Robot futures - from data centers to shopping centers as retail analytics helps robots understand human behavior (without crushing us!)

So, you’ve built your robot’s World Foundation Model and taught it about physics, cause, and effect. You’ve trained your humanoid in simulated environments and used teleoperation and video to complement that process. And you’ve built your Visual Language Action Model, so it can link words with actions, and perhaps added a Large Behaviour Model so it can infer probable outcomes. And finally, you’ve geo-fenced your robot and enabled it to warn other robots of its presence and intentions.

So, now you can unleash it on the human world, and everything will be fine, right?

Wrong. And that’s because you now need to do something subtler but, in many ways, just as important: teach your robot how people move around in real physical spaces, so you can figure out how to “keep it from smushing humans” in the words of one company’s spokesman.

That ...