Waymo hits 500K weekly rides

PLUS: Drones fly with bat-like echolocation

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Joey Liu, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
April 02, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Waymo just hit half a million paid robotaxi rides a week across 10 U.S. cities — a 10x leap in under two years.

Meanwhile, Baidu is investigating a Wuhan outage that stalled 100 Apollo Go vehicles mid-traffic, Tesla’s robotaxi service remains limited to Austin, and Zoox still hasn’t started charging passengers. Autonomous vehicles are arriving, but the field is separating fast.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Waymo just hit 500K rides a week

  • Drones are learning to fly like bats

  • Europe’s biggest industrial bet is a humanoid

  • A bicycle robot that jumps and pops wheelies

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WAYMO

Image source: Waymo

The Rundown: Alphabet’s Waymo says it is now completing 500K paid robotaxi rides per week across 10 U.S. cities — a 10x jump from 50K weekly trips just two years ago, and the clearest signal yet that autonomous ride-hailing is graduating to mainstream.

The details:

  • The fleet holding those numbers steady sits at roughly 3K vehicles equipped with Waymo’s 5th-gen self-driving system, per NHTSA filings.

  • In February, Waymo launched in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando, bringing its total to 10 U.S. markets, up from just 3 cities at the start of 2025.

  • Waymo’s numbers still barely register against Uber’s scale: Uber completed 13.5B trips in 2025, including more than 1M mobility rides per hour.

  • Waymo was among 7 AV companies, including Tesla and Zoox, that refused to tell a Senate investigation how often their cars use remote human assistance.

Why it matters: Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov has framed the shift starkly: eight years to reach riders in four cities, then four new markets launched in a single day. That kind of acceleration is what separates Waymo from a field where Tesla remains limited to Austin and Zoox is only beginning commercial rollout.

DRONES

Image source: Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The Rundown: Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have built an AI-powered echolocation system that lets palm-sized quadcopters navigate in complete darkness like bats, with no cameras, lidar, or GPS required.

The details:

  • The system uses ultrasound speakers and microphones, paired with a compact neural network that interprets echoes in real time to construct a 3D map.

  • Acoustic baffles help the drone filter out the interference of its own propeller noise, isolating the faint reflections that bounce back from surfaces.

  • Trained largely in simulation, the AI then reads minute differences in echo timing and intensity to infer distance, shape, and even surface texture.

  • The researchers say their bat-style echolocation stack could scale to swarms of low-cost drones that slip through smoke, dust, and darkness.

Why it matters: The researchers say the stack is designed to scale: swarms of cheap, camera-free drones threading through smoke, caves, and rubble, where conventional sensors go blind. The applications aren’t hard to imagine: disaster search-and-rescue, underground infrastructure inspection, and, inevitably, defense.

HUMANOIDS

Image source: Neura Robotics

The Rundown: Europe has ceded ground on AI models to the U.S. and on EVs to China. Now it’s making a calculated play for a third front: humanoids on the factory floor, Bloomberg reports.

The details:

  • Sweden’s Hexagon has spun its factory-automation know‑how into the Aeon humanoid, now running pilot tasks at BMW’s Leipzig plant.

  • Germany’s Neura Robotics is raising about €1B ($1.1B) at a €4B ($4.3B) valuation, for a modular humanoid that can plug into existing assembly lines.

  • Schaeffler has partnered with Neura to co-develop compact actuators for humanoid joints, and plans to deploy thousands of Neura robots by 2035.

  • Bosch, via its newly formed robotics division, announced a collaboration with Neura to pool sensor data and jointly develop AI software.

Why it matters: Europe’s industrial giants — BMW, Bosch, Schaeffler — are using humanoid partnerships to hedge against labor shortages and foreign competition simultaneously, backing homegrown robotics startups. If the BMW pilot and Neura hit their targets, Europe could have its first credible answer to the physical AI race.

RAI

Image source: Reve AI / The Rundown

The Rundown: Researchers at the Robotics and AI Institute have built a 52 lb. bicycle robot that hits 18 mph, clears 3-foot jumps, and performs wheelies — all via reinforced learning (RL) policies trained entirely in simulation.

The details:

  • The robot combines a bicycle frame with a reaction mass and a spatial linkage system that concentrates most of the robot’s weight in a movable head unit.

  • It hits a top speed of 8 m/s — roughly 18 mph — and can vault onto platforms up to 3 feet high, about 130% of its own nominal height.

  • Some behaviors, like the “shimmy-turn,” weren’t explicitly programmed but emerged as solutions the learning algorithm discovered on its own.

  • The team trained all RL policies using NVIDIA’s Isaac Lab, which uses a high-fidelity physics engine and randomized simulation parameters.

Why it matters: This is a big deal for robot control: this bot shows sim-trained RL can pull off wheelies, jumps, and other dynamic maneuvers on a super narrow two-wheel platform without hand-coded tricks. It’s still a custom robot, but it points toward a future where similar methods could unlock much more agile scooters and delivery bots.

QUICK HITS

A system failure in Baidu’s Apollo Go network caused at least 100 robotaxis in Wuhan to suddenly freeze in place, trapping some passengers for up to two hours.

Disney’s newly debuted Olaf robot at Disneyland Paris went viral after freezing mid-sentence and collapsing backward on its first day of operation.

Figure CEO Brett Adcock said that he ended the OpenAI partnership because it brought “very little” value and turned OpenAI into a direct humanoid competitor.

Austin-based defense startup Saronic has raised $1.75B at a $9.25B valuation to scale production of its autonomous surface vessels and build AI-based shipyards.

Scientists are developing tiny DNA robots that could one day move through the body to deliver drugs, hunt viruses, and build ultra-precise nanoscale devices.

China has reportedly opened a new humanoid factory in Guangdong that can produce up to 10K robots a year and one humanoid every 30 minutes.

UK startup Humanoid has tested its HMND 01 robot in a car factory, where it followed warehouse software to handle real tote-picking and delivery tasks.

Chinese firm Ubtech Robotics’ share price reportedly jumped after the firm reported a 23-fold surge in 2025 sales of full-size humanoids.

Grab and WeRide have launched Singapore’s first public robotaxi service, starting with 11 autonomous cars running limited routes in the Punggol neighborhood.

Researchers created a control method that lets ultra-flexible, tendon-driven robots move accurately in tight spaces with under 1% error for more precise surgical tasks.

Voyager will help Icarus Robotics test its Joyride free-flying robot on the ISS in early 2027 to prove autonomous operation in microgravity.

COMMUNITY

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