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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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
New York startup Tangent Robotics has raised $4.5 million led by Fly Ventures and Toyota Ventures. It is combining robot hands, light-based tactile sensors in the fingers and machine learning so robots can handle fine assembly work such as mating connectors, and plans to deploy in manufacturing.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Boston Dynamics has detailed a new hand for its Atlas humanoid with four fingers, an opposable thumb and 13 degrees of freedom, up from 7 on the previous version. The team left out a little finger to save three actuators and their cost and failure risk; the hand has tactile sensors in the fingertips and palm and is meant for tool use and in-hand manipulation.
· Boston Dynamics · Photo: Damian B Oh, CC BY-SA 4.0
DH-Robotics presented two backdrivable, direct-drive hands at IROS 2026: the five-finger ADH-5-13 with 13 active degrees of freedom, 735 g and fingertip tactile sensing, and the three-finger UDH-3-7 with 7. They target embodied-AI research and teleoperation; no prices or delivery dates were given.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Honda is developing a system that pairs its multi-fingered robot hand with Redwire's STAARK arm and experiment lockers to handle sample retrieval and lab chores on future commercial space stations. The concept is still at the exploration stage, with talks planned with station developers to free up time for smaller crews.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics have signed a memorandum of understanding to build safety infrastructure for Digit 5, including a pendant with emergency stop and enabling functions and a bridge to plant safety systems. The aim is to let the humanoid work near people at scale; earlier Digit versions have logged over 65,000 operating hours.
· Robotics Tomorrow · Photo: Agility Robotics, Press photo
ANYbotics has made Shift 1.0 available worldwide to schedule and monitor ANYmal inspection fleets, flag anomalies from thermal, acoustic, visual and gas readings and turn them into maintenance work orders in tools such as SAP. The company cites more than 200 robot deployments carrying out hundreds of thousands of inspections a month.
· The Robot Report · Photo: Cvoellmy, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Association for Advancing Automation has released ANSI/A3 R15.08-3-2026, the third part of its industrial mobile robot safety series. It covers the user's side: risk assessment, change management, staff training and periodic inspections during daily operation, complementing Parts 1 and 2 on the robots and the systems built with them.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Destro AI has emerged from stealth with an $8 million seed round led by Base10 Partners and Bonfire Ventures. Its software uses vision-language-action models to control robots and plan work alongside people in cross-dock logistics; a pilot with Yusen Logistics is growing to 26 robots, with a 17-robot pilot starting at another US site.
· TechCrunch
Inbolt has raised $12.5 million led by Shift4Good, taking its total funding to $34 million. Its 3D camera and AI software let arms from makers such as FANUC, ABB, KUKA and Universal Robots adapt to parts in real time; it counts over 200 robots in more than 100 factories and plans to expand in the US, Asia and data centers.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Retailer LPP's logistics arm has widened its partnership with Geekplus across two Polish sites, now running over 1,600 autonomous robots, including RoboShuttle units, with about 1.4 million storage locations up to roughly 12 metres high. The rollout was phased to keep operations running, with staff moving to supervision and exception handling.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Data services company Innodata has opened a motion-capture facility in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, that records human and robot movement with sub-millimetre optical tracking. Humanoid developers can buy the data, commission custom captures, retarget motion between platforms or send robots for independent performance and safety testing.
· The Robot Report
San Francisco and Paris startup Flourish has introduced Flourish One, a Raspberry Pi-based wheeled humanoid for household chores such as tidying and wiping tables. Owners teach it new tasks by moving their smartphone while the robot mirrors them, with training done on cloud GPUs. A first batch of 50 units is expected to ship before Christmas 2026.
· The Robot Report
An unnamed Fortune 100 heavy equipment manufacturer that already uses Cyngn DriveMod Tuggers has extended them to a second production workflow, moving components to an assembly line. The vehicles tow up to 12,000 pounds and navigate without magnetic tape or guide wires, a sign of repeat industrial demand for autonomous material handling.
· Robotics Tomorrow
DYNA Robotics has released DYNA 2.1, a semi-humanoid with a two-armed torso on four steerable wheels, already working in hotels, laundromats and restaurants. The company says it can run a full commercial laundry shift, from washers and dryers to folding and shelving towels, using its DYNA 2 model trained on one million hours of human and robot data.
· Robotics Tomorrow
A team led by Ritu Raman at MIT created a flat biohybrid robot whose two fins are powered by genetically engineered muscle that contracts under light, letting researchers steer it through a water maze. Published in Advanced Functional Materials, the work suggests thin designs could make biohybrid robots cheaper to build than bulkier 3D versions.
· MIT News
NVIDIA has introduced an Open Agent Safety Platform made of the OpenShell runtime and a Sentry watchdog design, and Gecko Robotics is among over 100 organizations using it. Gecko is adding a policy enforcement layer to its inspection robots, including the Komodo system deployed with the U.S. Navy, to limit what autonomous AI agents can do on physical machines.
· The Robot Report
