An AI make-up robot arm wins Hong Kong's first physical AI hackathon

Iron Bestie, a personalized make-up assistant that picks up lipstick and applies it while running through the user's morning schedule, took top honours at what organizers billed as Hong Kong's first physical AI hackathon, beating more than 160 global competitors over 48 hours. The system runs on vision-language models plus voice control. Physical AI hackathons are a new format, compressing hardware and software integration into a weekend, and the winning entry suggests how quickly VLMs have made fine manipulation tasks demo-ready.

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