — industrial arms bolted to the floor, sealed away from anything unpredictable, like people. Now they’re stepping into our world. They can walk, talk, deliver, and assist. In just the past year, Agility’s Digit began working at Amazon warehouses, Figure 03 joined BMW’s South Carolina plant, and Apptronik’s Apollo entered pilot use in logistics and retail. These aren’t test videos anymore — they’re the first real deployments of humanoid robots in everyday workplaces. So the question is changing from Can they work? to Can we live with them — and afford them? “Robots may clean the kitchen, but at twenty grand apiece, that’s a lot of dishes to justify.”…

Robots Part 4 What we’ve seen so far about robots is mostly pieces of a larger dream — factory arms that weld with precision, delivery carts humming through warehouse aisles, driver-assist cars edging toward autonomy, and household gadgets like the Roomba bumping their way around furniture. Our expectations, meanwhile, are shaped by movies: elegant, articulate humanoids (R2-D2 notwithstanding) that glide into our lives as finished products. Reality sits somewhere in between. The robots now emerging are prototypes on public display — awkward, sometimes brilliant, often clumsy. Like the first home computers or early cell phones, they’re stepping-stones toward something smoother. They’re also sparking intense curiosity about what could evolve into one of the world’s biggest markets. Their eventual success will depend not just on clever…

Part 2: Learning to Learn — Dexterity, Data, and the Objective Question Think about a baby tying shoelaces. At first it’s fumbled, uneven, and sometimes impossible. But after enough tries, the skill “clicks.” What’s remarkable is not just the act of tying shoes — it’s the ability to generalize that learning. The same hand–eye coordination shows up in folding clothes, braiding rope, or knotting a stitch to close a cut. Humans aren’t just task-learners. We’re adaptive learners. We don’t memorize a thousand individual steps; we learn how to learn. Robots are now on the cusp of something similar — though their path looks a lot different. Dexterity as the Gatekeeper For decades, robots have been impressive at heavy lifting — welding cars, stacking pallets, moving…