Industry Briefing
A single destination for timely, editor-curated robotics news from around the world.
Saronic Launches 52-ft Mirage ASV for Maritime Operations in Texas
Saronic has officially launched its first Mirage, a 52-foot Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV), at its test facility in Galveston, Texas. This vessel joins the existing fleet of the 24-foot Corsair and 180-foot Marauder, marking a significant milestone in Saronic's production capabilities. The Mirage, designed for dual-use, is set to undergo on-water trials following its rapid development from design to launch in under a year. The Mirage ASV boasts impressive specifications, including a top speed exceeding 35 knots, a range of over 2,500 nautical miles, and a payload capacity of 3,500 pounds. This new platform enhances maritime operations for both manned and unmanned teams, supporting missions in maritime domain awareness and security. The vessel operates autonomously or under remote supervision via Saronic's Echelon command-and-control platform, leveraging proven technologies from the company's existing fleet. Looking ahead, Saronic is already working on the next hull of the Mirage, with production capabilities at its Austin headquarters allowing for the manufacture of hundreds of these vessels annually. No further timeline was disclosed at the time of publication, but the rapid development and testing of the Mirage indicate a strong commitment to expanding Saronic's fleet and capabilities in the maritime sector.
saronic mirage usv
RoboScience launches Visics, a versatile embodied model for cross-ontology, cross-object, and cross-task applications.
On June 24, RoboScience, a company specializing in embodied intelligence, unveiled its self-developed Visics large model, introducing the innovative VLOA (Vision-Language-Object-Action) architecture. This announcement marks a significant advancement in the field, demonstrating the model's applications in real-world scenarios such as furniture assembly, dexterous grasping, and dynamic assembly lines. The current landscape of embodied intelligence lacks a universally accepted foundational representation unit, which hampers data collection, model learning, and the transfer of knowledge to new contexts. Traditionally, models have focused on replicating specific robotic movements tied to particular tasks, limiting their adaptability to new robots, objects, or environments. Founder and CEO Tian Ye highlighted three major challenges in robotic operations: poor generalization, difficulty in precise manipulation, and cumulative errors in long-range tasks. To address these issues, RoboScience has developed a new foundational representation unit from the ground up. The Visics model employs a dual-engine architecture, consisting of an embodied world model and a universal operation model, each operating independently. The embodied world model utilizes vast amounts of internet video data to learn the physical dynamics of objects, while the operation model translates object trajectories into actionable commands for robots. This layered design enhances the model's generalization capabilities across various robotic platforms and tasks. RoboScience's innovative approach also includes a high-precision simulation engine, RoboMirage, which, combined with automated video data annotation, significantly reduces data acquisition costs. The company aims to build a comprehensive dataset of over 1 terabyte of high-quality manipulation trajectories by 2026. Since its inception, RoboScience has garnered support from multiple investors and established research and production centers in major Chinese cities. The company plans to collaborate with various sectors, including retail and logistics, to standardize robotic products for industrial and commercial applications by the end of this year.
Robotics needs a service framework.
RSF defines a common language for robot service capability, lifecycle operations, certification pathways, and service-provider networks.
