Nvidia GTC earlier this month brought out robots I'd never seen in person before like Neo Gamma, familiar faces performing new feats like Digit and leading humans in the robotics business. We caught up with industry leaders from Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, 1X and Disney to learn more about the specific challenges each company is trying to solve, their dreams for the future and the technology that might help them get there.
Neo Gamma from 1X
1X had its Neo Gamma robot on display in a home-like environment. The humanoid was picking up a watering can, posing for pictures with the crowd and vacuuming.
Neo Gamma vacuuming
1X co-founder and CEO Bernt Børnich told us the demo involved a mix of autonomy and human operation or as he called it "mixed autonomy."
In the beginning, Børnich says tele-operation will be used to teach the robot new tasks. Then, once the robot starts being successful in performing its new task often enough, it will start autonomously improving by learning from its own failures.
"What we're selling now in 2025 is not Rosie the Robot, it's a journey to Rosie the Robot," Børnich says. "If you want to be part of that journey then this is for you."
Neo Gamma meeting the crowd at Nvidia GTC 2025
1X says its Neo robot will cost less than a car and start being deployed to paying customers later this year.
Digit from Agility Robotics
Right next door, Digit from Agility Robotics was following a standing order to pick any three items from a shelf, put them in its basket and set them down on a table.
CTO Pras Velagapudi says the Agility Robotics team picked up the grocery items used in the demo while they were in San Jose for GTC, and Digit was in charge of deciding which items to grab.
Digit grabbing groceries
The robot was also speaking aloud in a language of beeps and boops. I downloaded an app, Waver, onto my phone to see if we could translate. When the robot failed to pick up an item, "I missed :(" was the in-app translation of the resulting sounds. Additional sequences of beeps and boops appeared to be the robot announcing its next task.
When it isn't busy grabbing groceries at GTC, Digit can be found deployed in warehouses, sometimes working full shifts. For safety reasons, Digit is confined to an enclosed space away from human employees while working, something Agility Robotics hopes to change with future advancements.
"We've been approaching that by developing safe human detection," Velagapudi says, "which we'd like to incorporate into our next-generation robot in the next 18 months."
Atlas from Boston Dynamics
While Atlas from Boston Dynamics wasn't present at Nvidia GTC, the company's CTO, Aaron Saunders, was. After a panel discussion, we caught up with him to talk about the most recent video of Atlas, which includes a cartwheel, breakdancing and running.
Atlas does a cartwheel in the latest video from Boston Dynamics.
"One of our people dressed up in a motion capture suit did those motions," Saunders said. "We can go from a single motion capture to an overnight run training the policy to the first time on the robot working pretty consistently now."
In robotics and machine learning, a "policy" is how a robot or AI agent chooses what to do next based on its current state. Saunders says the next step is moving beyond policies designed to accomplish specific tasks toward more general policies that robots can learn to cover a wider range of tasks and behaviors.
Disney's BDX Droid and character robots
Last but certainly not least, we connected with a company with a long history of making robots for a very different purpose: storytelling, which comes with unique challenges.
This BDX droid we found wandering around the show floor was remote-controlled by an operator who creates the personality and performance that make these robotic characters so engaging.
Disney's BDX droids balance autonomously, allowing their operators or "creative directors" to focus on performance
Associate Lab Director for Disney Research Moritz Bächer, who led the project on the BDX droids, says it's important to find the right balance between creative control and robot autonomy. "An operator is usually a creative director, but for more complex characters it becomes difficult to control with just a couple joysticks and buttons, so you would need more autonomy," Bächer says.
The BDX droids are autonomously balancing as they navigate the world, which frees up their operators or "creative directors" to spend more energy focusing on the character's performance and believability.
Bächer delivered a talk later in the day where he teased some of the upcoming robotics research Disney is working on, including humanoid development, but that will have to wait for a future video.
I learned so much at Nvidia GTC, and was really fascinated by the challenges the robotics industry is aiming to solve, the variety of use cases for these machines and the creative potential.