Therobotreport
Jun 4, 12:30
Voyager Technologies acquires Astrobotic to advance lunar initiatives
Voyager intends to accelerate investment to scale Astrobotic’s programs, including lunar and reusable rocket programs. The post Voyager Technologies acquires Astrobotic to advance lunar initiatives appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Voyager Technologies acquires Astrobotic to advance lunar initiatives. Voyager intends to accelerate investment to scale Astrobotic’s programs, including lunar and reusable rocket programs. The post Voyager Technologies acquires Astrobotic to advance lunar initiatives appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Voyager Technologies acquires Astrobotic to advance lunar initiatives appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
Jun 3, 21:41
Autonomous defense manufacturer Mach Industries raises $300M
Mach Industries will use the funding to accelerate executing government contracts, acquire talent, develop products, and expand its network. The post Autonomous defense manufacturer Mach Industries raises $300M appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Mach Industries vertically integrates weapons, propulsion, and manufacturing. | Source: Mach Industries Mach Industries, a manufacturer of uncrewed defense systems, yesterday said it has raised $300 million in Series C funding.
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Mach Industries will use the funding to accelerate executing government contracts, acquire talent, develop products, and expand its network. The post Autonomous defense manufacturer Mach Industries raises $300M appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
Jun 3, 13:26
RoboBusiness 2026 opens call for speakers
RoboBusiness 2026, the premier event for developers of commercial robotics and those building robotics businesses, is seeking expert speakers. The post RoboBusiness 2026 opens call for speakers appeared first on The Robot Report .
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RoboBusiness 2026, the premier event for developers of commercial robotics and those building robotics businesses, is seeking expert speakers. The post RoboBusiness 2026 opens call for speakers appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
RoboBusiness 2026, the premier event for developers of commercial robotics and those building robotics businesses, is seeking expert speakers.
Therobotreport
Jun 3, 12:31
Festo launches lightweight pneumatic gripper and tests GripperAI
Festo has released a compact cobot gripper, and its robot-agnostic GripperAI enables grasping of objects without prior training. The post Festo launches lightweight pneumatic gripper and tests GripperAI appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Festo launches lightweight pneumatic gripper and tests GripperAI. Festo has released a compact cobot gripper, and its robot-agnostic GripperAI enables grasping of objects without prior training. The post Festo launches lightweight pneumatic gripper and tests GripperAI appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Festo launches lightweight pneumatic gripper and tests GripperAI appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
Jun 3, 12:15
Boston University team wins MassRobotics Form & Function Challenge at Robotics Summit
MassRobotics awarded prizes to university teams and showcased healthcare innovators, physical AI developers, and startups. The post Boston University team wins MassRobotics Form & Function Challenge at Robotics Summit appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Boston University team wins MassRobotics Form & Function Challenge at Robotics Summit. MassRobotics awarded prizes to university teams and showcased healthcare innovators, physical AI developers, and startups. The post Boston University team wins MassRobotics Form & Function Challenge at Robotics Summit appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Boston University team wins MassRobotics Form & Function Challenge at Robotics Summit appeared first on The Robot Report .
Robohub
Jun 3, 09:13
Global robotics technology roadmap
Deborah Lupton / Pop Chips / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0. Henrik I Christensen, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at University of California San Diego, has recently released a global robotics technology roadmap. This position paper focuses on Asia, Europe, and America and outlines the current state-of-the-art in robotics, and highlights the main opportunities. The […]
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Global robotics technology roadmap. Deborah Lupton / Pop Chips / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0. Henrik I Christensen, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at University of California San Diego, has recently released a global robotics technology roadmap.
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This position paper focuses on Asia, Europe, and America and outlines the current state-of-the-art in robotics, and highlights the main opportunities.
Therobotreport
Jun 2, 19:15
2026 Robotics Summit & Expo Recap
Listen to the podcast this week as The Robot Report editorial staff recaps the recent Robotics Summit & Expo from Boston. The post 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo Recap appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Listen to the podcast this week as The Robot Report editorial staff recaps the recent Robotics Summit & Expo from Boston. The post 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo Recap appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
Listen to the podcast this week as The Robot Report editorial staff recaps the recent Robotics Summit & Expo from Boston.
Computerworld
Jun 2, 18:19
Microsoft announces Scout, an autonomous AI agent built on OpenClaw
Topics Close Analytics Android Apple Artificial Intelligence Augmented Reality Careers Cloud Computing Collaboration Software Computers and Peripherals Data Center Emerging Technology Enterprise Appl…
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Microsoft announces Scout, an autonomous AI agent built on OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout, unveiled at the company’s Build event Tuesday, is a new type of always-on agent based on the OpenClaw agent framework that Microsoft calls “autopilots.
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Microsoft has developed a new AI agent that can run autonomously around the clock to complete tasks across Microsoft 365 applications.
Therobotreport
Jun 2, 18:15
Petal Surgical adds more funding for incisionless surgical robot
Petal said its incisionless surgery method could create a new standard of care, making advanced treatments safer, more accessible and less traumatic for patients worldwide. The post Petal Surgical adds more funding for incisionless surgical robot appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Petal Surgical adds more funding for incisionless surgical robot. Petal said its incisionless surgery method could create a new standard of care, making advanced treatments safer, more accessible and less traumatic for patients worldwide. The post Petal Surgical adds more funding for incisionless surgical robot appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Petal Surgical adds more funding for incisionless surgical robot appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
Jun 2, 17:46
FORT Robotics acquires Mapless AI to expand teleop capabilities
While FORT has traditionally worked with technology in industrial environments, Mapless AI brings experience in more unstructured settings. The post FORT Robotics acquires Mapless AI to expand teleop capabilities appeared first on The Robot Report .
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FORT said acquiring Mapless AI will enable it to expand into complex real-world environments, including construction, logistics, defense, and more. | Source: FORT Robotics FORT Robotics recently acquired Mapless AI, a Boston- and Pittsburgh-based developer of teleoperation and onboard active safety technology.
TL;DR:
While FORT has traditionally worked with technology in industrial environments, Mapless AI brings experience in more unstructured settings. The post FORT Robotics acquires Mapless AI to expand teleop capabilities appeared first on The Robot Report .
Robohub
Jun 2, 10:51
RoboChem Flex: democratisation of the autonomous synthesis robot
Image credit: HIMS / Nature Synthesis. In a paper published in Nature Synthesis, researchers led by Professor Timothy Noël of the University of Amsterdam’s Van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences present an advance in autonomous laboratory systems for synthesis optimisation. A versatile, modular design and the option for “human-in-the-loop” analytics, RoboChem Flex caters to […]
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RoboChem Flex: democratisation of the autonomous synthesis robot. In a paper published in Nature Synthesis, researchers led by Professor Timothy Noël of the University of Amsterdam’s Van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences present an advance in autonomous laboratory systems for synthesis optimisation.
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Image credit: HIMS / Nature Synthesis.
Therobotreport
Jun 1, 21:27
NVIDIA releases new and updated tools for physical AI developers
NVIDIA has released open-source physical AI agent skills and tools, as well as an Isaac GR00T humanoid reference robot. The post NVIDIA releases new and updated tools for physical AI developers appeared first on The Robot Report .
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NVIDIA releases new and updated tools for physical AI developers. NVIDIA has released open-source physical AI agent skills and tools, as well as an Isaac GR00T humanoid reference robot. The post NVIDIA releases new and updated tools for physical AI developers appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
NVIDIA has released open-source physical AI agent skills and tools, as well as an Isaac GR00T humanoid reference robot.
Therobotreport
Jun 1, 19:55
ANSCER Robotics closes Series A round for industrial material handling
ANSCER Robotics has raised $5.4 million to scale its hybrid industrial automation robots in North America and globally. The post ANSCER Robotics closes Series A round for industrial material handling appeared first on The Robot Report .
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ANSCER Robotics closes Series A round for industrial material handling. ANSCER Robotics has raised $5.4 million to scale its hybrid industrial automation robots in North America and globally. The post ANSCER Robotics closes Series A round for industrial material handling appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
ANSCER Robotics has raised $5.4 million to scale its hybrid industrial automation robots in North America and globally.
Therobotreport
Jun 1, 18:04
Top 10 robotics stories of May 2026
May 2026 was a busy month full of robotics news, and it was topped off by the Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston. The post Top 10 robotics stories of May 2026 appeared first on The Robot Report .
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May 2026 was a busy month full of robotics news, and it was topped off by the Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston. The post Top 10 robotics stories of May 2026 appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
May 2026 was a busy month full of robotics news, and it was topped off by the Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston.
Therobotreport
Jun 1, 15:24
Learn about advances in robotic case and each picking
Experts from Locus Robotics, Nomagic, and RightHand Robotics will discuss progress in piece picking in this week's webinar. The post Learn about advances in robotic case and each picking appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Learn about advances in robotic case and each picking. Experts from Locus Robotics, Nomagic, and RightHand Robotics will discuss progress in piece picking in this week's webinar. The post Learn about advances in robotic case and each picking appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
Experts from Locus Robotics, Nomagic, and RightHand Robotics will discuss progress in piece picking in this week's webinar.
Therobotreport
May 31, 12:30
Why robotic arms are now being integrated with CNC machines
Robotic CNC machine tending is becoming more flexible as leading suppliers bring new software and integration to industry. The post Why robotic arms are now being integrated with CNC machines appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Why robotic arms are now being integrated with CNC machines. Robotic CNC machine tending is becoming more flexible as leading suppliers bring new software and integration to industry. The post Why robotic arms are now being integrated with CNC machines appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
Robotic CNC machine tending is becoming more flexible as leading suppliers bring new software and integration to industry.
Mariozechner
May 31, 02:54
How to Build a Shitty Robot
Last Friday I went to the toy store with my boy, and while he was rummaging through the Spider-Man section, my eyes caught sight of a section with very low-cost toy robots.
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How to Build a Shitty Robot. The little robot came with a remote that lets you turn its head counterclockwise or move it forward in the direction it's facing. Also, that LED matrix is actually not an LED matrix, but more on that later.
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Last Friday I went to the toy store with my boy, and while he was rummaging through the Spider-Man section, my eyes caught sight of a section with very low-cost toy robots.
Therobotreport
May 30, 13:21
MISUMI Group invests $1B in Americas, global AI and digital manufacturing
MISUMI Americas combines MISUMI's precision components with Fictiv's digital manufacturing platform for an entire bill of materials. The post MISUMI Group invests $1B in Americas, global AI and digital manufacturing appeared first on The Robot Report .
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MISUMI Group invests $1B in Americas, global AI and digital manufacturing. MISUMI Americas combines MISUMI's precision components with Fictiv's digital manufacturing platform for an entire bill of materials. The post MISUMI Group invests $1B in Americas, global AI and digital manufacturing appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
MISUMI Americas combines MISUMI's precision components with Fictiv's digital manufacturing platform for an entire bill of materials.
Spectrum
May 29, 17:00
Video Friday: Extreme Omnidirectional Robot
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO Enjoy today’s videos! What is the right number of legs for a robot? Two? Four? No, the answer is obviously all of them. All of the legs. [ Argus ] Sigh, yet another skill that I as a soccer-playing human should have but a robot has instead: the rabona. [ Boston Dynamics ] Robots are rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives, from drones and industrial machines to home assistants and humanoid robots. As their presence continues to grow, an important question arises: how can we choose the right robot—not only in terms of performance and cost, but also in terms of sustainability? This video introduces the Eco‑Score for Robots, a new approach to evaluating the environmental impact of robotic systems. Just as eco-labels help consumers make informed choices in other industries, the Robotics Eco‑Label provides a clear and transparent way to assess how sustainable a robot truly is. [ Robotics EcoLabel ] Thanks, Bram! Uh oh, five-fingered hands . [ Agility ] Robotic manipulation has come a long way since the 1990s. We’ve gone from the two-ball paddle juggling robot to AthenaZero, who can juggle barehanded using onboard vision feedback. By moving away from task-specific passive end-effectors such as cups or paddles and using multi-fingered hands, it can transition between a wide range of patterns including cascade, half-shower, tennis, shower, and box. There needs to be a robot circus show already. [ Robotics and AI Institute ] Zero legs. One hat. $13k. [ Astribot ] From its elegant design to the advanced technology powering every step, Luna is more than a machine—it’s a leap into the future. [ LimX Dynamics ] Thanks, Jinyan! You got a quadrotor in my quadruped! No, you got a quadruped in my quadrotor! [ MARS Laboratory ] A human hand, a robot’s arm—together tracing circles of trust and precision. No missteps. No hesitation. Just pure, algorithmic grace. [ UBTECH ] Low gravity planetary exploration with a quadruped just looks like fun. [ Autonomous Robots Lab ] Here it is, that robot Kool-Aid that everyone seems to be drinking. Including me! [ Generalist ] Don’t shoot Mini Pupper! [ MangDang ] We show here the ARISTO (Anthropomorphic, Robotic, Integrated-Sensing, Tendon-Operated) Hand. Developed in collaboration with Sony Group Corporation, this research platform is engineered to address the complex requirements of manipulating small, thin, and fragile objects. [ University of Texas Human Centered Robotics Lab ] Okay but did you really have to call it the T800? [ EngineAI ] Moby shows what useful mobile manipulation looks like in the real world: picking up, carrying, and placing adaptable payloads. The video shows payload handling across increasing crate loads, including a 50.3-lb load, while maintaining balance, control, and mobility. This is the kind of capability that matters outside the lab—moving real objects, in real spaces, with practical reliability. [ Noble Machines ] What does it take to make a robot look human? Harvard SEAS students Hailey Block, Henry Tavistock, and Evan Crowley created “Hollow Minds,” a pair of animatronic heads capable of speaking, blinking, tracking movement, and displaying lifelike facial expressions. [ Harvard University ] The longevity here is impressive, but the obvious question here is why the heck you’d ever do this task with a bipedal humanoid robot. It also doesn’t seem to have any error recovery, which is obviously fixable, but highlights the fact that real humans are versatile and humanoid robots are not. [ Figure ] Kacper Nowicki, CEO and Co-Founder, Nomagic, recently sat down for a deep dive into the “humanoid vs. purpose-built” debate during a panel discussion at the Web Summit in Vancouver 2026. [ Nomagic ]
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Video Friday: Extreme Omnidirectional Robot. What is the right number of legs for a robot? [ Autonomous Robots Lab ] Here it is, that robot Kool-Aid that everyone seems to be drinking.
TL;DR:
What is the right number of legs for a robot?
Therobotreport
May 29, 15:00
Software becoming the biggest bottleneck to physical AI innovation, finds QNX research
As robots enter more unconstrained environments, software and security are becoming higher priorities, a QNX survey found. The post Software becoming the biggest bottleneck to physical AI innovation, finds QNX research appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Software becoming the biggest bottleneck to physical AI innovation, finds QNX research. As robots enter more unconstrained environments, software and security are becoming higher priorities, a QNX survey found. The post Software becoming the biggest bottleneck to physical AI innovation, finds QNX research appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
As robots enter more unconstrained environments, software and security are becoming higher priorities, a QNX survey found.
Therobotreport
May 29, 14:24
NIST proposes a baseline performance benchmark for humanoid robots
NIST has proposed a standardized performance benchmark and testing procedures to help developers and evaluators of humanoids. The post NIST proposes a baseline performance benchmark for humanoid robots appeared first on The Robot Report .
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NIST proposes a baseline performance benchmark for humanoid robots. NIST has proposed a standardized performance benchmark and testing procedures to help developers and evaluators of humanoids. The post NIST proposes a baseline performance benchmark for humanoid robots appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
NIST has proposed a standardized performance benchmark and testing procedures to help developers and evaluators of humanoids.
Robohub
May 29, 11:55
Robot Talk Episode 158 – Autonomous robot deliveries, with Ahti Heinla
Claire chatted to Ahti Heinla from Starship Technologies about their AI-powered delivery robots that operate independently on streets and pavements. Ahti Heinla is the co-founder and CEO of Starship Technologies, the world’s leading autonomous delivery company building AI-powered robots that operate fully independently in real-world environments. One of the original engineers behind Skype’s billion-dollar success, […]
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Claire chatted to Ahti Heinla from Starship Technologies about their AI-powered delivery robots that operate independently on streets and pavements. Ahti Heinla is the co-founder and CEO of Starship Technologies, the world’s leading autonomous delivery company building AI-powered robots that operate fully independently in real-world environments.
TL;DR:
Claire chatted to Ahti Heinla from Starship Technologies about their AI-powered delivery robots that operate independently on streets and pavements.
Tesla
May 28, 20:16
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 Enters Factory Production
Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus Gen 3 started working on assembly lines, performing complex assembly tasks alongside human workers.
TL;DR:
Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus Gen 3 started working on assembly lines, performing complex assembly tasks alongside human workers.
Therobotreport
May 28, 14:12
The evolution of cobots in metal fabrication and construction
Matt Bush, the co-founder and CEO of Hirebotics, talks about how cobots are becoming a necessity for manufacturers and welders. The post The evolution of cobots in metal fabrication and construction appeared first on The Robot Report .
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The evolution of cobots in metal fabrication and construction. Matt Bush, the co-founder and CEO of Hirebotics, talks about how cobots are becoming a necessity for manufacturers and welders. The post The evolution of cobots in metal fabrication and construction appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post The evolution of cobots in metal fabrication and construction appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 28, 12:00
Your guide to the last day of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo
The fun continues in Boston for the second day of the Robotics Summit & Expo, which includes the Women in Robotics breakfast and more. The post Your guide to the last day of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Your guide to the last day of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo. The fun continues in Boston for the second day of the Robotics Summit & Expo, which includes the Women in Robotics breakfast and more. The post Your guide to the last day of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The fun continues in Boston for the second day of the Robotics Summit & Expo, which includes the Women in Robotics breakfast and more.
Robohub
May 28, 06:25
Light-activated gel could impact wearables, soft robotics, and more
New MIT work advances the growing field of ionotronics, in which data are transferred through ions, potentially providing a bridge between electronics and biological tissue.
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MIT engineers and colleagues have developed a soft, flexible gel that dramatically changes its conductivity upon the application of light. This figure shows a soft, stretchable circuit created with a rectangular bar of the gel.
TL;DR:
New MIT work advances the growing field of ionotronics, in which data are transferred through ions, potentially providing a bridge between electronics and biological tissue.
Robohub
May 27, 15:44
Handle with care: Soft robot gripper picks ripe fruit without bruising
Cornell researchers used stretchable fiber-optic sensors to create a soft robot gripper that can predict the ripeness of strawberries by touch. Credit: Anand Mishra. By David Nutt When assessing the ripeness of fruit, sight and smell can tell you a lot, but the best indicator is often how the fruit feels. Cornell researchers used stretchable […]
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Cornell researchers used stretchable fiber-optic sensors to create a soft robot gripper that can predict the ripeness of strawberries by touch. Credit: Anand Mishra. By David Nutt When assessing the ripeness of fruit, sight and smell can tell you a lot, but the best indicator is often how the fruit feels. Cornell researchers used stretchable […]
TL;DR:
Cornell researchers used stretchable fiber-optic sensors to create a soft robot gripper that can predict the ripeness of strawberries by touch.
Therobotreport
May 27, 12:00
A guide to Day 1 of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo
Today, the Robotics Summit & Expo will be full of insightful talks, hands-on robot demos, and interesting conversations. The post A guide to Day 1 of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
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A guide to Day 1 of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo. Today, the Robotics Summit & Expo will be full of insightful talks, hands-on robot demos, and interesting conversations. The post A guide to Day 1 of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post A guide to Day 1 of the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 27, 11:43
Why robots still struggle to see the real world
Making machine perception reliable enough for real deployment requires more than better AI; it requires properly calibrated sensors, says an Orbbec co-founder. The post Why robots still struggle to see the real world appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Why robots still struggle to see the real world. Making machine perception reliable enough for real deployment requires more than better AI; it requires properly calibrated sensors, says an Orbbec co-founder. The post Why robots still struggle to see the real world appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Why robots still struggle to see the real world appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 26, 20:34
How humanoids learn to read the room
Sponsored by Analog Devices Inc. Designing for a humanoid robot is one of the most complicated applications in robotics today. All on its own, a humanoid system has to manage movement, balance, vision and reactivity across a complex web of joints, sensors and data processing. This becomes critical when a humanoid robot operates in an… The post How humanoids learn to read the room appeared first on The Robot Report .
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How humanoids learn to read the room. Designing for a humanoid robot is one of the most complicated applications in robotics today. This becomes critical when a humanoid robot operates in an… The post How humanoids learn to read the room appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
Designing for a humanoid robot is one of the most complicated applications in robotics today.
Therobotreport
May 26, 20:34
GMSL and the growing ecosystem around robotic vision systems
Sponsored by Analog Devices Inc. Just a few years ago, many site owners were satisfied if a robot could move from point A to point B. That’s not quite enough anymore. Today’s robots are being asked to move faster, operate in more dynamic environments, and deal with more obstacles along the way. As those demands… The post GMSL and the growing ecosystem around robotic vision systems appeared first on The Robot Report .
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GMSL and the growing ecosystem around robotic vision systems. Just a few years ago, many site owners were satisfied if a robot could move from point A to point B. As those demands… The post GMSL and the growing ecosystem around robotic vision systems appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
As those demands… The post GMSL and the growing ecosystem around robotic vision systems appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 26, 14:35
XELA Robotics to show tactile sensing at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo
XELA Robotics will show at the Robotics Summit & Expo its improved magnetic interference compensation and uSkin in the Universal Manipulation Interface. The post XELA Robotics to show tactile sensing at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
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XELA Robotics to show tactile sensing at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo. XELA Robotics will show at the Robotics Summit & Expo its improved magnetic interference compensation and uSkin in the Universal Manipulation Interface. The post XELA Robotics to show tactile sensing at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post XELA Robotics to show tactile sensing at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 26, 13:01
Allient to demonstrate advanced motion control systems at 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo
Allient will exhibit and demonstrate a range of its motion and control technologies at the Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston this week. The post Allient to demonstrate advanced motion control systems at 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Allient to demonstrate advanced motion control systems at 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo. Allient will exhibit and demonstrate a range of its motion and control technologies at the Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston this week. The post Allient to demonstrate advanced motion control systems at 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Allient to demonstrate advanced motion control systems at 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 26, 13:00
IntBot and Certis Group partner to scale physical AI for enterprises across Singapore
Certis is collaborating with IntBot to add humanoids to its existing service robot offerings as the partners start to expand in Singapore. The post IntBot and Certis Group partner to scale physical AI for enterprises across Singapore appeared first on The Robot Report .
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IntBot and Certis Group partner to scale physical AI for enterprises across Singapore. Certis is collaborating with IntBot to add humanoids to its existing service robot offerings as the partners start to expand in Singapore. The post IntBot and Certis Group partner to scale physical AI for enterprises across Singapore appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post IntBot and Certis Group partner to scale physical AI for enterprises across Singapore appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 26, 12:00
A guide to everything happening at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo
Over the next two days, the Robotics Summit & Expo will bring thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors to Boston. The post A guide to everything happening at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
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A guide to everything happening at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo. Over the next two days, the Robotics Summit & Expo will bring thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors to Boston. The post A guide to everything happening at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post A guide to everything happening at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 25, 14:23
Simulation vs. digital twin: A strategic lens on virtual manufacturing
Digital twins and simulation provide distinct benefits for manufacturers designing and integrating systems including automation, explains Visual Components. The post Simulation vs. digital twin: A strategic lens on virtual manufacturing appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Digital twins and simulation provide distinct benefits for manufacturers designing and integrating systems including automation, explains Visual Components. The post Simulation vs. digital twin: A strategic lens on virtual manufacturing appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
digital twin: A strategic lens on virtual manufacturing appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 24, 12:25
Sortera uses physical AI to double capacity in a Tennessee sorting facility
With the new facility, Sortera has increased its annual processing capacity to an estimated 240 million lbs. The post Sortera uses physical AI to double capacity in a Tennessee sorting facility appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Sortera uses physical AI to double capacity in a Tennessee sorting facility. With the new facility, Sortera has increased its annual processing capacity to an estimated 240 million lbs. The post Sortera uses physical AI to double capacity in a Tennessee sorting facility appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Sortera uses physical AI to double capacity in a Tennessee sorting facility appeared first on The Robot Report .
IEEE Spectrum
May 24, 00:16
Surgical Robot Performs Autonomous Knee Replacement Surgery
A robotic system performed a complete knee replacement autonomously, with a human surgeon only supervising, achieving 0.5mm accuracy.
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IEEE.org IEEE Xplore IEEE Standards IEEE Job Site More Sites Sign In Join IEEE The June issue of IEEE Spectrum is here! Forgotten photos of the Trinity detonation show the immensity of the project Majestic Labs’ Prometheus packs up to 128 TB of DRAM per server 2,700 years of invasion and exploitation explain the resistance Golf carts and forklifts benefit from a new approach t…
TL;DR:
A robotic system performed a complete knee replacement autonomously, with a human surgeon only supervising, achieving 0.5mm accuracy.
Science Robotics
May 24, 00:16
Soft Robotics Breakthrough Enables Adaptive Grasping
New pneumatic artificial muscles using variable stiffness actuators can adapt to any object shape without prior programming.
TL;DR:
New pneumatic artificial muscles using variable stiffness actuators can adapt to any object shape without prior programming.
Therobotreport
May 23, 00:17
Exploring PLC and robot integration with YRG Robotics’ Chris Elston
Chris Elston discusses PLC integration, Yamaha Robotics, and AI's role in advancing automation accessibility and innovation. The post Exploring PLC and robot integration with YRG Robotics’ Chris Elston appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Exploring PLC and robot integration with YRG Robotics’ Chris Elston. Chris Elston discusses PLC integration, Yamaha Robotics, and AI's role in advancing automation accessibility and innovation. The post Exploring PLC and robot integration with YRG Robotics’ Chris Elston appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Exploring PLC and robot integration with YRG Robotics’ Chris Elston appeared first on The Robot Report .
Therobotreport
May 22, 18:49
Robotics Summit keynote to present open foundation for AI-powered robots
Brian Gerkey of Open Robotics will explain how the open-source community is ushering in the age of robots and AI at the Robotics Summit. The post Robotics Summit keynote to present open foundation for AI-powered robots appeared first on The Robot Report .
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Robotics Summit keynote to present open foundation for AI-powered robots. Brian Gerkey of Open Robotics will explain how the open-source community is ushering in the age of robots and AI at the Robotics Summit. The post Robotics Summit keynote to present open foundation for AI-powered robots appeared first on The Robot Report .
TL;DR:
The post Robotics Summit keynote to present open foundation for AI-powered robots appeared first on The Robot Report .
Spectrum
May 22, 16:00
Video Friday: Atlas Versus a Fridge
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO Enjoy today’s videos! Just months after its debut, Atlas is proving why it is the world’s most capable and dynamic humanoid robot, ready for real work. Lifting a mini-fridge is a feat of strength, but the true breakthrough is in the underlying reinforcement learning and controls systems. The robot is learning to navigate real world adaptability: handling heavy objects by bracing and accounting for the mass and inertia; using whole-body control, not just hands to maneuver; and demonstrating superhuman range of motion and balance. This marks a critical shift in robotics where humanoids move beyond the lab and into dynamic industrial settings. Watching Atlas move a fridge may be less impressive than whatever the heck it does at 4:10. [ Boston Dynamics ] SpikerBot is a robot you teach by wiring neurons, not writing code. Drag spiking neurons in the app, connect them to sensors and motors, then press play. It moves, reacts, and changes behavior based on the brain you built. Already funded on Kickstarter with a robot kit starting at US $219. [ Kickstarter ] via [ Backyard Brains ] Thanks, Greg! Wheeled-legged robots, which have wheels at their feet and achieve high mobility by coordinating wheel drive and leg drive, have been developed. In this paper, we address the problem of how to draw out the potential task-execution capability of the legs by freeing them from the roles of locomotion through external body support. [ WiXus ] from [ JSK Robotics Laboratory ] via [ ICRA 2026 ] A very clever idea for electronics-free, multi-dimensional touch sensing. [ Nature Communications ] Using external voice commands, G1 is directly controlled to generate a wide range of actions in real time. This video was recorded in a single take, with on‑site audio recording. [ Unitree ] Hummingbirds are impressive flyers, and advancements in high-speed photography, instrumentation, and measurement techniques have revealed much about their aerodynamics, flight behaviors, and wing and body kinematics. However, comparatively less is known about their natural flight dynamics, which is the relationship among a bird’s flight velocities, the control actions of its wings, and the acceleration of the bird in flight. To investigate this, at the Advanced Vertical Flight Laboratory we have designed, built, and flight tested a biomimetic robotic hummingbird on which is implemented the same techniques for flight control as observed in hummingbirds. [ Advanced Vertical Flight Laboratory ] I guess if you’re going to make a robot dog , it’s only fair to give it the ability to frolic in the water. [ MagicLab ] The original automated layout robot—the one that showed up when the construction industry was pretty sure robots were lame and then proved otherwise. It has printed millions of square feet of layout across thousands of projects. It built an entire category of construction technology. The category of: Stuff That Actually Does Helpful Work on Real Jobsites. But FieldPrinter 2 is here. It’s faster, tougher, smaller, and smarter. So for FieldPrinter 1, it’s time. Time for a quiet retirement. A mug. Maybe a plaque... But nay, good knight! Thou shalt expire in a blaze of thunderous glory!! [ Dusty Robotics ] Here’s an interesting idea for an inflatable monocopter drone . [ AIRLAB ] Meet the Lynx S10—a compact all-terrain robot built to deliver industry-grade performance in a lightweight form factor under 20kg. [ DE Robotics ] Noble Machines builds general-purpose robots for heavy industry, supporting people with the most hazardous and physically demanding tasks. Attendees at NVIDIA GTC 2026 witnessed the power of autonomous industrial work with Noble Machines Moby. [ Noble Machines ] I’m sorry, but Lego bricks should be for humans only. [ LimX Dynamics ] Need a robot that can go places? Huskies were around way before legged humanoids, and I bet they’ll be around way after, too. [ Clearpath Robotics ] I know this little dude is just a research platform at Disney, but I still want one to be my friend. [ Paper ] In March 1982, General Motors announced a rapid and aggressive conversion to robotics. By 1990, GM wanted 14,000 robots in their factories doing everything from painting to welding to assembly. Nowadays, we dream of robots in the factories, doing everything end to end. In the dark. Lights out. Guess what? GM dreamed the same 40 years ago, and they spent an estimated US $60 billion to try to make it reality. In today’s video, we look at General Motors and their dreams of the automated, all-robot factory. [ Asianometry ]
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Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. [ LimX Dynamics ] Need a robot that can go places?
TL;DR:
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics.
Robohub
May 22, 12:13
Robot Talk Episode 157 – Generating new robot designs, with Josie Hughes
Claire chatted to Josie Hughes from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne about using AI to develop new designs for robotic manipulators. Josie Hughes is an Assistant Professor at EPFL, where she established the CREATE Lab in 2021. She completed her PhD in the Bio-inspired Robotics Lab at the University of Cambridge, examining the role of […]
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Robot Talk Episode 157 – Generating new robot designs, with Josie Hughes. Claire chatted to Josie Hughes from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne about using AI to develop new designs for robotic manipulators. She completed her PhD in the Bio-inspired Robotics Lab at the University of Cambridge, examining the role of […]
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She completed her PhD in the Bio-inspired Robotics Lab at the University of Cambridge, examining the role of […]
Spectrum
May 21, 14:00
Open-Source Software Is Starting to Help Robots Think
When a group of academics started making open-source robotics hardware , a generation of roboticists got years of their lives back. Now, the bigger challenge is getting robots to think—and that’s starting to be open sourced too. The shift is still early, but companies including Hugging Face, Nvidia, and Alibaba have all made significant bets on open-source robotics in the last two years, releasing tools and models aimed at the higher-level work of getting robots to reason, decide, and act. The open source movement that accelerated other AI applications is now being applied to the problem of making robots smarter. If these attempts to bring AI to robotics with open-source platforms succeed, the barrier to building a capable robot could fall as fast as the barrier to building an AI application did. The world ROS built Open-source robotics software has been around since the mid-1990s, with early projects like Carnegie Mellon University’s Inter-Process Communication package and the Player Project in the early 2000s laying the groundwork. But these were often tied to specific research groups, and the field remained fragmented. The Robot Operating System, ROS, changed that when it made its debut in 2007. By bundling tools and attracting more users, it became the de facto standard. The story of open-source robotics, in many ways, starts there. Despite its name, ROS is not actually an operating system. Rather, it is a software framework that sits on top of Linux and handles robotic fundamentals like moving data between components, talking to hardware, building maps, planning paths, and supporting developer tools, such as data logging and visualization. Before ROS, every robotics team wrote that infrastructure themselves. It often took a year or two before a lab could get to the research it actually cared about. Brian Gerkey , who helped build ROS in the mid-2000s, says he was drawn to the project because of how much open source had already changed the world, pointing out that nearly the entire internet is built on it . “I’m a tool builder, and I like to share everything as openly as I possibly can, because I think that’s where we get the most impact out of what we build,” says Gerkey, board chair of Open Robotics and now CTO at Intrinsic , a robotics and AI unit of Google. As it was developing, the AI community largely took the same approach, sharing research, models, and data openly, and the field accelerated faster than almost anyone predicted. Now some of those same advancements are arriving in robotics. Open-source AI for robotics Computer vision, once a hard problem, has advanced dramatically in just a few years, says Spencer Huang , Nvidia’s director of product for robotics. What once required significant expertise can now be done in a few lines of code. Simulation tools have become accurate enough to be useful for training, and access to the tooling that once required a specialized lab is now widely available, much of it open source. “To get into robotics, you no longer need a Ph.D.,” he says. The result is a much larger pool of people who can contribute, and the field is starting to look less like a specialized discipline and more like a platform that anyone can build on. Nvidia has built out an open-source robotics stack that covers the full development pipeline. Its Cosmos world models generate synthetic training data and simulate physical environments. Its GR00T models give robots the ability to reason through and execute complex tasks. And its Isaac frameworks handle the orchestration that ties training, simulation, and deployment together. Not everyone needs to train the robots from scratch, Huang says, and most people probably shouldn’t. “If you gate pre-training, the field just never grows,” he says. “We should be able to provide a high-quality, state-of-the-art pre-trained model that anyone can go and take and fine tune for their own purposes.” All of Nvidia’s open-source models live on Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform that has become the default place to share models and datasets. Hugging Face launched LeRobot , a community platform for robotics AI, in May 2024. Since its launch, the number of robotics datasets on the platform grew from 1,145 at the end of 2024 to more than 58,000 today, making it the single largest dataset category on the hub. Hugging Face has also moved into hardware, acquiring robotics company Pollen Robotics . The acquisition came from a realization that software alone was not enough, according to Clement Delangue , Hugging Face’s CEO. The goal, as with the software, was to bring more people in. The contributors to LeRobot include the biggest names in the industry, academic labs, and hobbyists building robots in their spare time. For instance, earlier this year, Alibaba released RynnBrain , an open-source foundation model for physical AI that the company claims outperforms comparable offerings from Google and Nvidia on benchmarks. That diversity of projects, Delangu...
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Now some of those same advancements are arriving in robotics. “To get into robotics, you no longer need a Ph.D.,” he says. Hugging Face has also moved into hardware, acquiring robotics company Pollen Robotics .
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Hugging Face has also moved into hardware, acquiring robotics company Pollen Robotics .
Robotics Business Review
May 21, 00:16
Warehouse Robotics Market Reaches $50B as Labor Shortages Bite
Global warehouse robotics revenue hit $50B annually, driven by a 30% labor shortage in logistics and e-commerce fulfillment.
TL;DR:
Global warehouse robotics revenue hit $50B annually, driven by a 30% labor shortage in logistics and e-commerce fulfillment.
Robohub
May 20, 13:03
Robotics Café brings together autonomous robot practitioners
The recently launched Robotics Café is a weekly online seminar series to bring together researchers, students and industry practitioners working in the field of autonomous robotics. One of the key aims of the initiative is to provide a dedicated platform for students to present and disseminate their work, enabling broader visibility and impact across academia […]
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The recently launched Robotics Café is a weekly online seminar series to bring together researchers, students and industry practitioners working in the field of autonomous robotics. One of the key aims of the initiative is to provide a dedicated platform for students to present and disseminate their work, enabling broader visibility and impact across academia […]
TL;DR:
The recently launched Robotics Café is a weekly online seminar series to bring together researchers, students and industry practitioners working in the field of autonomous robotics.
Spectrum
May 19, 17:41
Robots Could Turn E-Waste Into a Source of Legacy Chips
Electronic waste is moving up on regulatory agendas in 2026. New European waste-shipment rules, expanded recycling fees on products with non-removable batteries in California, and an e-waste import ban in Malaysia, for example, are all increasing pressure to recover more value before electronics are shredded or exported. The world is projected to generate 82 million tonnes of e-waste annually by 2030, according to the United Nations’ most recent Global E-Waste Monitor report in 2024. The report estimated that current e-waste management captures less than a third of the recoverable metal value contained in discarded electronics. For recyclers, much of that lost value is a consequence of what happens before a circuit board ever reaches a smelter or shredder. Boards contain a mixture of components such as memory chips, processors, magnets, and capacitors, as well as valuable raw materials such as copper, aluminum, tantalum, and precious metals. Conventional recycling often mixes everything into bulk streams and destroys components that might otherwise be reused. Tuurny , a startup based in San Francisco, is developing an automated system to remove and separate reusable chips from circuit boards before the remaining material is shredded. In April, the company announced it had designed a robotic system, called Nantul, to identify and extract RAM integrated circuits, claiming each machine can recover 300 intact RAM ICs per hour. Sina Ghashghaei , Tuurny’s founder, says the company is preparing its first field deployment with dozens of machines through a six-figure deal with Areera, a television recycler in the United Kingdom, which processes 1,500 tonnes of televisions per month. The deployment is planned for early 2027. Tuurny’s first target is recovering RAM ICs and other chips used in legacy systems where replacement components can be difficult to source. Ghashghaei says the company is talking with a few legacy chip suppliers and pursuing potential agreements to supply aluminum and copper recovered from circuit boards to smelters and refiners. He declined to identify the companies involved. Robots for Automated RAM Recovery Traditional electronics recycling often begins by shredding boards and sorting the mixed output afterward. Tuurny aims to do the opposite: Identify and remove components first, sort them by model or material, then reroute the recovered items to testing labs for potential reuse as new chips or to refiners and smelters for further processing. Nantul comprises three robotic systems in one. The first is an arm to continuously feed the component-removal robots, paired with two tabletop machines similar to 3D printers or computer numerical control (CNC) machines. A neural network identifies and catalogs components, then searches the internet for manufacturers’ thermal-profile specifications. Nantul uses those specifications to employ a combination of suction, controlled heat, computer vision, and robotic controls to remove chips while minimizing damage. Recovered items are then sorted by model number in material-specific groups. “We’re creating a new supply chain from old feedstock that didn’t exist before,” Ghashghaei says, adding that manual recovery is expensive and difficult to scale. Tuurny’s recovery system includes a computer vision system that identifies specific RAM components to assess them for recovery. Tuurny Minghui Zheng , an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University, in College Station, who studies robotic disassembly and electronics recycling systems, says Tuurny’s approach appears technically feasible, especially when focused on the narrow, valuable target of recovering RAM from more controlled e-waste streams. “RAM is a good starting point because it has relatively high reuse value and is more standardized than many other electronic parts,” Zheng says. The harder challenge, however, is removing chips “without heat, mechanical, or electrical damage, and making sure it still works reliably afterward.” Used circuit boards can vary by layout, markings, age, contamination, solder condition, or prior damage. A robot has to identify the correct component, choose a removal strategy, apply heat locally, lift the part cleanly, and preserve enough information about the part for downstream testing and resale. E-Waste Recycling Strategies Ghashghaei says Tuurny is building small modular machines using off-the-shelf parts, custom controls, and Nvidia Jetson Nano hardware. The company is trying to keep costs down by reducing hardware complexity to arrive at a price point far below centralized industrial equipment used at large facilities. He says the biggest challenge from an engineering perspective has been developing the autonomous computer vision and robotic control. Last year, the four-person startup received a NASA-funded grant to support an AI-powered repair assistant for printed circuit boards that used computer vision and a custom large language model (LL...
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Robots Could Turn E-Waste Into a Source of Legacy Chips. Tuurny’s first target is recovering RAM ICs and other chips used in legacy systems where replacement components can be difficult to source. Tuurny’s recovery system includes a computer vision system that identifies specific RAM components to assess them for recovery.
TL;DR:
Tuurny’s first target is recovering RAM ICs and other chips used in legacy systems where replacement components can be difficult to source.
Spectrum
May 19, 11:00
Home Robot Safety Is All About Relationships
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is updating its 12-year-old safety requirements for personal care robots . A lot has happened since the last revision, both on the technology side and with researchers’ understanding of safety for humans collaborating with domestic robots. The proposed ISO update addresses hazard identification, risk assessment, and different use scenarios. It does not, however, set limits, propose testing methods, or have enforcement mechanisms that might address the complexities of human-robot collaboration . And that is a problem, argues technology policy researcher Jae-Seong Lee of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea. Why is the next revision of ISO 13482 a big deal? Jae-Seong Lee: The standard is moving into final approval at a moment when domestic humanoid robot makers are shifting from lab prototypes to products aimed at real homes, real caregivers, and real families. That matters because the standard does more than specify geometry and impact limits. It helps define what counts as acceptable robot behavior in the messy world of everyday life. What is the core engineering problem? Lee: It is not simply whether a robot can avoid collisions or detect people in its path. The harder problem is that human-robot interaction is bidirectional. The robot changes what the human does, and the human changes what the robot perceives and does next. In other words, safety is not a fixed property of the machine alone; it emerges from the relationship. Isn’t that already covered by current safety standards? Lee: Only partially. ISO 13482 addresses personal care robots through hazard identification, risk assessment, and intended use scenarios, and related guidance acknowledges noncontact hazards such as unpredictability and incorrect autonomous decisions. But it stops short of binding compliance criteria, test methods, or enforcement mechanisms for the hazards produced by the human-robot relationship. The technical community understands bidirectional coupling, and the standards framework acknowledges relevant hazards, but no current standard fully converts that knowledge into enforceable rules for domestic autonomy.—Jae-Seong Lee Why can’t engineers just better define a robot’s operating envelope? Lee: Because the value proposition of a domestic humanoid depends on operating in uncontrolled environments. A robot that is safe only in standardized rooms, with healthy adults, under well-defined conditions is not really a domestic humanoid at all. In industrial robotics, designers can usually bound the task, the workspace, and the population. In a home, the robot must adapt to elderly residents, children, visitors, pets, clutter, tight spaces, and fluctuating human behavior. Those aren’t edge cases. Those are the baseline. Tightening the domain to be more like that of factory robots would make the home robots less useful. The proposal mentions training data. Why does that matter? Lee: Because the data already reflect the diversity of domestic life. Companies building humanoid training datasets are reportedly sending paying contract workers around the world to record their chores in ordinary settings. That means the robots will be trained on real-world variability, not sanitized demonstrations. The safety problem is therefore in the composition of the entire human-robot system, not in any one component. What is the standards gap? Lee: The gap is governance. The technical community understands bidirectional coupling, and the standards framework acknowledges relevant hazards, but no current standard fully converts that knowledge into enforceable rules for domestic autonomy. What is missing is a way to specify safe behavior across the full range of human conditions the robot will actually encounter. What’s also missing is a decision about who gets to decide whose behavior counts as normal. Whose gait sets the baseline? Whose is an acceptable risk threshold? Whose definition of safe judgment gets written into the requirement language? Those are value judgments, not purely engineering ones. A standards committee cannot avoid choosing a normative reference point; it can only decide whether that choice is explicit and inclusive. Who could help answer those questions? Lee: The proposal argues that the people most affected by domestic humanoids are not systematically represented in the working groups shaping the standard. It points especially to older adults, who are often the primary intended users of domestic care robots, yet whose movement patterns and cognitive states are not directly embedded in the standards process. In other words, this revision acknowledges the hardest problems but pushes unresolved issues into advisory language, nonbinding guidance, or future revision scopes. That can be useful, but it also delays the real question: What counts as safe relational behavior in the home? What are the stakes? Lee: The risk is not only inju...
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Home Robot Safety Is All About Relationships. The robot changes what the human does, and the human changes what the robot perceives and does next. In industrial robotics, designers can usually bound the task, the workspace, and the population.
TL;DR:
The robot changes what the human does, and the human changes what the robot perceives and does next.
Robohub
May 18, 10:38
Table tennis robot defeats some of world’s best players – why this has major implications for robotics
Ace rotates its paddle as it prepares to return the ball back to its human opponent, Yamato Kawamata, during a match in December 2025. Credit: Sony AI. By Kartikeya Walia, Nottingham Trent University A table tennis robot has outperformed elite players in recent evaluations. The robot, called Ace, marks a significant step toward artificial intelligence […]
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Table tennis robot defeats some of world’s best players – why this has major implications for robotics. By Kartikeya Walia, Nottingham Trent University A table tennis robot has outperformed elite players in recent evaluations. The robot, called Ace, marks a significant step toward artificial intelligence […]
TL;DR:
The robot, called Ace, marks a significant step toward artificial intelligence […]
Spectrum
May 15, 17:00
Video Friday: Heavy Robotic Machinery Operates Itself
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO Enjoy today’s videos! Bulk material handling is a critical, labor-intensive operation across various industries, traditionally performed by human operators using heavy hydraulic manipulators equipped with free-swinging, underactuated grippers. This work presents the first complete autonomous material-handling solution deployed on a real-world 40-ton material handler. [ ETH Zurich ] I don’t want to minimize this bedroom tidying by Figure (although I suppose I’m going to), but in the context of doing a task like this in place of a human, it really illustrates what these robots are comfortable with, and what they’re not. [ Figure ] Give me this over videos of robots doing backflips any day. [ Hello Robot ] Okay, but can it get them out of the can? [ Generalist ] The world’s first production-ready manned mecha. It can transform. It’s a civilian vehicle. It weighs ~500 kilograms with you inside. [ Unitree ] Curious about what happens when street dance meets embodied AI? From smooth choreography to dynamic flips, NIX is exploring movement, rhythm, and real-world interaction through embodied AI. We’ll make NIX available—FOR FREE!—to selected partners from global universities, robotics labs, and creative technologists. [ Lumos ] Thanks, Ni Tao! We introduce and open-source the Unified Autonomy Stack, a novel solution for resilient autonomy across aerial and ground robot morphologies. The architecture combines multimodal perception, multibehavior planning, and multilayered safe navigation to deliver mission-level autonomy across diverse robot morphologies. It fuses lidar, radar, vision, and inertial sensing to enable robust localization and mapping, vision-language-based scene reasoning, multibehavior planning, and layered safety through map-based avoidance, deep learned policies, and control barrier functions. The system supports Global Navigation Satellite System–denied navigation in perceptually degraded environments, exploration, object discovery, and inspection, and has been validated on multirotor and legged robots in challenging settings, demonstrating resilient performance. [ NTNU ] Thanks, Kostas! Cassie WAS the best robot! The next video better be a Digit Centaur. [ Agility ] Any robot doing anything consistently over a long period of time is impressive. Having said that, you want to be very careful about claiming that any robot operates at “human performance levels,” especially in a somewhat complex manipulation task, because humans are very, very good at stuff like this. [ Figure ] Robust.AI cofounder and CTO Rodney Brooks , ranked #44 on the Forbes 250 America’s Greatest Innovators list, sits down for a Q&A ahead of his panel discussion at the Forbes America Innovates event in San Francisco. We asked him two questions: What makes innovation in robotics such a challenge? What does the current surge in AI mean for robotics today? [ Robust AI ] This is one of the best robotic research videos I’ve ever seen—and don’t worry, according to the credits it’s not AI. And make sure to watch after the credits! [ Nature ] EFGCL is a guided-reinforcement learning method that efficiently enables highly dynamic motions through the use of assistive forces. In this work, we successfully achieved several dynamic motions, including jumping, backflips, and lateral flips. [ EFGCL ] Thanks, Keita! Legged robots: helping farmers one vegetable at a time. [ University of Southern California ] Humanoid robots promise general-purpose assistance, yet real-world humanoid loco-manipulation remains challenging because it requires whole-body stability, dexterous hands, and contact-aware perception under frequent contact changes. In this work, we study dexterous, contact-rich humanoid loco-manipulation . [ Touch Dreaming ] More than just technology, KATA Friends is a lifelike AI companion designed to see your world, feel your touch, and understand your heart. With expressive movements, evolving emotions, and natural conversations, Noa and Niko both grow alongside you to become a presence uniquely yours. From curious head tilts and playful reactions to ever-changing eye expressions and a soft, innocent voice, every interaction feels warm, personal, and alive. [ SwitchBot ] I really hate to say this, but despite how cute it is, Aibo may be showing its age. [ Aibo ] One of the biggest challenges in robotics right now isn’t the hardware. It’s data. While many data-collection methods are effective, handheld data collection can create a diverse dataset of environments, conditions, and strategies for completing manipu...
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Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Cassie WAS the best robot!
TL;DR:
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics.
Robohub
May 15, 11:32
Robot Talk Episode 156 – Rugged robots for dangerous missions, with Gavin Kenneally
Claire chatted to Gavin Kenneally from Ghost Robotics about robot dogs for defence, security, and public safety. Gavin Kenneally is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ghost Robotics, a company that has gained a reputation for pushing the boundaries of legged robotics technology. In his current role, Gavin spearheads a team of highly skilled engineers and […]
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Robot Talk Episode 156 – Rugged robots for dangerous missions, with Gavin Kenneally. Claire chatted to Gavin Kenneally from Ghost Robotics about robot dogs for defence, security, and public safety. Gavin Kenneally is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ghost Robotics, a company that has gained a reputation for pushing the boundaries of legged robotics technology.
TL;DR:
Claire chatted to Gavin Kenneally from Ghost Robotics about robot dogs for defence, security, and public safety.
Robohub
May 13, 09:21
Developing active and flexible microrobots
By C Huygelen Leiden researchers Professor Daniela Kraft and Mengshi Wei have created microscopic robots that move without sensors, software, or external control. Instead, their behaviour emerges entirely from their shape and the way they interact with their environment. This class of robots opens up entirely new possibilities for biomedical applications. Close-up of the microrobot. […]
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By C Huygelen Leiden researchers Professor Daniela Kraft and Mengshi Wei have created microscopic robots that move without sensors, software, or external control. Instead, their behaviour emerges entirely from their shape and the way they interact with their environment. This class of robots opens up entirely new possibilities for biomedical applications.
TL;DR:
By C Huygelen Leiden researchers Professor Daniela Kraft and Mengshi Wei have created microscopic robots that move without sensors, software, or external control.
Spectrum
May 12, 15:00
Hello Robot Sets the Standard for Practical, Safe Home Robots
Many roboticists (and at least one robotics journalist) have been seduced by the dream of a robot butler. And the rampant popularity of videos showing humanoid robots doing household tasks in improbably clean kitchens and unrealistically tidy bedrooms suggests that we’re not the only ones interested in a robot that can do our chores. But for all kinds of reasons , legged humanoids are not yet ready for industrial or commercial applications at scale, and home applications ( if people even want them ), I would argue, are even farther away. Even so, ludicrously well-funded humanoid robotics companies are now ramping production while explicitly promising that their robots will be doing ‘ housework .’ So what about that robot butler dream, then? It still exists! All you have to do is forget about legs, arms, hands, faces, and focus on what really matters: mobility and manipulation. This is what Hello Robot’s Stretch robot is unapologetically all about, and the newest version being announced today, Stretch 4, is closer than ever to a robot that could safely do practical work in the home at an accessible cost. Hello Robot says Stretch 4 is “built for the real world.” Hello Robot “With Stretch 4, we wanted to make the transition from a research platform to something that is truly deployable,” explains Aaron Edsinger , Hello Robot co-founder and CEO. This version, while ready for research and enterprise customers now, is designed for pilot deployments to help Hello Robot understand how to scale in the home. “This has been our most difficult design process,” adds co-founder and CTO Charlie Kemp . “We had a lot of fear of ‘second-system syndrome,’ where you add all the features you didn’t get to initially and end up with a monstrosity. But since we founded the company on making simple, minimalist robots, every time we added complexity it was an emotional challenge. Navigating that fear resulted in a nice compromise that sits in a great spot, rather than being a maximalist humanoid.” Stretch 4 Upgrades The biggest change from the previous version of Stretch is the addition of an omnidirectional base, meaning that the robot can translate in any direction without having to turn first. This makes it much easier to control (especially for novice users), but omnidirectional bases are significantly more complicated to design and build. What ultimately made it possible for Stretch were new types of omnidirectional wheels developed for powered wheelchairs, along with a solid six months of focused development by Hello Robot. A redesigned sensorized head gives Stretch more options for teleoperation and autonomy. Hello Robot Stretch 4 also ditches the cute little pan-tilt head for a more complex sensor suite with a much wider field of view. “We started out wanting to use lots of cheap cameras to keep costs low, like Tesla does,” Edsinger tells us. “But we ended up with an approach closer to Waymo’s: the richer and more reliable your data, the safer and more intelligent the robot can be.” There are a pair of hemispherical lidars, Luxonis cameras for vision and navigation, and a wrist-mounted depth camera for manipulation. The robot’s primary system runs on an Intel NUC 15, plus an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX for researchers to play with for visual processing or AI. Philosophy on Autonomy Hello Robot’s general philosophy on autonomy is to have a human in the loop, but that can take many different forms ranging from direct control to purely supervisory control. The robot will ship with a baseline of autonomous capabilities that include mapping, navigation, and self-charging, along with demo-ready features like autonomous grasping. But unlike most other robotics companies, Hello Robot isn’t looking to use their hardware to collect a stupendous amount of data in the concerningly vague hope that commercially viable autonomy will follow. “Stretch has huge advantages in safety, cost, and capability,” Kemp says. “I’d much rather be the platform that foundation model developers target.” Edsinger agrees: “We do want to partner with foundation model companies to explore things like dexterous in-home manipulation, but we aren’t the ones to build those foundation models.” In-Home Pilots While earlier versions of Stretch were primarily for research, Kemp tells us that Stretch 4 has been explicitly designed to be piloted in the homes of people with severe mobility impairments. Hello Robot will be happy to sell you one (or lots, I’m guessing) for commercial or industrial applications, but the broader goal with Stretch 4 is to use remote testing and in-home evaluations to work towards a robot that’s useful and reliable enough that it can provide consistent daily value for disabled users. A holonomic base and an extendable arm make for a capable robot without the complexity. Hello Robot Part of why I’m optimistic about Stretch finding near-term success in this role is precisely because it’s not a humanoid. One of the primary arguments for humanoids is...
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Hello Robot Sets the Standard for Practical, Safe Home Robots. Many roboticists (and at least one robotics journalist) have been seduced by the dream of a robot butler. This is what Hello Robot’s Stretch robot is unapologetically all about, and the newest version being announced today, Stretch 4, is closer than ever to a robot that could safely do practical work in the home at…
TL;DR:
Many roboticists (and at least one robotics journalist) have been seduced by the dream of a robot butler.
Robohub
May 11, 14:18
How to teach the same skill to different robots
The assembly line task setup. Credit: 2026 LASA EPFL CC-BY-SA. By Celia Luterbacher In today’s manufacturing environments, upgrading a robot fleet often means starting from scratch – not only replacing hardware, but also reprogramming tasks. Even when two robots are built to perform similar jobs, different joint arrangements or movement limits mean that a task […]
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How to teach the same skill to different robots. By Celia Luterbacher In today’s manufacturing environments, upgrading a robot fleet often means starting from scratch – not only replacing hardware, but also reprogramming tasks. Even when two robots are built to perform similar jobs, different joint arrangements or movement limits mean that a task […]
TL;DR:
By Celia Luterbacher In today’s manufacturing environments, upgrading a robot fleet often means starting from scratch – not only replacing hardware, but also reprogramming tasks.
Spectrum
May 9, 16:00
Video Friday: AI Gives Robot Hands Humanlike Dexterity
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO Enjoy today’s videos! Introducing GENE-26.5—the first AI brain to give robots human-level physical manipulation capabilities. Cooking a full meal. Cracking an egg one-handed. Conducting lab experiments. Wire harnessing. Even playing the piano. Tasks that were impossible for robots. Until now. [ Genesis AI ] via [ TechCrunch ] This is Labububot—one of the rarest monsters on Earth. Twelve Labubu heads are reconstituted into a single spherical form: a Frankenstein’s Monster of pop culture iconography. Labububot is a playful critique of social robots , and a question made physical—what do the monsters we make reveal about the monsters we are? [ MIT Media Lab ] Watch Spot crouch, jump, climb boxes, and leap across gaps, controlled by a neural network trained with reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-expert distillation. [ Robotics and AI Institute ] Good, now there is a robot that can take over exercise for me. [ Kepler ] Additive manufacturing has become an enabling technology, but existing techniques are not capable of directly 3D printing high-current electromagnetic actuators due to material and design limitations. In this work, a novel 3D-printable, multilayer, wave-winding topology is created for high-efficiency electric motors. [ Sensing Technologies Laboratory ] NASA is pushing the limits of flight on Mars —by spinning helicopter rotor blades so fast, they’re breaking the sound barrier. During recent tests at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, engineers accelerated the tips of next-generation rotor blades beyond Mach 1 inside a special chamber that simulates the atmospheric conditions of the Red Planet. [ NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ] Balancing commercial goals and robotics research can be tricky, but with Atlas, we’re making it work. [ Boston Dynamics ] Open Duck Mini is an open-source version of Disney’s BDX droids, and you can play with it in your browser. [ Open Duck Mini Viewer ] Thanks, Masato! Automated inspection of steel structures using magnetic climbing robots can reduce costs and improve safety, but many such structures feature interior corners that are challenging for wheeled or tracked robots to traverse. We present the first magnetic-wheeled robot to use X-ray fluorescence for steel structure inspection, Sally, capable of overcoming all interior corner transition types, traversing small obstacles, and maneuvering in tight spaces. [ Robomechanics Lab ] I don’t know what this is, but it’s coming soon from SwitchBot. [ SwitchBot ] You probably know the answers to these questions already, but this ELI5 from Aaron Ames is still fun. [ Wired ] Jim Fan, who leads the embodied autonomous research group at Nvidia, returns to AI Ascent to argue that robotics is entering its endgame—and that the playbook is already written. [ Sequoia ]
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Video Friday: AI Gives Robot Hands Humanlike Dexterity. Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. [ Robotics and AI Institute ] Good, now there is a robot that can take over exercise for me.
TL;DR:
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics.
Robohub
May 8, 11:33
Robot Talk Episode 155 – Making aerial robots smarter, with Melissa Greeff
Claire chatted to Melissa Greeff from Queen’s University about autonomous navigation and learning for drones. Melissa Greeff is an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen’s University. She leads Robora Lab and is also an Ingenuity Labs Robotics and AI Institute member. Her research interests include aerial robots, vision-based navigation, and safe learning-based […]
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Robot Talk Episode 155 – Making aerial robots smarter, with Melissa Greeff. She leads Robora Lab and is also an Ingenuity Labs Robotics and AI Institute member. Her research interests include aerial robots, vision-based navigation, and safe learning-based […]
TL;DR:
She leads Robora Lab and is also an Ingenuity Labs Robotics and AI Institute member.
Robohub
May 7, 08:41
New understanding of insect flight points way to stable flapping-wing robots
By David Nutt The way bugs and birds flap their wings may look effortless, but the dynamics that keep them aloft are dizzyingly complex and difficult to quantify. Cornell researchers created a computational model that shows the effect of insects’ morphology on stabilizing their flight. The findings could lead to a new way to understand […]
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New understanding of insect flight points way to stable flapping-wing robots. Cornell researchers created a computational model that shows the effect of insects’ morphology on stabilizing their flight. The findings could lead to a new way to understand […]
TL;DR:
By David Nutt The way bugs and birds flap their wings may look effortless, but the dynamics that keep them aloft are dizzyingly complex and difficult to quantify.
Robohub
May 5, 09:31
Robotically assembled building blocks could make construction more efficient and sustainable
New research suggests constructing a simple building from interlocking subunits should be mechanically feasible and have a much smaller carbon footprint.
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A robot carries three voxels as it walks across a voxel structure. Robotically assembled building blocks could be a more environmentally friendly method for erecting large-scale structures than some existing construction techniques, according to a new study by MIT researchers.
TL;DR:
New research suggests constructing a simple building from interlocking subunits should be mechanically feasible and have a much smaller carbon footprint.
Spectrum
May 4, 17:30
iRobot Founder Wants to Put a Robotic Familiar Into Your Home
Two years ago, Colin Angle stepped down as CEO of iRobot , the company that he cofounded and the most successful home robot company the world has ever seen. Angle almost immediately founded a stealthy new “physical AI” company called Familiar Machines & Magic (FM&M), which in short order managed to attract a combination of exceptionally talented robotics folks, including Morgan Pope from Disney Research , which got us very curious. Today, Familiar Machines & Magic is announcing its first robot, a “physically embodied AI system designed to perceive, adapt, and interact with people in ways that feel natural and consistent,” the press release says. This robot is not a toy, and it’s not specifically for kids. Rather, it’s for adults to purchase for themselves and their families. It will get to know you, seek you out for attention, and actively help you positively pursue an idealized routine in your life. Intended for adults, Familiar is pet-like in that it will seek you out for attention. Familiar Machines & Magic Here are the (limited) technical details from the press release: The first Familiar is a quadruped, specifically designed for human-robot interaction, with 23 degrees of freedom enabling both lifelike movement and expressive behaviors. The Familiar is covered with a custom touch-sensitive coat, a vision system, and a microphone array and audio system, to support rich interactions. Its onboard edge AI stack is powered by a custom small multimodal model optimized for social reasoning, combining vision, audio, language, and memory to create socially responsive behaviors in real time. FM&M CEO and cofounder Colin Angle tells us that this first prototype Familiar is designed to look like a sort of highly abstracted bear. It’s very deliberately nothing like a dog or a cat, following the successful strategy of other social robots like Paro and Pleo —if you can’t connect the form factor to an animal that you have direct experience with, you won’t bring expectations to your interactions with the robot. What Does it Do? “Our goal is to position this as a robot familiar that lives with you and helps reinforce healthy routines,” Angle says. He explains that thinking of a Familiar like a pet is a strong analogy, but pet-like also undersells what the robot can do. The Familiar behaves a little more like a service animal, in the narrow sense of being able to recognize activities and intervene to motivate you to do more or less of them, as the case may be. One easy example is screen time—the Familiar can note how much time you spend on your phone, and if it’s too much, it can actively try to engage you in other activities, including taking it for a walk outside. “The idea,” says Angle, “is that you can have a bit of technology in your home which is hyperloyal to you, gets to know you, helps you figure out an idealized routine, and then plays a positive role.” Spending too much time on your phone? Familiar can help with that. Familiar Machines & Magic Cramming this amount of intelligence into a robot that you can take for a walk outside (at regular human walking pace) is extremely ambitious. I asked FM&M’s creative director Morgan Pope what made him feel that a robot like a Familiar was possible, with enough confidence that he was willing to leave Disney Research to join the startup. “ Two recent advancements made it feel tractable,” Pope says. “First, seeing Disney’s bipedal robots walk flexibly over various terrain using reinforcement learning proved you can execute dynamic motion without needing perfect, zero-backlash actuators or crazy expensive hardware. And second, while I am often skeptical of generative AI hype, it is a perfect fit here because it excels at creating the plausible assumption of intelligence, which helps the character feel coherent and lifelike. ” The Challenge of Social Home Robots As a social home robot, the Familiar will have quite a lot of work to do to single-pawedly reestablish a category that burned itself out between 2012 and 2019. A series of high-profile and very-well-funded startups including Anki , Mayfield , and Jibo were not able to sustain social home robots as a business, primarily because of a struggle with longer-term engagement. It’s not enough for a robot to be cute and charming in the short term; it has to continue enthralling its users or at least providing value after the initial novelty has worn off. In other words, a flashy demo is arguably counterproductive, which is a real problem, since robots excel at flashy demos. Part of the value of Familiar is that it will help you establish healthy routines. Familiar Machines & Magic “It’s about creating the right expectation and delivering on that expectation,” says Angle. “Familiars live in your world and play by your rules, and if you don’t find yourself hanging out with it, petting it, and engaging with it, then we haven’t succeeded.” In what is very much not a coincidence, the term familiar really is the best way of thin...
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This robot is not a toy, and it’s not specifically for kids. “Our goal is to position this as a robot familiar that lives with you and helps reinforce healthy routines,” Angle says. He explains that thinking of a Familiar like a pet is a strong analogy, but pet-like also undersells what the robot can do.
TL;DR:
This robot is not a toy, and it’s not specifically for kids.
Spectrum
May 4, 11:08
DAIMON Robotics Wants to Give Robot Hands a Sense of Touch
This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics . This April, Hong Kong-based DAIMON Robotics has released Daimon-Infinity , which it describes as the largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI, featuring high resolution tactile sensing and spanning a wide range of tasks from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by collaborative efforts of partners across China and the globe, including Google DeepMind, Northwestern University, and the National University of Singapore. The move signals a key strategic initiative for DAIMON, a two-and-a-half-year-old company known for its advanced tactile sensor hardware, most notably a monochromatic, vision-based tactile sensor that packs over 110,000 effective sensing units into a fingertip-sized module. Drawing on its high-resolution tactile sensing technology and a distributed out-of-lab collection network capable of generating millions of hours of data annually, DAIMON is building large-scale robot manipulation datasets that include vast amounts of tactile sensing data. To accelerate the real-world deployment of embodied AI, the company has also open-sourced 10,000 hours of its data. Prof. Michael Yu Wang, co-founder and chief scientist at DAIMON Robotics, has pioneered Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating the tactile to a modality on par with vision. DAIMON Robotics Behind the strategy is Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON’s co-founder and chief scientist. Prof. Wang earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon — studying manipulation under Matt Mason — and went on to found the Robotics Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. An IEEE Fellow and former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering , he has spent roughly four decades in the field. His objective is to address the missing “insensitivity” of robot manipulation, which practically relies on the dominant Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. He and his team have pioneered Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating the tactile to a modality on par with vision. We spoke with Prof. Wang about how tactile feedback aims to change dexterous manipulation, how the dataset initiative is foreseen to improve our understanding of robotic hands in natural environments, and where — from hotels to convenience stores in China — he sees touch-enabled robots making their first real-world inroads. Daimon-Infinity is the world’s largest omni-modal dataset for Physical AI, featuring million-hour scale multimodal data, ultra-high-res tactile feedback, data from 80+ real scenarios and 2,000+ human skills, and more. DAIMON Robotics The Dataset Initiative This month, DAIMON Robotics release d the largest and most comprehensive robotic manipulation dataset with multiple leading academic institutions and enterprises. Why releas ing the dataset now, rather than continuing to focus on product development? What impact will this have on the embodied intelligence industry? DAIMON Robotics has been around for almost two and a half years. We have been committed to developing high-resolution, multimodal tactile sensing devices to perceive the interaction between a robot’s hand (particularly its fingertips) and objects. Our devices have become quite robust. They are now accepted and used by a large segment of users, including academic and research institutes as well as leading humanoid robotics companies. As embodied AI continues to advance, the critical role of data has been clearer. Data scarcity remains a primary bottleneck in robot learning, particularly the lack of physical interaction data, which is essential for robots to operate effectively in the real world. Consequently, data quality, reliability, and cost have become major concerns in both research and commercial development. This is exactly where DAIMON excels. Our vision-based tactile technology captures high-quality, multimodal tactile data. Beyond basic contact forces, it records deformation, slip and friction, material properties and surface textures — enabling a comprehensive reconstruction of physical interactions. Building on our expertise in multimodal fusion, we have developed a robust data processing pipeline that seamlessly integrates tactile feedback with vision, motion trajectories, and natural language, transforming raw inputs into training-ready dataset for machine learning models. Recognizing the industry-wide data gap, we view large-scale data collection not only as our unique competitive advantage, but as a responsibility to the broader community. By building and open-sourcing the dataset, we aim to provide the high-quality “fuel” needed to power embodied AI, ultimately accelerating the real-world deployment of general-purpose robotic foundation models. The robotics industry is highly competitive, and many teams have chosen to focus on data. DAIMON is releasing a large and highly comprehensive cross-embodiment, vision-ba...
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DAIMON Robotics Wants to Give Robot Hands a Sense of Touch. This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics . DAIMON Robotics Behind the strategy is Prof.
TL;DR:
This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics .
Spectrum
May 1, 16:30
Video Friday: Figure, 1X Ramp Up Humanoid Robot Production
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO Enjoy today’s videos! Figure is now able to produce 55 robots per week, which will be “allocated to internal research and development groups, data collection, efforts for robots to perform end-to-end housework, and commercial use-case development.” Er, that seems like a lot of robots to be making when commercial use cases are still “in development,” doesn’t it? [ Figure ] The opening of the NEO Factory in Hayward, Calif., marks a fundamental shift in humanoid robotics: The United States’ most vertically integrated robot factory has now begun full-scale production, bringing end-to-end manufacturing of NEO under one roof. Spanning 58,000 square feet and employing over 200 team members, 1X designs and builds every critical component in-house—motors, batteries, transmissions, sensors, structures, and final assembly—enabling faster iteration, superior safety, and true American scale. With the first robots already coming off the line and consumer shipments planned for 2026, this is the critical milestone that turns the vision of abundant, general-purpose home robots into reality. Scale will fix everything...? [ 1X ] Unlike statically stable robots, a dynamically balanced robot can shift its center of mass to accommodate loads without tipping over, so we like to see just how far we can push our software. Getting Digit to stand on one leg pushes the limits of our sim-to-real pipeline training methodologies—even the slightest model mismatches can lead to instability. [ Agility ] In this work, we develop a tactile-enabled whole-body humanoid manipulation system for stable, dexterous, contact-rich real-world manipulation. Our system combines VR-based whole-body teleoperation, a lower-body controller based on reinforced learning, dexterous hand retargeting, distributed tactile sensing, and a multimodal policy called Humanoid Transformer with Touch Dreaming (HTD). [ Humanoid Touch Dream ] Thanks, Yaru! Originally posted two years ago, “Can I Have a Pet T. Rex?” is a short interdisciplinary portrait documentary. It features paleontologist and Kod*lab postdoc Aja Mia Carter and the Kod*lab robotics researchers Wei-Hsi Chen (also a postdoc) and J. Diego Caporale, a Ph.D. student. It’s been two years! Where is her pet T. rex !? [ Kod*Lab ] I am not entirely sure why CMU and HEBI had robots at the 2026 NFL Draft, but I’m entirely sure that it made it more interesting to watch. [ HEBI Robotics ] Thanks, Trevor! Ethan Lauer, a software engineer, answers your questions about robot perception , world modeling, and what spooks our Stretch robot. [ Boston Dynamics ] Yet another thing that a robot is consistently better at than I am. [ Generalist ] If you’re wondering where all those reported humanoid robot sales are coming from, it’s because every big company needs one or two for this sort of thing. [ Impress ] Full-color laser yo-yo zapper, a phrase never before written in the history of the universe. [ Ishikawa Group Laboratory ] The future of the L’Oréal Pro 2026 Le Hair Show is...a bald robot? [ LimX Dynamics ] Meet MagicHand H01, our all-new dexterous hand. [ MagicLab ] This is briefly one of the flattest quadrupeds I have ever seen. [ DEEP Robotics ] I appreciate that Engineered Arts did not try to cover up the sound in this video. [ Engineered Arts ] This is very impressive considering that magnets are basically indistinguishable from magic. [ Sung Lab ] NASA has two rovers on Mars, but they’re exploring entirely different eras of the planet’s past. Separated by 2,300 miles, the two rovers are uncovering clues from very different moments in Martian history. Perseverance is on the rim of Jezero Crater, where it’s studying some of the oldest Martian terrain ever explored while searching for signs of ancient microbial life. Meanwhile, Curiosity is climbing Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater, where layers of rock reveal how Mars’s climate changed as water dried up from its surface. [ NASA ] We’ve built a surgical robot to automate key steps in the process of receiving a Neuralink implant to promote safety, reliability, and scalability. [ Neuralink ] The Chinese-made Unitree G1 humanoid robots are making their way into the United States. And they aren’t just in viral videos but in major tech companies like OpenAI and Nvidia, and top academic institutions. Most arrive through Robostore, a robotics reseller based on Long Island. I went there to watch them come off the pallet, then brought one to my home to see what it could actually do. Are these the future of home robots? A security risk? A Chinese surveilla...
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Video Friday: Figure, 1X Ramp Up Humanoid Robot Production. Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months.
TL;DR:
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics.
Robohub
May 1, 12:41
Robot Talk Episode 154 – Visual navigation in insects and robots, with Andrew Philippides
Claire chatted to Andrew Philippides from the University of Sussex about what we can learn from ants and bees to improve robot navigation. Andrew Philippides is a Professor of Biorobotics at the University of Sussex, where he co-directs the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and the be.AI Leverhulme Doctoral centre for Biomimetic Embodied AI. […]
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Claire chatted to Andrew Philippides from the University of Sussex about what we can learn from ants and bees to improve robot navigation. Andrew Philippides is a Professor of Biorobotics at the University of Sussex, where he co-directs the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and the be.AI Leverhulme Doctoral centre for Biomimetic Embodied AI. […]
TL;DR:
Claire chatted to Andrew Philippides from the University of Sussex about what we can learn from ants and bees to improve robot navigation.
Robohub
Apr 29, 15:05
Ultralightweight sonar plus AI lets tiny drones navigate like bats
This small drone is using sonar, similar to bats’ echolocation, to navigate through a grove of trees. Image credit: Nitin Sanket. By Nitin Sanket, Worcester Polytechnic Institute To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation. Current robots […]
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Ultralightweight sonar plus AI lets tiny drones navigate like bats. This small drone is using sonar, similar to bats’ echolocation, to navigate through a grove of trees. By Nitin Sanket, Worcester Polytechnic Institute To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system insp…
TL;DR:
This small drone is using sonar, similar to bats’ echolocation, to navigate through a grove of trees.