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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Shanghai-based ZS Robotics has brought its H125 four-way pallet shuttle to the Americas, a warehouse storage and retrieval vehicle with a 125 mm chassis, 13 safety sensors and CE, UL and CSA compliance. The company, which reports over 1,000 shuttles deployed worldwide, is also opening a demonstration and training space in Houston with partner Kingmore.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Agility Robotics CEO Jonathan Hurst confirmed the company is evaluating other form factors, including wheels, for sites where legs are not needed, without saying whether this means a wheeled Digit or a new platform. The move comes as Agility prepares a SPAC listing at a $2.5 billion valuation and reports a Digit 5 backlog above $300 million from one customer.
· The Robot Report
Epson Robots has added the AX6 to its lineup, a carbon fiber cobot with 6 kg payload and 900 mm reach that uses power and force limiting to work near people after a risk assessment. It can be programmed without code or in Python through the RC-A1010 controller, meets ISO Class 5 cleanroom requirements, and is sold through Epson distributors.
· The Robot Report
ANYbotics has worked with dormakaba and LEGIC to let its ANYmal quadruped open automatic doors and request entry through secured ones with a digital credential, logging each access. Tested at GE Vernova's Whitegate power station in Ireland, the add-on is due later in 2026 and targets equipment often located behind fire doors that limited inspection routes.
· The Robot Report · Photo: Cvoellmy, CC BY-SA 4.0
TrinaTracker, part of Trina Solar, launched two robots for solar plants: BUILDEX, which autonomously picks and places PV modules at up to 90 per hour using AI vision and 3D cameras, and AURORA, a self-powered cleaning robot that crosses height offsets up to 50mm. The launch extends robotics into utility-scale solar construction and maintenance.
· Robotics Tomorrow
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
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
