Uber has launched the UK’s first robotaxis in London, letting customers hail self-driving minicabs through its app with a human safety driver ready to take over. The initial service includes 15 autonomous vehicles licensed to operate in the city. Uber will phase the robotaxis in over several years, and regulators’ plans for fully driverless hire by end-2026 now look increasingly unlikely.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will add a new “Real World AI Stage” focused on the digital-to-physical intersection. The stage runs October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. It expands Disrupt’s AI programming into two stages and brings speakers from Nvidia and robotics and de-extinction companies to cover autonomous hardware, edge deployment, and scaling prototypes into production.
Tesla is starting public rides of its Cybercab robotaxi in Austin, Texas, putting Musk’s autonomy plan into operation. The service is launching nearly two years after the Cybercab was unveiled. This shifts Tesla from showing prototypes to testing camera-only driving in real-world passenger service as part of its robotaxi offering.
LG’s CLOiD is a robot housekeeper on wheels, not a legged humanoid. US robotics company 1X has already put its $20,000 Neo robot into homes to do housework with remote help. LG says it’s training hundreds of CLOiDs in home environments to build a robot foundation model.
World Labs Inc. released Atlas, a multimodal “omni model” that reconstructs and renders 3D scenes with precise camera control from a single image input. World Labs says it raised $1.2 billion in funding before Atlas’ debut, and it has now made Atlas available in early access for select enterprises. Atlas is positioned to shift development toward more accurate simulated environments for robotics training by generating RGB images and depth readings as robots move through reconstructed spaces.
The article argues that Waymo cars and other tools are already shifting work from humans to machines, extending the same pattern that mechanized physical labor during the Industrial Revolution.
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