Morning Edition · Sunday, July 26, 2026Published at 1:32 AM EDT · New York
Researchers Build a Four-Legged Robot That Walks on Water to Pull Drowning Victims Out
The QuadBoat, developed in Shenzhen and New Jersey and inspired by the fishing spider, uses model-predictive control to stand, move, and retrieve objects on the surface.
Researchers described the QuadBoat, a quadruped surface vehicle designed to move on water and physically retrieve drowning victims or floating targets. The work comes from the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for S…
Continue the AI Intelligence Brief
Track frontier labs, chips, export controls, model releases, regulation, and AI infrastructure.
- 5 AI intelligence signals a day
- Frontier labs, compute, and chips
- Model releases and AI infrastructure
- Source-grounded analysis with confidence labels
The Global Intelligence Brief stays free.
Part of a tracked trend
Robotics Foundation Models for Embodied AI
Over the coming months, labs ship general-purpose robotics model suites that bridge vision-language understanding to physical navigation and manipulation, pushing foundation models into embodied action.
More from this edition
- Anthropic Ships Claude Opus 5 at Flat Pricing, Claiming Double Its Prior Agent Score
- Moonshot's Kimi K3 Becomes the Largest Open-Weight Model, but Abandons Discount Pricing
- Beijing Approves Policy to Build a Monetized "Token Economy" Around AI Agents
- Bipartisan US Bill Would Give Homeland Security a Shutdown Order Over Frontier AI
- Meta's Brain2Qwerty Decodes Typed Sentences From Brain Signals Without Surgery
- Meta Superintelligence Labs Ships Muse Image, an Agentic Model Aimed at Production Design
- Meta's Open Vision Models Cut US Energy Lab Data Analysis From a Month to 15 Minutes
- Meta Opens Its First Self-Serve Frontier API With Muse Spark 1.1
- Altman Declares "We Are Now in the Singularity" as Scrutiny of Lab Rhetoric Grows
- Claude Code's Creator Says He Has Not Hand-Written Code Since November
- A 1986 Protest Against Calculators Resurfaces as AI Deskilling Fears Grow