This could create a “self-fulfilling prophecy” for enabling more autonomous robots to enter the world, Hurst said, because so many “really motivated, excited, and capable engineers throwing their whole life’s efforts into this professionally is going to make it happen.”

One such person is Dipam Patel, who is pursuing his PhD in computer science at Purdue University in Indiana while also testing robots at the US Army DevCom Army Research Lab.

His Army Research Lab work has focused on training robots to traverse unfamiliar landscapes filled with obstacles during search-and-rescue scenarios, such as the aftermath of an earthquake disaster. He has even tested how four-legged robots with a robot arm on top can perform “interactive navigation” by grabbing obstacles to move them out of the way.

Scrambling through earthquake debris and moving objects out of the way is second nature to human rescue workers. But robots face challenges in reliably performing multi-step tasks with longer time horizons, including “catastrophic forgetting” when a robot’s AI model trained through reinforcement learning may overwrite a previously learned capability as it starts to learn new tasks.

The robots also need to pack enough onboard computing hardware and sensors to perform as needed in new environments without necessarily relying on external cameras and sensors or having the luxury of offloading computing tasks to cloud servers. “The robot should be able to do everything on its own without any external dependencies,” Patel told Ars. “Only then can we push towards general-purpose robots.”

Patel, who is also a graduate student member at IEEE, has done broader work on developing whole-body control schemes for both quadruped “robot dogs” and the humanoid robots that have generated so much excitement among investors and the general public. But like Levine at Physical Intelligence, he takes a pragmatic approach in his view of what robotic form makes the most sense.

“People are like, ‘we need a human-like robot,’ but we don’t really need that,” Patel said. “We just need a robot that can do stuff.”

This story was updated on July 7, 2026 to provide additional information about how Agility’s Digit robot would operate around human workers.