Robotics news
Short summaries of what matters in robotics, each linking to its original source, plus our own interviews and features. Have a story?
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Danish tooling maker OnRobot has started shipping the 2FGP20 Fork, an all-electric palletizing gripper for open, display and other low-rigidity boxes weighing up to 16 kg. It needs no compressed air, includes a vacuum pump for slip sheets, and comes with plugins for robots from ABB, Fanuc, Universal Robots, Doosan and others, replacing the custom pneumatic tools such jobs often required.
· Robotics Tomorrow
ABB Robotics has introduced two compact industrial robots, the IRB 1700 and the IRB 1700ID, with payloads of 6 to 12 kg across five variants and path repeatability down to 0.03 mm. ABB says they cut cycle times by up to 20% and use up to 15% less power. The ID version routes cables inside the arm, and both debut at CIIF in Shanghai for electronics, automotive and general industry.
· Robotics Tomorrow
ABB Robotics has extended its OmniCore EyeMotion vision software with AI Robot Trainer, a guided workflow that takes integrators from collecting shop-floor images to training, deploying and refining AI vision models without AI specialists. ABB says it works with any camera brand and can shorten commissioning by up to 90%, with uses from pick-and-place and bin picking to inspection and assembly.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Edinburgh startup Danu Robotics, founded by Amy Ma, has raised $5 million in late-seed funding and is now commercialising H.E.R.O., an AI-driven robot that sorts recyclables with a pincer claw rather than suction. The company reports $500,000 in signed contracts and more than 200 prospects in its sales pipeline.
· TechCrunch
Kawasaki Robotics will show the CP110L, a four-axis palletizer with a 110 kg payload and 2,505 mm reach, in North America for the first time at PACK EXPO in Chicago on October 18-21. Rated at up to 2,200 cases per hour, it targets end-of-line packaging in plants with tight floor space or low ceilings.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Helm.ai, based in Redwood City, California, has booked $70 million in commercial contracts over the past 12 months with carmakers, Tier 1 suppliers and industrial automation firms. Its foundation models handle perception for Level 2 to 4 driving, mining, construction and robots, and the company says it is now heading toward break-even.
· The Robot Report
Amazon Web Services has published an open-source toolchain that covers the robot AI pipeline from synthetic data and training on SageMaker to simulation, edge deployment and field feedback. It builds on NVIDIA tools such as Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, GR00T and Cosmos, and AWS says it does not tie developers to any particular robot hardware.
· The Robot Report
Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab fitted a commercial Wuji Technology hand with a small battery and computer pack and trained it with reinforcement learning to walk on its fingers. It moved at about 9 cm per second over 14 surfaces and pushed objects to targets, which the team sees as useful for maintenance and search and rescue in tight spaces.
· IEEE Spectrum
Mecka AI, founded in 2024, has raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with Nvidia and Microsoft's M12 also investing, at a $500 million valuation. The company hires people to film themselves doing daily chores while wearing body sensors and using phones, turning that human motion into data for training humanoids and other robots.
· TechCrunch
Teradyne Robotics and Elite Robots have settled the case in which Teradyne claimed Elite's cobot software infringed copyright in Universal Robots software. A Hamburg court had issued a preliminary injunction in April 2026 restricting Elite in Germany; the terms of the settlement were not disclosed and Elite admits no liability.
· The Robot Report
MIT researchers led by Jonathan P. How have built SANDO, a trajectory planner that builds time-aware safe corridors around moving obstacles so drones can fly without collisions in unmapped areas. It beat rival planners to the goal in simulation and avoided every dynamic obstacle across 12 real flights, with search and rescue, mine exploration and delivery as target uses.
· MIT News
Boston Dynamics has appointed Rohit Prasad, who led Alexa and the Nova foundation models at Amazon, as its CEO from October 7, taking over from interim chief and CFO Amanda McMaster. The Hyundai-controlled maker of Atlas, Spot and Stretch says the hire is meant to push its AI-driven robots toward large-scale commercial use.
· The Robot Report
DEKRA has independently certified Techman Robot's TM AI Cobot S Series to Security Level 2 of IEC 62443-4-2, the standard setting security requirements for industrial control components. Techman says it also runs vulnerability handling, incident reporting and security updates over the product lifecycle, in line with the EU Cyber Resilience Act.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Teradyne has made an undisclosed investment in Bright Machines, whose software-defined Bright Factory platform runs more than 130 microfactories in over ten countries. The deal brings Teradyne robotic assembly, test-equipment loading and autonomous material movement into those lines, with Universal Robots cobots working next to Teradyne board testers.
· The Robot Report
Deliveroo has signed an exclusive deal with Coco Robotics to deliver food with sidewalk robots in the UK, starting at Canary Wharf in London this October and then Milton Keynes, Leeds, Stockton-on-Tees and Nottingham. The robots travel at walking speed and share hazard data with the BlindSquare accessibility app; fleet sizes were not disclosed.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Munich-founded RobCo says it is now valued at $1 billion, twice its level nine months ago, with Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective joining backers such as Sequoia and Lightspeed. The company rents its Alfie robots for factory work as a service without upfront cost and paired the milestone with a share sale for long-serving staff.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Safeworld, co-founded by Carnegie Mellon safety researcher Ding Zhao, has emerged from stealth with a seed round of more than $12 million led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun. It runs robots' real control software in simulated workplaces full of digital humans to probe thousands of risky situations; Gritt Robotics is an early customer.
· TechCrunch
University of Glasgow researchers used augmented reality to try five face styles and five sounds on a Qoobo robot with 24 volunteers. Animal-like and anime faces scored equally well, faces conveyed emotion better than voices, and pet owners leaned towards animal designs; the work was presented at the MobileHCI conference.
· Robohub
Runway has introduced Praxis-1, a world action model trained mostly on ordinary video rather than robot demonstrations, aimed at the scarcity of robot training data. Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra are testing it on their hardware ahead of a public open-weight release planned in the coming months.
· The Robot Report
Productive Robotics has introduced the OB7-AI, a seven-axis cobot that scans a machine's work area to locate parts, load and unload them and read the CNC screen to know when a cycle ends, without precise part placement. It targets machine tending in job shops, with labs and healthcare as further uses; price and payload were not given.
· Robotics Tomorrow