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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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The New York State Office for the Aging will pay Intuition Robotics $2.1 million over three years to keep providing the ElliQ AI companion to older adults at risk of isolation. The program began in 2022, and more than 3,500 people applied to join it in 2025 alone.
· The Robot Report
Doug Field, who led Ford's EV and technology strategy until April and earlier oversaw the Tesla Model 3, has joined Mind Robotics as president to run product, engineering and operations. The Rivian-created venture builds robots running on foundation models for industrial manufacturing, has raised more than $1 billion and counts Rivian as its first customer.
· TechCrunch
Toronto-based Promise Robotics will produce components for more than 1,250 U.S. homes for D.R. Horton, the country's largest homebuilder by volume, under a multi-year agreement. Its factory-as-a-service model turns home designs into robot instructions and runs automated production, starting from facilities in Edmonton, Calgary and Phoenix.
· The Robot Report
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Edge AI chipmaker SiMa.ai closed a $150 million Series C co-led by Fidelity and Amplify, bringing total funding to $500 million. The company plans to use the money for its Palette Neat software and next-generation chips aimed at humanoid robots, drones and driver assistance, with new hardware rated at 1,000 dense TOPS due in the first half of 2028.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Intrinsic, the Google AI robotics group, has published Intrinsic Core on GitHub, a set of ROS-compatible tools covering real-time control, 6D pose estimation, motion and grasp planning, simulation and camera calibration. It also released an open machine tending reference design, giving developers building blocks previously locked inside its commercial platform.
· Robohub
AGIBOT and Chimelong have opened a first phase with more than 300 robots at Chimelong Spaceship Park in Zhuhai, China, used for shows, guest guidance, retail, education and hotel services. The deployment included AGIBOT's 20,000th production robot, and the partners are setting up a joint institute on robots in tourism.
· Robotics Tomorrow