Avride’s next-gen delivery robot ditches two wheels and adds NVIDIA AI brains

Autonomous delivery vehicle company Avride has a fresh design — and NVIDIA AI brains. The company’s engineers have swapped out the old six-wheel configuration for a more efficient four-wheel chassis. It can make 180-degree turns almost instantly, effortlessly park on inclines and move faster without compromising safety.

Avride has been working on autonomous delivery robots since 2019. It began as part of Russian tech company Yandex’s autonomous driving wing. But the spun-off company divested its Russian assets after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and rebranded as Avride. It’s now owned by the Netherlands-based Nebius Group (formerly Yandex N.V.), headquartered in Austin, TX and making deals with the likes of Uber.

The company’s latest delivery robot shakes up one of the few constants from previous iterations: They all had six wheels. The new four-wheel robo-buggy uses a “groundbreaking chassis design” that eliminates some of the rough spots from older generations. These included additional friction and tire wear caused by excessive braking required for turns, lower maneuverability and less precise trajectory execution. Avride says the new model dramatically improves on all of those counts.

The new vehicle’s wheels are mounted on movable arms attached to a pivoting axle. For turns, each wheel glides along a circular path stabilized by the central arm. “This design allows the wheels to rotate both inward and outward, reducing friction during turns,” the company wrote in its announcement blog post.

Central to the new design is ditching the traditional front and rear axles for mechanically connected wheel pairs on each side. Avride says this enables simultaneous turning angle adjustment, leading to more precise positioning and maneuvers.

Among the results of the fresh approach are almost instant 180-degree turns. Avride says this especially helps when navigating narrow sidewalks, where sudden adjustments could be necessary. Parking on slopes is also more energy efficient: It now sets its wheels in a cross pattern to park in place without careening downward. The tighter controls also let the company increase its maximum speed. “This means faster deliveries for our customers,” the company wrote. (And, presumably, more profit.)

Not only did the new generation of delivery bots get a new body, but it also got smarter. Powered by the NVIDIA Jetson Orin platform, essentially an “AI brain for robots,” the vehicles can now tap into neural networks as powerful as those in full-size autonomous cars. This lets them process “vast amounts” of sensor data like lidar inputs and camera feeds in real time.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a delivery buggy without a cargo compartment — and that got an upgrade, too. The new model has a fully detachable storage section, allowing for modular swap-outs for different purposes. Avride says its standard cargo hold is big enough to hold several large pizzas and drinks or multiple grocery bags. It also adds a sliding lid that only provides access to the correct section, helping to avoid delivering orders to the wrong customers.

Engineering and design nerds can read much more detail about the new robots in Avride’s Medium post.

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Meta is reportedly working on humanoid robots that help with chores

If you look at your Roomba with disgust, thinking about what a far cry it is from the Jetsons’ Rosey the Robot, help is on the way. Bloomberg reported on Friday that Meta plans to leverage its advances in AI and augmented reality to build a platform for futuristic humanoid robots that can help with household chores like folding laundry.

Meta is reportedly creating a new team within its Reality Labs hardware division, which handles Quest VR headsets and the long-term Orion AR glasses project. Although it will build robot hardware during development, Meta’s long-term goal is more like Android, where Google makes the software platform that almost all of the industry (outside of Apple) uses. Meta would make the underlying sensors, AI and software for other companies to put inside their hardware. In other words, it wants to be the Android of androids.

At least initially, Meta plans to make household chores the project’s central focus. Bloomberg lists folding laundry, carrying glasses of water, putting dinnerware in the dishwasher and other home chores as examples to build excitement around what could be an unsettling product category for many people. (For examples of why those concerns may be warranted, look no further than the Unitree G1 robot that ran full-speed at Engadget’s Karissa Bell at CES, momentarily pinning her against the onlooking crowd.)

Speaking of Unitree, Meta has reportedly held early discussions with the Chinese robotics company, which also makes a quadruped "robot dog" that can run around, climb stairs and sit on its hind legs like a good girl. Meta is also said to have discussed its plans with California-based humanoid robot maker Figure AI, which can count OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel and Jeff Bezos among its investors.

Today’s humanoid robots aren’t advanced enough to pitch in around the house like Rosey, but Meta believes all the resources it’s sinking into AI and XR are paving a road to that destination. Although the company thinks it will be a few years before useful humanoid robots are widely available, Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth reportedly views the company’s progress in hand tracking, low-bandwidth computing and always-on sensors as advantages.

"The core technologies we’ve already invested in and built across Reality Labs and AI are complementary to developing the advancements needed for robotics," Bosworth reportedly wrote in a memo. "We believe that expanding our portfolio to invest in this field will only accrue value to Meta AI and our mixed and augmented reality programs."

Meta isn’t alone in raising its eyebrows at the prospect of home robots for (likely rich) consumers. Last year, news broke that Apple was working on robotics. Ditto for Google. Both companies have published research papers on their robotics work. Flying cars may have to wait, but Rosey is looking a lot less like a pipe dream.

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Watch the Atlas robot bust a move in Boston Dynamics' latest video

Watch the Atlas robot bust a move in Boston Dynamics' latest video Boston Dynamics has treated us to a lot of impressive videos over the years and the company is back today with the latest example of its robotics mastery. In the clip above, its Atlas robot demonstrates several types of full-body movement, starting with a walk and advancing to a cartwheel and even a spot of break dancing. The different actions were developed using reinforcement learning that used motion capture and animation as source materials. At this rate, our future robot overlords will be able to out-dance and out-tumble us humans as well as out-think us one day. The video is part of Boston Dynamics' research with the Robotics and AI Institute, but it has multiple partners aiding its work. For instance, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang touched on the company's GR00T model for robotics during the GTC 2025 keynote earlier this week. Yesterday, Boston Dynamics announced that it is deepening its collaboration with the company focused on AI in robotics. It is using NVIDIA's Jetson Thor computing platform to run "complex, multimodal AI models that work seamlessly with Boston Dynamics’ whole-body and manipulation controllers."

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