Waymo faces heat over remote support

PLUS: Amazon's kills its Blue Jay robot arm

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Joey Liu, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
February 19, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Waymo's “driverless” label just hit a Capitol Hill speed bump: when its robotaxis get stuck, they can summon remote human assistance — some of it from offshore operators.

Now, Washington is floating a closer look, and the fallout could ripple across the entire robotaxi race.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Waymo under heat for remote operators

  • Amazon kills its Blue Jay robot arm

  • Tesla’s first Cybercab rolls off the line

  • Unitree eyes 20K humanoids after Chinese gala

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WAYMO

Image source: Waymo

The Rundown: Waymo is under fire in Washington after admitting its U.S. “driverless” robotaxis tap a remote workforce in the Philippines for real‑time guidance, forcing the company to defend how autonomous its autonomy really is.

The details:

  • Waymo runs roughly 70 remote assistance agents across four operations centers, with about half based in the Philippines and half stateside.

  • In a written response to Sen. Ed Markey, the company insists that those workers offer split-second routing guidance when software gets stuck.

  • Waymo says remote agents “do not directly control, steer, or drive” vehicles, with only a U.S.-based response team allowed to move a stopped car.

  • U.S. lawmakers are now weighing a formal probe into whether offshoring safety-critical roles creates cybersecurity gaps or national security risks.

Why it matters: The dispute spotlights a growing regulatory question for autonomous vehicles: how companies should describe “driverless” systems that can still request rapid human input in edge cases. It’s also pulling remote-assistance practices into the policy arena, including where operators are located and what safeguards are in place.

AMAZON

Image source: Amazon

The Rundown: Amazon is quietly killing Blue Jay, the multi‑armed warehouse robot it unveiled barely six months ago as an AI‑driven breakthrough, now downgraded to a short‑lived “prototype.”

The details:

  • Blue Jay, developed in just over a year using AI, was designed to collapse three separate picking, sorting, and consolidation stations into a single work cell.

  • Its South Carolina pilot reportedly ran into high costs and deployment challenges, prompting Amazon to walk away rather than scale the robot.

  • Amazon says Blue Jay’s core tech will be folded into other robotics “manipulation” efforts, with its team reassigned to new projects.

  • Last year, Amazon unveiled the two-armed Vulcan robot, which uses touch‑sensitive, vision‑guided suction grippers to pick items in warehouses.

Why it matters: The move undercuts Amazon’s hype cycle and shows that even the most advanced warehouse operator is still in rapid‑fire experimentation mode. Amazon, which has deployed more than a million robots since buying Kiva in 2012, says Blue Jay’s perception and gripping tech will live on in other platforms.

TESLA

Image source: Tesla

The Rundown: Tesla says its first Cybercab — a two-door pod with no steering wheel or pedals — has rolled off the production line at its Austin Gigafactory, a purpose-built capsule for a ride-hailing network that barely exists yet.

The details:

  • The two-seat Cybercab has no pedals or controls and is designed to operate on Tesla’s robotaxi network rather than as a conventional privately driven car.

  • Musk is pricing the Cybercab at around $30K for eventual consumer purchase, but the vehicle is architected for robotaxi fleets, not driveways.

  • Tesla’s Austin robotaxi pilot — running Model Y vehicles — reportedly has logged roughly 14 crashes across an estimated 800K miles.

  • The Cybercab can’t scale on public roads until Tesla wins federal exemptions for wheel-less cars and threads a maze of state-by-state AV rules.

Why it matters: Tesla’s first Cybercab rolls into a world where its so-called robotaxi service still relies on human operators and a handful of unsupervised rides, while Waymo pushes ahead. If the tech works, Tesla still has to win exemptions for a steering-wheel-free car and survive a 50-state battle over safety and liability.

UNITREE

Image source: Unitree Robotics / YouTube

The Rundown: Chinese robotics firm Unitree plans to ship about 20K humanoids by 2026 — up from 5,500 last year — after its GI and H2 humanoids stole the show at China’s Spring Festival Gala with high‑agility kung fu and parkour routines.

The details:

  • China's 2026 Spring Festival Gala — the country's Super Bowl equivalent — featured four robotics firms across martial arts routines and comedy sketches.

  • Unitree’s G1 and H2 robots delivered what the company claims is the world's first fully autonomous humanoid cluster martial arts performance.

  • The robots reportedly hit technical firsts, including freestyle parkour, 3-meter aerial flips, and an Airflare grand spin of seven-and-a-half rotations.

  • A follow-on Unitree video showed more than 40 G1 humanoids spelling out a New Year’s greeting in perfectly synchronized formation.

Why it matters: Humanoids are at the core of China’s AI strategy, and Xi Jinping has personally met five robotics founders in the past year to prove it. With Unitree and rivals like AgiBot eyeing IPOs, Monday’s televised gala was just as much a billion-viewer investor pitch as it was pure robotic entertainment.

QUICK HITS

Aurora says its self-driving trucks can now run a 1K‑mile route in about 15 hours without a human driver, beating what human truckers can legally do.

Barclays analysts argue that the market for AI-powered robots and autonomous machines could swell roughly tenfold to about $1T by 2035.

Uber reportedly plans to invest more than $100M in DC fast‑charging hubs for robotaxi fleets in key U.S. and international markets.

Private university Galgotias was kicked out of a major AI summit in New Delhi after a staffer showcased a Chinese-made Unitree Go2 robot dog as the university’s own.

Waymo launched a pilot where DoorDash gig workers in Atlanta are paid to close doors left ajar on its self-driving cars so the robotaxis can resume driving.

Hyundai Motor shares jumped after its Boston Dynamics unit released a new video of the Atlas humanoid performing cartwheels and a backflip, Bloomberg reports.

Amazon FAR researchers debuted Perceptive Humanoid Parkour, a system that lets Unitree’s G1 humanoid use onboard vision to chain human-inspired parkour skills.

Canada’s Upside Robotics built solar‑powered field robots that use weather and soil data to micro‑dose corn crops with fertilizer, cutting usage by up to 70%.

Beijing’s X-Humanoid launched Embodied Tien Kung 3.0, a general-purpose humanoid platform designed to lower the technical bar for developers.

A curling robot system is turning Olympic curling into a test bed for robotics, using reinforcement learning and precision mechanics to outplay human teams on the ice.

Researchers in Spain unveiled a new AI-powered 3D LiDAR localization system that helps “kidnapped” mobile robots quickly recover their position.

COMMUNITY

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