Column: For physical AI, maps are turning into memory
A robot that can map a factory floor still cannot necessarily find the box it has been asked to move, or remember what it saw on its last visit. For autonomous robots, building the map is increasingly just the beginning. What comes next — searching for objects, navigating to specified locations, remembering what the robot has seen, and retrieving that information for model reasoning in complex environments — is where the new applications and challenges lie.