AI news
Short summaries of what matters in robotics, each linking to its original source, plus our own interviews and features. Have a story?
Stories
Arduino has opened pre-orders for VENTUNO Q, its first board aimed squarely at robotics, combining a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ-8275 processor rated at up to 40 dense TOPS with an STM32H5 microcontroller for real-time control. It ships with Ubuntu, 16 GB of memory and MoveIt integration from PickNik, targeting mobile robots, inspection and education. Pricing was not disclosed.
· The Robot Report
Robotics software company Viam presented BoxBot at IROS 2026, a robot that cuts tape with visual servoing and opens flaps using a fine-tuned open source SmolVLA policy. Engineers gathered the 125 teleoperated demonstrations in about five hours, and the model runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Code and data are published on Hugging Face.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Qualcomm will buy PickNik, maintainer of the widely used MoveIt manipulation framework for ROS; terms were not disclosed. Qualcomm says MoveIt will stay open source under its current license and keep supporting third-party hardware, while adding tighter integration with its Dragonwing platforms and Arduino VENTUNO Q boards.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Gripper maker Robotiq has released three open source packages on GitHub: a C++ SDK, a ROS 2 package that can replace the community driver, and NVIDIA Isaac Sim models with closed-loop kinematics. They form part of its Contact Core software layer for training manipulation models on Robotiq hardware, with embedded intelligence expected in Q4 2026.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Machine vision company Cognex will buy RealSense, the depth camera business spun out of Intel in 2025, for $500 million in cash, with closing expected in Q4 2026. RealSense sensors are used on robot arms, mobile robots, quadrupeds and humanoids, and the company expects $80 to 90 million in 2026 revenue. Its facial authentication unit will be split off.
· Robotics Tomorrow
NVIDIA has made Isaac ROS 5.0 available as free, open source software, adding support for ROS Lyrical on Ubuntu 24.04 and packaged skills that AI coding agents can use for setup, stereo model fine-tuning and pick-and-place. It runs across Jetson hardware from Orin Nano to Thor and speeds up FoundationPose object pose estimation by up to 5.5x.
· NVIDIA Blog
Simbe Robotics now has more than 3,000 Tally shelf-scanning robots under contract across over 75 retail banners in nearly a dozen countries. Tally checks stock levels, prices and product placement in stores, and Simbe says it is the only company with UL 3300 certification for a robot working in public spaces.
· Robotics Tomorrow
MIT researchers led by Marin Soljacic built a reconfigurable lab where a seven-joint robot arm places mirrors, lenses and light sources, then adjusts them with micron-level accuracy. It assembled a working laser cavity in 50 moves within 30 minutes. The work, presented at IROS, could speed materials testing for solar cells and quantum devices.
· MIT News
Skild AI has introduced S1, a robot foundation model that picks up new multistep tasks from a single video demonstration without retraining. The company reports about 66% success on unfamiliar tasks versus 9% for comparable systems, and says it is working with NVIDIA and Foxconn to use the technology in server assembly.
· NVIDIA Blog