When robots take the night shift shopping spree! 🛍️... Robots navigate through dm-drogerie markt Deutschland stores at night to create a digital replica of the store's layout, known as a "digital twin." Developed Ubica Robotics GmbH, these autonomous robots scan shelves to provide real-time information about item positions, pricing, stock gaps, and store layouts. 🏪 This data serves multiple purposes, such as improving staff routes, enhancing inventory management, and informing the creation of planograms for more efficient store layouts. It combines digital twin with robotics and it's really cool use case. What are your thoughts? ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

A robot mower on steroids! 💉 This mowing robot... can handle any bush. Literally. It's well-suited for work on PV farms, which are usually in remote areas and typically don't have permanent staff. I don't even need to mention the origin country. Chinese are cooking. This type of use case makes a lot of sense for robots. Someone mentioned that it's AI generated so, here's the OEM page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

High school students built an autonomous ball-collecting robot! 🎾... A group of high school students built a robot that picks up balls and shoots them into a bin while moving without stopping, with impressive speed and accuracy. It combines mechanical design, sensors, and software making constant adjustments in real time while the robot is driving. When teenagers can build systems this sophisticated, the talent pipeline for the robotics industry is accelerating! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Digital twins make deployments! 🔄 Digital twins are more... than just simulation, they let you test and fix everything before touching real hardware. The biggest win is catching problems early. You can test the complete system virtually, including all the control logic and data flows. Finding a bug in simulation takes hours. Finding it on-site during installation takes days and costs serious money. The second benefit is predictable deployment. Instead of discovering surprises when the robots arrive, you've already worked through the issues in the virtual model. The third advantage is automation. The operator interface gets generated automatically from the digital model. The old way was: build the system, write all the code, install the hardware, then spend weeks debugging on-site. Cool example here! ;-) ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

High-speed labeling is harder than it looks! 🍼 I... remember when I was programming robots myself and the struggle of making an application really repeatable. It was hard. Super hard. That's why seeing a machine working as smooth as here, it's incredible! 🤯 Applying shrink sleeves without wrinkles or misalignment becomes a real bottleneck at scale. Krones machine solves that by combining fast application with precise servo-controlled cutting. It can handle up to 50,000 containers per hour, keep labels perfectly aligned, and switch between bottle shapes with minimal downtime. For manufacturers, that reliability matters. Magic!!! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Multi-robot learning is getting a serious boost! 📚 Researchers... have extended Isaac Lab to train heterogeneous multi-agent robotic policies at scale. The new framework supports high-resolution physics, GPU-accelerated simulation, and both homogeneous and heterogeneous agents working together on coordination tasks. They benchmarked different approaches (MAPPO: Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization and HAPPO: Heterogeneous Agent PPO) across six challenging scenarios and showed that large-scale multi-robot training is not only feasible, but efficient. It’s an important step for real-world robotic collaboration, where teams of robots need to coordinate, split tasks, adapt roles, and interact dynamically, not just operate as identical clones. The code is open-source, and it pushes Isaac Lab closer to what robotics actually needs: scalable, physics-driven environments where many different robots can learn to work together. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

A great day at LEAP East 2026 at HKCEC... building and connecting. Spent time at the Animoca Brands booth discussing Minds by Animoca Brands and the next wave of persistent AI agents. Think persistent AI agents with memory, identity, and on-chain wallets, that's what it was! For us at Rice Robotics, that's an exciting direction. As robots become more autonomous, they'll need persistent digital identities, long-term memory, and the ability to interact with both people and decentralized networks. Oh... and we had an insightful and in-depth discussion with someone pretty special and big 👀 More on that soon🤫show more

A monowheel security robot from Estonia! 🇪🇪 Rollo Robotics... just raised €3.7M pre-seed led by FoodLabs and PROTOTYPE to bring the world's first stable autonomous monowheel robot to market. Founded by Arno Kütt (the mind behind Cleveron) and Sander Sebastian Agur, this Estonian startup has cracked what they call the "stability paradox" of the monowheel. Instead of clunky multi-wheeled platforms, Rollo uses high-frequency sensor fusion and proprietary balance control to create a slim, agile robot that navigates tight urban spaces and industrial corridors where traditional robots simply can't fit. The application? Autonomous security patrolling. With hybrid threats to physical infrastructure growing, the demand for scalable robotic security is massive. The funding will go toward two things: hardening the tech for extreme weather and high-traffic environments, and scaling production to meet demand from early pilot programs. 💰 P.S. Monowheels have been sci-fi for decades. Excited to see if Rollo can make them practical at scale. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Spiders as robotic grippers? 🕷️ Researchers made a stunning... discovery at Rice University. Dead spiders are being used as mechanical grippers. Yes, they use dead spiders as grippers... But how? 👀 It turns out that spiders use hydraulics to move their legs. They extend their legs by contracting their prosoma chamber, which sends fluid into their bodies. Scientists selected wolf spiders that can lift 130% of their weight. Using such a solution could be useful for pick-and-place processes in electronics assembly, for instance. Their discovery might start the field of necrobotics. Given my arachnophobia, I'm not sure how I'd react to such a grip. 🕸️ ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Robots that act like slime! 🫟 Cornell University engineers... developed a robotic collective that behaves less like a machine and more like a material that flows, reshapes, and adapts without centralized control. It consists of dozens of small robots with limited individual mobility that exhibit coordinated motion when entangled. The system resembles soft matter, continuously deforming and reorganizing as it moves, driven by mechanical intelligence. Each robotic module measures 200mm long and 20mm wide, containing a small motor that oscillates between "I" and "U" shapes. These oscillations generate forces against the ground, allowing modules to inch forward and jostle together. On their own, modules move slowly and inefficiently. When they entangle into chains, they self-organize into shifting configurations that prove resilient in challenging environments. On incline surfaces, chains moved more reliably than individuals. In obstacle fields, the collective behaved like a flowing material, connections formed to maintain cohesion, then broke apart to prevent jamming. The system stays functional even when modules fail. Isolated modules emit an audible distress signal, prompting nearby modules to slow down so the straggler can reconnect. No centralized sensing or control, each module infers when it has lost contact by how much it's being jostled. Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Genesis AI just unveiled Eno. It's humanoid robot that... challenges everything the industry assumed about what robots should look like. Forbes just called it 'the iPhone moment for humanoid robots'. No head. No face. No exposed motors or cables. 22 degrees of freedom per hand with different finger lengths (like actual human hands). Back-drivable for safety. Onboard cameras and tactile sensors. In demos: bundling wires with tape (genuinely hard, tape is sticky and unpredictable), performing lab automation with millimeter precision on unmodified equipment. Optional chest screen shows the robot's reasoning before it acts, a visual window into its mind to build trust. Powered by Genesis AI GENE foundation model. Payload 3-5kg per arm, 4-6 hours battery. Industrial deployments late 2026, homes much later. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

🚨 BREAKING: NVIDIA just announced the Isaac GR00T Reference... Humanoid Robot. The first fully open humanoid robot reference design built on Jetson Thor, and it's going straight to the world's top research institutions. This is Jensen Huang's bet on open physical AI infrastructure. The hardware stack is serious: → Unitree H2 Plus chassis, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 31 degrees of freedom → Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, 22 degrees of freedom, bringing total to 75 across the full body → NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor onboard compute, 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, 128GB unified memory → Multi-view sensing, stereo head camera, wrist cameras, IMU Alongside this announcement, Unitree also introduced the H2 Plus as a standalone product, a frontier humanoid combining Unitree's own body, Sharpa's five-finger hands and NVIDIA Robotics Jetson Thor compute into one fully integrated research platform. The full Isaac GR00T software stack ships with it, teleoperation for data capture, open foundation models, Isaac Sim for training, Isaac Lab for evaluation, and accelerated ROS middleware for deployment. The complete loop from data to real-world robot in one unified platform. ETH Zürich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego and Ai2 are already on board as launch research partners. NVIDIA Robotics did to AI what it's now doing to robotics, build the platform, open the ecosystem, let the world build on top of it. Whoever owns the infrastructure layer wins. NVIDIA knows this better than anyone. 👀 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

A Letter to Our Community: The Road Ahead for... Robotics To our Community and Partners, As we step into 2026, our mission at Axis is clearer than ever: Constructing the definitive End-to-End Scaling Layer for Robotics. Our goal is to accelerate the transfer of diverse human intelligence into Robotics General Intelligence (RGI). By owning the critical path of intelligence creation, we are turning the physical limitations of robotics into a scalable, software-driven future. Here is our strategic outlook and roadmap for the year ahead. The Core Thesis: Simulation is the Only Way Out The path to RGI is currently blocked by Data Scarcity, Generalization Fragility, and Hardware Fragmentation. At Axis, we believe Simulation is the only way out. Our Simulation Data Platform and Data Augmentation Engine transform raw data into "Synthetic Gold". Backed by academic milestones like Roboverse, Skill Blending, and GraspVLA, we have proven that pure simulation can achieve the generalization required for the real world. We don’t just collect data; we architect it. The Engine: Why Crypto? We believe RGI should come from all, not a few. Crypto is not just a feature; it is the primitive that powers our entire ecosystem flywheel: - Incentive Mechanism: Democratizing contribution and rewarding the trainers and developers. - Assetization: Turning proprietary data and refined models into liquid, ownable assets. - Verifiable Workflow: We are opening the "Black Box" of AI. By bringing total transparency to the Task Generation → Data Collection → Model Training pipeline, we ensure every byte of intelligence is verifiable, traceable, and secure. 2026 Strategic Deliverables This year, we are committed to delivering three foundational pillars: - The World's Largest Training Dataset for Robots: A robot training set—diverse, high-quality interaction data at an unprecedented scale. - A Robotics Foundation Model: A universal robotic brain trained on our pure simulation and synthetic data, capable of robust cross-embodiment transfer and open-world adaptability. - Evolvable Robot Hardware: Robots deployed with Axis models that autonomously evolve through continuous interaction, turning every deployment into a self-improving node within our RGI network. The Ultimate Vision We are building more than models; we are architecting the Distributed Machine Economy. A future where every dataset, model, and robotic embodiment is a verifiable asset in a global, autonomous network. Thank you for building the future of intelligence with us✌️📷show more

AI that watches your work! 👀 Codya built AI... that watches assembly lines and verifies every step got done right. Engine being assembled, bolt by bolt. The model tracks each one, inserted vs fastened. Standard computer vision would struggle here. It's about occlusion. A worker's hands constantly cover the bolts during assembly. Hand moves in, bolt disappears. Hand moves away, bolt reappears. Without smart tracking, the model forgets which bolt is which every time it's hidden. They solved it with BoT-SORT, a tracking algorithm that keeps object identity through occlusions. When a hand covers a bolt and moves away, the tracker knows it's still the same bolt, same state, same position. SkalskiP looking forward to see more and more industrial use cases with your Roboflow models :) ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

🚨China vs USA robots Chinese robot: $24,000 American robot:... $39,100 Pricing policy isn't everything. If we look at real capabilities, the balance of power looks completely different 🇨🇳 The robot demonstrates incredible agility, confidently performs a backflip, moves dynamically, and dances Maximum flexibility, high tech at an affordable price, and readiness for real-world tasks 🇺🇸 The robot, with a higher price tag, currently looks more modest, struggling even with basic rectilinear walking An obvious overpayment for brand and marketing, while Chinese engineers are outpacing competitors in software and hardware The main paradox of the current moment is that Chinese companies focus on rapidly cheapening hardware and mass production, turning robotics into an accessible mass-market consumer product. Meanwhile, the US traditionally tries to enter the market through fundamental neural networks and a universal AI brain However, in the coming years, we will see the inevitable convergence of these approaches: the winner in this race will not be the one who simply teaches a robot to do a backflip or walk straight, but the one who first combines Chinese cheap and adaptive mechatronics with advanced American language and multimodal models And what do you think, who will ultimately set the global standard in robotics East or West?show more

Robotics keeps hitting the same wall. Single task RL... works, but... it does not scale to hundreds of tasks or new embodiments. This new paper looks like a real step toward fixing that. The team introduces MMBench, a benchmark with 200 tasks across many domains and robots, and Newt, a language conditioned world model trained online across all 200 tasks at once. The simple idea behind Newt: The model learns from demos to get the right priors It trains across many tasks through online interaction It uses language to ground the goal It adapts fast when a new task shows up What stood out to me: ✅ One model trained on 200 tasks at the same time ✅ Language conditioned control for both states and RGB ✅ Better data efficiency than strong baselines ✅ Strong open loop control ✅ Fast adaptation to new tasks and embodiments ✅ Full release of 200 checkpoints, 4000 demos, code, and benchmark This is a good push toward general control instead of one model per task. If you want the full paper: Project page: —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:show more

Sub-40ms full self-driving on a $100 drone! 🚁 A... demonstration showing a complete full-self-driving pipeline running in under 40 milliseconds on a $100 drone. The prompt: "Find the bike and land." No pre-mapping. Running real-time on commodity hardware. For context, human reaction time is around 200-250ms. This drone is processing sensor data, understanding natural language commands, identifying objects, planning motion, and executing control, all in 40ms. This is what happens when foundation models meet efficient inference. The models get smaller and faster while maintaining capability. The hardware gets cheaper while getting more powerful. The intersection makes previously impossible applications suddenly viable. A few years ago, this required thousands of dollars in compute, pre-mapped environments, and cloud connectivity. Now it runs locally on hardware that costs less than a nice dinner. Awesome stuff Chester & ! 😮‍💨 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

It's 2030 and you are reviewing humanoid robots. A... Tesla. A Google. An Apple. An OpenAI. A Meta. A Figure. And a bunch of Chinese-made ones. Which one is best, and why? I think the Tesla understands the world much better. Why? There were eight Teslas around me on the freeway today. Start there. No other robot company has that data. But my robot is parked at the local high school twice a day. Its cameras see humans in all of our weirdness. How we move. Where we go. Where we walk. Who we talk with. What you are wearing. Whether your hair was combed this morning. That data will lead to robotics breakthroughs. Apple might keep up with its Vision Pro data, but it is too freaked out by the privacy implications of using said data. (On the front are six cameras and a couple of TOF -- Time Of Flight -- sensors that can see everything in your home in great detail). Google has a lot of data, for sure. All my: 1. Email. 2. Calendars. 3. Photos. 4. TV watching behavior. 5. Contacts. 6. Documents and spreadsheets. 7. Files. 8. Location data. So I expect Google's robot will be attractive to many. But how do you see the others shake out over the next five years? Make some guesses. But remember what an AI pioneer told me years ago about AI: it's all about the data. The Chinese ones have huge advantages: the Chinese have more data on their citizens, and many more citizens to boot AND they can make robots cheaper than we can. But now that you know OpenAI is building its own robot you have caught wind of what I've heard from many in San Francisco and Silicon Valley: that humanoid robots are the real prize of AI and will be highly profitable for those that can make them and find customers willing to buy them. Here, too, I learned long ago never to bet against Elon Musk. Will you?show more

🚨 SCIENTISTS JUST BUILT A CHIP THAT CAN SEE,... THINK, AND REMEMBER ALL AT THE SAME TIME. And it works more like a biological brain than a traditional computer. Researchers at RMIT University have created a neuromorphic vision chip that mimics the human eye and brain. Unlike conventional systems that capture images and send data to external processors, this chip performs sensing, processing, and memory storage directly where the light hits. The active layer is thousands of times thinner than a human hair. It uses doped indium oxide to detect light, process the information on-chip, and retain what it sees over time without constant electrical refreshing. Why this matters: • It dramatically cuts energy use and latency by eliminating data transfer to separate processors • Enables much faster real-time decision making for autonomous systems • Works more like biological vision than traditional machine vision • Could power the next generation of efficient edge AI in vehicles, robots, and remote sensors The deeper implication: For decades, we’ve built vision systems by bolting cameras, processors, and memory together like separate organs. This chip collapses those functions into one biological-style unit. It’s a step toward machines that don’t just “see” but actually perceive and remember in a more efficient, brain-like way. If scaled successfully, it could become a foundational component for autonomous systems that need to operate intelligently with minimal power and minimal delay. We’re moving from cameras that take pictures to chips that truly see. How do you think neuromorphic vision chips like this will change what’s possible for self-driving cars and autonomous robots? Follow for more frontier neuromorphic computing, AI hardware, and brain-inspired technology.show more

Multi-axis 3D printing with curved layers! 🖨️ Researchers from... the The University of Manchester introduced a neural network-based computational pipeline as a representation-agnostic slicer for multi-axis 3D printing. Traditional 3D printing works like stacking pancakes, flat layers on top of each other. 🥞 This often requires temporary support structures that get thrown away after printing, wastes material, and creates weaker parts. Multi-axis 3D printing can print along curved paths that follow the object's natural shape. This eliminates support structures and makes stronger parts. But figuring out these curved paths is mathematically complex, you need to avoid collisions, respect what the printer can physically do, and optimize for strength. The neural network solves this automatically. It learns to create a "field" around the object, then extracts curved printing paths from this field. Because the entire process is differentiable (translation for non-math specialists, meaning you can optimize it end-to-end), the AI can directly optimize for manufacturing goals like "no support structures needed" and "make it as strong as possible." Here's the project: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Most humanoid projects talk about real work. Very few... last an hour on a real line. This week I saw a case that matters for anyone building robots, perception, or physical AI. Kinisi deployed its first mobile manipulation system into a live recycling facility. Not a demo. Not a staged test. A real production line with real output pressure. Why this matters if you want robotics to deliver real value on your floor: • Handles mixed glass with random poses and no fixed fixtures. • Runs real grasp selection under noise, vibration and production variability. • Maintains throughput while avoiding breakage on a delicate material. • Shows mobile manipulation doing actual shift work instead of controlled lab runs. Kinisi published a video that shows what the robot sees and how sensor data turns into action. This is the part most teams struggle to explain to customers, so the educational angle is useful for anyone working on adoption. On top of this, the team signed a pilot with a global automotive manufacturer to explore humanoid use cases in production. The direction is clear. Wheeled mobility (not legs!) plus strong perception seems to be shaping a large part of industrial humanoids right now. I know Brennand from earlier conversations and from our podcast session, and I am always glad to see European teams push the category forward. Wishing the Kinisi team continued success. —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:show more