Uber's $10B robotaxi pivot

PLUS: Boston Dynamics' Spot can now do inspections

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Joey Liu, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
April 16, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Uber just made a $10B wager on its robotaxi future, locking up autonomous EV fleets and buying into their makers.

With Waymo scaling and Tesla and Amazon-backed rivals circling, Uber is pouring billions into hardware it doesn’t control to avoid becoming a software layer on someone else’s machine. Can the ride-hailing giant stay essential in an autonomous world, or is this the moment the platform starts looking vulnerable?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Uber pours $10B into driverless ride-hails

  • Google’s Gemini turns Spot into an AI inspector

  • Toyota’s giant humanoid shoots perfect hoops

  • Tesla’s biggest factory may build Optimus

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UBER

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Uber is earmarking more than $10B to secure autonomous EV fleets and buy into their makers as it jockeys with Waymo, Tesla, and Amazon-backed rivals to shape the driverless ride-hail market, the Financial Times reports.

The details:

  • Uber plans to spend over $7.5B buying dedicated robotaxi fleets and more than $2.5B taking stakes in autonomous-vehicle developers.

  • The company is stitching together a marketplace of AV partners, including Baidu in China and EV makers Lucid and Rivian.

  • The most concrete deal is with Lucid: a combined $500M equity investment and a commitment to purchase at least 35K Lucid vehicles.

  • Uber plans to roll out robotaxis in 28 cities by 2028, leaning on partners like Nuro, and has set up an Uber AV Labs unit and dedicated fast-charging hubs.

Why it matters: Uber’s pivot comes as Alphabet’s Waymo scales commercial robotaxis in U.S. cities and Tesla pushes its vertically integrated “Cybercab” vision. Uber is under pressure to invest heavily in hardware it does not control, as it leans on its massive global rider base to stay at the center of autonomous mobility.

BOSTON DYNAMICS

Image source: Boston Dynamics

The Rundown: Boston Dynamics plugged Google DeepMind’s Gemini into its Spot robot dog so it can autonomously patrol industrial sites, visually read analog gauges and thermometers, and flag problems without a human in the loop.

The details:

  • Spot can now autonomously read analog gauges and thermometers in industrial sites, converting video into structured data with no human oversight.

  • The system uses multimodal reasoning to interpret complex panels and environments, letting Spot decide when a reading is abnormal.

  • These new capabilities are being rolled out to customers focused on routine inspections in factories, refineries, and other hazardous facilities.

  • The upgrade shifts Spot’s role from a teleoperated camera platform to a semi‑autonomous “inspector.”

Why it matters: Spot just got a serious brain upgrade. With Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics‑ER 1.6 wired into its Orbit AIVI‑Learning stack, it can now patrol factories and refineries, zoom in on pressure gauges and thermometers, and read them with near‑human accuracy. Plus, it can grind through tedious rounds with no downtime.

TOYOTA

Image source: Toyota Frontier Research Center / X

The Rundown: Toyota’s latest humanoid can shoot flawless free throws on live TV. CUE7, standing 7'2", took the court during a live B.League game in Tokyo this week — dribbled, rolled to the line, and sank it.

The details:

  • A hybrid control system combines reinforcement learning with model predictive control, letting the robot adapt shot mechanics in real time.

  • CUE7 locks onto the hoop, uses sensors to gauge distance, makes fine upper-body adjustments to arm angle and posture, then releases the ball on an arc.

  • The robot swaps the older four‑wheel base for a lighter two‑wheel design, cutting 46 kg from its predecessor, going to 74 kg from 120 kg.

  • The project goes back nearly a decade: CUE3 sank 2,020 free throws in 2019 for a Guinness record; CUE6 hit a 24.5m shot in 2024 for another.

Why it matters: Unitree’s G1 can dribble and hit layups using imitation learning from motion-capture data, while lab projects like DribbleBot push humanoids toward ball control. What separates CUE7 is the underlying stack: a hybrid of reinforcement learning and model predictive control that lets the robot analyze and adjust on the fly.

TESLA

Image source: China News Service / Tesla Shanghai assembly line

The Rundown: Tesla wants to turn its Shanghai Gigafactory — the sprawling plant that delivered more than half its cars and hit record output last year — into the backbone of its Optimus humanoid ambitions.

The details:

  • Tesla China president Wang Hao told local media that GigaShanghai could be a “golden key” to solving the mass production challenge for Optimus.

  • In Q1 2026 alone, the factory accounted for 59.6% of Tesla’s global quarterly output, with deliveries jumping 23.5% year-over-year to 213,398 vehicles.

  • Tesla says it is already converting its Fremont factory — freed up by the sunset of Models S and X — into an Optimus line designed for up to 1M units a year.

  • Although analysts say Tesla built only a few hundred humanoids in 2025, Musk’s new $1T pay plan hinges in part on delivering 1M bots by 2035.

Why it matters: Shanghai already delivers more than half of Tesla’s global cars, but whether or not Tesla could smoothly put Optimus into those same high‑throughput lines isn’t quite clear. Still, Shanghai’s scale is its best shot at jumping from a few hundred prototypes a year to the tens of thousands it needs to make this business real.

QUICK HITS

Ukraine says it has captured a Russian frontline position using only drones and ground robots, in what Kyiv touts as a first glimpse of autonomous warfare.

A humanoid named Edward Warchocki, built on a Unitree G1 platform, went viral after a video showed it chasing a group of wild boars down the street in Warsaw.

Uber and Nuro started testing a premium robotaxi service in San Francisco using Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with Nuro’s autonomous driving system.

Skild AI acquired Zebra Technologies’ Robotics Automation business to power large-scale, end-to-end warehouse automation with its Skild Brain software.

Korean AI chip startup DEEPX is deepening its Hyundai partnership to develop a generative AI robotics platform using its next-gen low-power chips ahead of an IPO.

Snake-like robots developed in Japan use an AI control system to seamlessly switch between slithering and rolling, boosting their movement efficiency over complex terrain.

Waymo began testing its all-electric Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis with safety drivers on London roads as a step toward launching the city’s first commercial robotaxi service.

Austin-based Contoro Robotics raised about $13.5M, shortly after winning an SXSW Pitch award, to scale its AI-powered trailer and container-unloading robots.

DJI will unveil two new consumer drones, the Lito and higher-end Lito X1, at a “Just Fly” launch event on April 23.

Almost 100 humanoids are training in Beijing’s E-Town district for a full test run of a 21 km half-marathon course just days before the official 19 April race.

About 20 international teams will push military robots through one of the world’s toughest real-world field trials at ELROB 2026 in Thun, Switzerland, in June.

Mobileye is seeking a buyer for its transit app Moovit, likely at a steep discount to the roughly $900M its parent Intel paid in 2020, as it doubles down on autonomous driving.

EPFL researchers developed a “kinematic intelligence” framework that lets a task demoed by a human be transferred and executed by multiple differently built robots.

KAIST’s new DreamWaQ++ system lets quadruped robots see terrain and walk adaptively like animals across complex, unpredictable ground.

Roboticists showed that injecting a bit of randomness into how individual bots move prevents dense robot swarms from jamming, sharply increasing overall flow.

COMMUNITY

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team