Archive 17.06.2026

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Upsampling method sharpens AI vision with up to 16 times less GPU memory

From facial recognition on smartphones to humanoid robots, computer vision technology, which serves as the eyes of artificial intelligence (AI), is widely used in daily life. A joint research team from KAIST and international institutions has developed a technology that allows AI to see the world more clearly with minimal memory, increasing GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) memory efficiency by up to 16 times. The achievement is seen as a core technology that could accelerate the era of humanoid robots and on-device AI.

DataRobot for Developers — integrating with the Google Antigravity CLI

Antigravity CLI is the newest agentic coding CLI from Google, replacing the now-deprecated Gemini CLI. It inherits the asynchronous subagent model that makes Antigravity stand out from the field, syncs bidirectionally with Antigravity Desktop, and is optimized for speed on Gemini 3.5 Flash.

DataRobot ships a full plugin for Antigravity CLI directly from the same open source repository that powers our Cursor, Claude Code, and Gemini CLI integrations. One install gives you the complete DataRobot skill set inside Antigravity’s agent and slash-command interface.

Getting the skills into Antigravity CLI

Install the DataRobot plugin with a single command:

agy plugin install https://github.com/datarobot-oss/datarobot-agent-skills.git

If you’re still on Gemini CLI, the same repository installs there too:

gemini extensions install https://github.com/datarobot-oss/datarobot-agent-skills.git

Already using the DataRobot extension in Gemini CLI and switching to Antigravity? Migrate it directly:

agy plugin import gemini

Once installed, the full DataRobot skill set is available including datarobot-setup and datarobot-agent-assist and can be invoked with slash commands like /datarobot-skills:datarobot-agent-assist

Antigravity CLI autocompleting the DataRobot skills slash commands

Adding DataRobot tracing to a local agent

Debugging agents is hard. LLM calls return plausible-sounding output even when something has gone wrong, tool calls fail silently, and latency problems are invisible in the final response. Without structured trace data, the only option is log-hunting and guesswork.

To show how the DataRobot tracing skill works in practice, here’s a concrete example: a LangGraph agent in a single main.py file that manages bike workouts. It has several tools, produces inconsistent answers, and the root cause isn’t obvious from the conversational output alone.

Adding production-grade tracing to this agent takes a single skill invocation: /datarobot-skills:datarobot-external-agent-monitoring.

Invoking the datarobot-external-agent-monitoring skill in Antigravity CLI

The skill provisions a new DataRobot Use Case, instruments the agent to emit traces via OpenTelemetry, and writes a monitoring_setup.md artifact with the runtime configuration steps.

The monitoring skill inspecting the project and provisioning a DataRobot Use Case
Summary of actions the skill completed, including the monitoring_setup.md artifact

With instrumentation in place, run the agent and send it a question — in this case, “What’s the schedule this week?”

Running the bike training agent and asking for the week's schedule

The skill generates setup instructions that include the Use Case entity ID and the environment variables needed to route traces to DataRobot:

The generated monitoring setup instructions with runtime variables and telemetry steps

The DataRobot tracing interface surfaces the full request history. Each trace shows end-to-end latency, total token consumption, and the complete span tree:

The DataRobot tracing interface listing the agent's traced requests

Drilling into the “schedule this week” request reveals the full picture: 2,700 tokens consumed, tool-level latency for each call, LLM invocation count, and any custom attributes emitted via standard OTel instrumentation. This is the data that makes debugging tractable, not inference from final output.

The trace detail view showing span hierarchy, latency, and token counts

For local development, the DataRobot CLI surfaces trace updates in real time: dr plugin install xp followed by dr xp --entity-id=<use_case_id>. This creates a tight iteration loop — run the agent, inspect the trace, fix the issue, repeat.

In this case, the span output makes the root cause explicit: the agent lacks calendar access, which is why it couldn’t answer the scheduling question. That failure wasn’t surfaced in the agent’s conversational response:

A span's output showing the agent explaining it lacks calendar access

Instead, the agent responded with generic guidance:

2. **Build a week from scratch** - If you tell me a few things, I can sketch out a balanced week for you:

   - Your goal (general fitness, an event/race, building endurance, etc.)
   - How many days/hours you can train
   - Your current fitness level and any FTP you know

A solid general week might look like:

- **Mon** - Rest or easy recovery spin
- **Tue** - Intervals
- **Wed** - Endurance ride (zone 2)
- **Thu** - Recovery or rest
- **Fri** - Tempo/threshold work
- **Sat** - Long endurance ride
- **Sun** - Easy ride or rest

The trace made the gap between expected and actual agent behavior immediately actionable. This same pattern applies at enterprise scale: whether the agent is running on a laptor or in production on a cloud provider, DataRobot traces the full execution tree and surfaces what the agent actually did — not just what it said.

Get started

The gap between an agent prototype and an agent in production is mostly operational context. Your coding agent writes the code. DataRobot supplies the observability layer and the governed deployment target. One plugin install, one skill execution — and you have production-grade trace data from the first run.

The post DataRobot for Developers — integrating with the Google Antigravity CLI appeared first on DataRobot.

Could AI tell you where you left your keys?

An auto factory worker can remember the storage bin where she left a partly assembled component the night before and quickly return to that spot to pick it up. But robots that may work side by side with her would struggle to develop and access this same type of "spatiotemporal" memory.

New research enables a robot to chart a better course

A figure shows multiple flight pathways as a UAV starts from the center and flies toward 24 goals (dots around perimeter). The flight pathways are mainly red and end in cool colors, showing reduced speed. The rainbow clouds represent obstacles, with cooler colors representing taller obstacles. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers.

By Adam Zewe

In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly through a collapsed building to map the scene, giving rescuers information they need to quickly reach survivors. 

But this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to swiftly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course.

Researchers from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania developed a new trajectory-planning system that tackles both challenges at once. Their technique enables a UAV to react to obstacles in milliseconds while staying on a smooth flight path that minimizes travel time. 

Their system uses a new mathematical formulation that ensures the robot travels safely to its destination along a feasible path, and that is less computationally intensive than other techniques. In this way, it generates smoother trajectories faster than state-of-the-art methods.

The trajectory planner is also efficient enough for real-time flight using only the robot’s onboard computer and sensors. 

Named MIGHTY, the open-source system does not require proprietary software packages that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It could be more readily deployed in a wider variety of real-world settings.

In addition to search-and-rescue, MIGHTY could be utilized in applications like last-mile delivery in urban spaces, where UAVs need to avoid buildings, wires, and people, or in industrial inspection of complex structures, such as wind turbines.

“MIGHTY achieves comparable or better performance using only open-source tools, which means any researcher, student, or company — anywhere in the world — can use it freely. By removing this cost barrier, MIGHTY helps democratize high-performance trajectory planning and opens the door for a much broader community to build on this work,” says Kota Kondo, an aeronautics and astronautics graduate student and lead author of a paper on this trajectory planner.

Kondo is joined on the paper by Yuwei Wu, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania; Vijay Kumar, a professor at UPenn; and senior author Jonathan P. How, a Ford professor of aeronautics and astronautics and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Aerospace Controls Laboratory (ACL) at MIT. The research appears in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Overcoming trade-offs           

When Kondo was a child, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident occurred following the Great East Japan Earthquake. With school cancelled, Kondo was stuck at home and watched the news every day as workers explored and secured the reactor site. Some workers still had to enter hazardous areas to contain the damage and assess the situation, exposing them to high doses of radioactive material.

“I became passionate about creating autonomous robots that can go into these dynamic and dangerous situations, then come back and report to humans who stay out of harm’s way,” Kondo says.

This task requires a strong trajectory planner, which is software that decides the path a robot should follow to safely get from point A to point B. 

But many existing systems force tradeoffs that limit performance. 

While some commercial systems can rapidly generate smooth trajectories, they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Open-source alternatives often underperform compared to commercial solvers or are difficult to use.      

With MIGHTY, Kondo and his colleagues developed an open-source system that produces high-quality, smooth trajectories while reacting to obstacles in real-time, and which runs fast enough for flight using only onboard components.

To do this, they overcame a key challenge that limits many open-source systems. 

These methods usually estimate how long it will take the robot to get from point A to point B as a first step. From that fixed estimation of travel time, the planner finds the best path to reach the destination.

While using a fixed travel time allows the planner to rapidly generate a trajectory, it has drawbacks. For one, if the UAV must go far out of its way to avoid obstacles, it could be forced to crank up the speed to meet the fixed travel-time budget. This makes it harder to avoid sudden hazards.

A MIGHTY method

Instead, MIGHTY uses a mathematical technique, called a Hermite spline, that optimizes the travel time and flight path together, in a single step, to form a smooth trajectory that can be precisely controlled.

“Optimizing the spatial and temporal components together gets us better results, but now the optimization becomes so much bigger that it is harder to solve in a feasible amount of time,” Kondo says.

The researchers used a clever technique to reduce this computational overhead. 

Instead of generating a trajectory from scratch each time, MIGHTY makes an initial guess of a trajectory. Then it refines the trajectory through an iterative optimization, using a map of the scene generated by the UAV’s lidar sensors.

“We can make a decent guess of what the trajectory should be, which is a lot faster than generating the entire thing from nothing,” Kondo says.

This enables MIGHTY to react in real-time to unknown obstacles while keeping the trajectory smooth and minimizing travel time. The system utilizes the UAV’s onboard components, which is important for applications where a robot might travel far from a base station.

In simulated experiments, MIGHTY needed only about 90 percent of the computation time required by state-of-the-art methods, while safely reaching its destination about 15 percent faster than these approaches. 

When they tested the system on real robots, it reached a speed of 6.7 meters per second while avoiding every obstacle that appeared in its path.

“With MIGHTY, everything is integrated in one piece. It doesn’t need to talk to any other piece of software to get a solution. This helps us be even faster than some of the commercial solvers,” Kondo says.

In the future, the researchers want to enhance MIGHTY so it can be used to control multiple robots at once and conduct more flight experiments in challenging environments. They hope to continue improving the open-source system based on user feedback.

“MIGHTY makes an important contribution to agile robot navigation by revisiting the trajectory representation itself. Hermite splines have already been successfully used in visual simultaneous localization and mapping, and it is nice to see their advantages now being exploited for trajectory planning in mobile robots. By enabling joint optimization of path geometry, timing, velocity, and acceleration while retaining local control of the trajectory, MIGHTY gives robots more freedom to compute fast, dynamically feasible motions in cluttered environments,” says Davide Scaramuzza, professor and director of the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, who was not involved with this research.

This research was funded, in part, by the United States Army Research Laboratory and the Defense Science and Technology Agency in Singapore.

Elephant trunk skin reveals design that could reshape soft robotics

An elephant's trunk is both strong and capable of extremely fine motor movements. With this muscular, boneless structure, an elephant can carry heavy logs—or deftly peel a banana. Lucia Beccai and colleagues studied the skin of the trunk, hoping to understand its properties and derive lessons for the next generation of advanced soft robotics. The authors obtained a trunk from a single adult Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) that died of natural causes at Zurich Zoo, Switzerland, in 2020.
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