Robotics & embodied AI
A curated map of robotics & embodied-AI websites plus the latest tech progress and news from China and around the world, refreshed on a schedule.
News is gathered automatically from public robotics & AI feeds on a schedule.
Report looks at advances in robots for manufacturing Robotics in manufacturing has evolved from the days of rigidly programmed robot arms on automotive production lines. Robot models are diversifying, widening applications for industrial automation are changing with improvements in perception, autonomy, and actuation. In addition, widespread shortages of skilled labor are driving demand in diverse… The post State of Robots in Manufacturing appeared first on The Robot Report .
The company also detailed how some of those breaches had happened, and outlined additional measures it is taking to assess the impact of the events.
The round builds on a $30 million fundraise in February, taking the company's total funding to $140 million.
When customers talk about AI costs, the conversation usually starts with token prices and ends with access to the latest, most capable model in the cloud. Do they always need that level of capability? Not necessarily. But that is often where the conversation goes. As AI moves from experimentation to production, model choice is only…
In its prospectus, Anthropic just told investors it's losing tens of billions of dollars a year, but also growing like crazy, and — oh yeah — its own AI might pose an existential risk to humanity.
Thirteen of the 18 startups in Peak XV’s latest Surge cohort are targeting global markets, while more than half are based in India.
A top executive at the AI lab told the Wall Street Journal that the model in question had displayed a poor aptitude for following orders.
Listen to the session or watch below The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over a thousand people who…
Building useful robots starts with understanding the people who use them. For Charlie Kemp, cofounder and chief technology officer of Hello Robot, that means developing assistive robots that can help people with everyday tasks and support greater independence. In this Robots Guide profile, Kemp shares his path from studying artificial intelligence at MIT to building Stretch, explains how working with people with disabilities has shaped his approach, and offers advice for aspiring roboticists. Read the full profile on IEEE’s Robots Guide.
The new financing is expected to more than triples the AI infrastructure startup's valuation from just four months ago.
The acquisition will see World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist.
Shopify is expanding WebMCP support to checkout, allowing browser-based AI agents to update order details and complete purchases with a buyer’s authorization.
Just like the rest of the U.S., data centers and AI are dividing climate tech founders and investors.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday introduced a toolkit of software and hardware products that add independent security layers around AI agents to ensure they stay within their test environments even if they attempt to break out.
Anthropic has released the newest version of its mid-range model, boasting faster response times and less token burn.
Gecko Robotics is using the new NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform to ensure the secure autonomous control of systems. The post Gecko Robotics works with NVIDIA to add AI agent security and control appeared first on The Robot Report .
As all-in-one AI agents like Meta's Muse and Instinct take off, Google is opting to end a feature that built task-specific agents.
On Friday, OpenAI published a new site devoted to “misalignment reports” and the breadth of the incidents is alarming.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last Wednesday, Anthropic announced that earlier this year it had launched a molecular biology lab, where Claude agents read and conjecture about hard biology problems and human scientists run experiments on what…
Meta says it will focus on bringing its full technology stack, including Muse, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers.
Anthropic, Clay, and Gamma on what it takes for an AI product to go beyond the demo at the AI Stage at TechCrunchDisrupt 2026. Register to join and get 50% off a second pass.
After her grandfather was scammed by a deepfake of his brother's voice, Tarini Padmanabhuni founded DetectifAI, a San Francisco startup building AI models small enough to run directly on smartphones and flag fake voices in real time, and it's now one of the companies competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Thousands of applications. Multiple rounds of review. Hundreds of hours spent evaluating startups from around the world. Now comes the part everyone has been waiting for. Register for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 today.
Modulate deploys its models to detect deepfake, fraud and scam
The startup uses AI to automate tedious paperwork for insurance agencies and brokers.
The last day to book your Disrupt 2026 exhibit table is this Friday, October 2 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Secure your exhibit table and get your startup in front of 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders at San Francisco's Moscone West on October 13-15.
Economics is both a robotics impetus and a constraint, as systems make deliveries on streets or do chores in households. The post Robonomics on the threshold: Economic autonomy, smart cities, and crypto wallets for humanoids appeared first on The Robot Report .
"This funding helps us bring Instinct to more people and continue building the future of personal AI. It’s an exciting, creative time, and we're just getting started," founder Noah Shinn said in a statement.
Raise Robotics said attendees will learn a decision rule for allocating engineering capacity and a vocabulary for two hidden failure modes. The post Raise Robotics to discuss scaling field robots at RoboBusiness appeared first on The Robot Report .
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its agents…
This will be the first one-on-one meeting between Dario Amodei and Donald Trump.
Asimov's fictional Three Laws of Robotics famously set safeguards, and tech observers today raise similar concerns about AI. The post Asimov’s laws are not enough to keep robotics and AI safe appeared first on The Robot Report .
While robotaxis prove their driving ability, scaling the industry globally requires solving the unglamorous challenge of fast, local vehicle servicing. The post From 14 cities to 15,000: What it will take to scale robotaxis? appeared first on The Robot Report .
The new facility will produce products that power Amazon's fulfillment and robotics network across North America. The post Amazon to invest $100M in new Indiana manufacturing facility appeared first on The Robot Report .
Rather than training one model to do everything, General Robotics composes specialized capabilities—helping robots adapt across tasks and form factors. The post General Robotics is betting on modular intelligence, not one robot brain appeared first on The Robot Report .
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN, TEXAS Humanoids 2026 : 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CALIF. Enjoy today’s videos! Life’s better with a little Goose. [ The Robot Works ] Thanks, Dave! Skydio has introduced the F10, a charmingly lopsided fixed-wing drone , that uses a robot arm for autonomous l
Agility Robotics is exploring a range of robot designs and form factors, including wheels, to address different operating environments and customer needs. The post Agility Robotics, maker of Digit humanoid, exploring wheeled robots appeared first on The Robot Report .
Labor availability, costs, productivity, and efficiency are common concerns of farmers that technology can address, according to CNH. The post Farmers are facing more pressure; CNH says robotics can help appeared first on The Robot Report .
The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved form of lie detector, according to a Department of Defense budget request. The program, called Polygraph+ or Polygraph Next, will focus on scoring algorithms that use artificial intelligence and machine learning and on a technique called “standoff sensing,” which…
China still leads the world in industrial robot installations, but the U.S. and Germany are also significant markets, found the IFR. The post 5 million robots are now at work in factories worldwide, reports the IFR appeared first on The Robot Report .
In Guadalajara, Mexico, many high schools have motivated teachers and talented students with an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but they lack access to advanced tools such as robotics laboratories. The resources shortfall limits the students’ opportunities for hands-on learning on cutting-edge applications. A team from ITESO, Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara , is working to change that. Through the EPICS in IEEE initiative, a multidisciplinary group of 15 engineering students, faculty advisors, and IEEE Guadalajara Section volunteers developed RoboMeshA. The po
Choosing the right motion architecture is about understanding how the entire system will behave in use, explains Kollmorgen. The post Why you should look beyond the spec sheet when choosing motion architecture appeared first on The Robot Report .
Epson Robots has expanded its six-axis robot line with the AX6, a lightweight force- and power-limited arm. The post Epson introduces AX6 cobot with compact design, no-code programming appeared first on The Robot Report .
ANYbotics partnered with dormakaba and LEGIC Identsystems to enable the ANYmal quadruped to gain access like a badged employee. The post ANYbotics opens the door for inspections with ANYmal robots appeared first on The Robot Report .
While this is the first intentional step by Arduino into robotics, the company has over 20 years of experience working with robotics developers. The post With the new VENTUNO Q board, Arduino hopes to make robotics development easier appeared first on The Robot Report .
Helicon has obtained seed funding to use automation to cut composite manufacturing lead times from months to weeks. The post Helicon brings automation to high-volume composites manufacturing appeared first on The Robot Report .
Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians’ answer sheets). Anthropic’s models have also hacked into other companies’ systems four times already. And that’s…
Throughout her career, roboticist Barbara Mazzolai has turned to nature for inspiration. Now she wants to ensure the technology she builds gives back to the environment, too. After starting her career as a biologist, a chance opportunity saw Mazzolai switch streams to engineering and become an early pioneer of bioinspired robotics . Building on her knowledge of biology’s ability to solve a diverse set of problems, she has developed robots based on octopuses, plant roots, and even seeds . “I’ve always been fascinated by living organisms, [and] by the extraordinary variety of solutions in nature
It’s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents involving their models. This was followed…
When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses.  As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed…
MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border. We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for…
Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past…
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Enjoy today’s videos! A quadrotor is really just two birotors that love each other very much. [ CLIMB Lab ] The last 30 seconds of this video are fantastic. [ ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab ] This is great! But
This article is brought to you by VicOne . Robot safety has traditionally asked: Can a machine remain safe when something goes wrong? Physical AI raises a harder question: Can a machine remain safe when an attacker changes what it sees, decides, or does even when nothing appears to have failed? As AI and robotics continue to advance at an unprecedented pace, modern robots perceive through multimodal sensors, interpret context using AI models, and translate those interpretations into physical action. As they move into dynamic environments, their safety increasingly depends on the integrity of t
Despite the recent deluge of videos of humanoid robots doing backflips and kung fu, the actual pace of progress towards humanoids that can do economically viable jobs at scale has at times seemed a bit plodding. There are some good reasons for this : A humanoid robot needs to be powerful enough to do useful work, safe enough for humans to walk past, and have enough battery life to limit how much of the day it’s hooked to a charger. But all three of those necessary features actively work against each other. With its new Digit 5 robot, announced today, Agility Robotics may have found the sweet s
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Enjoy today’s videos! Traversing sparse 3D structures requires humanoid robots to perceive thin, overhanging geometry while executing agile, accurate whole-body motions. We study this problem through monkey-bar
Dexterous manipulation remains one of the biggest barriers keeping robots from successfully tackling a wide range of everyday tasks. A sense of touch could be the key, but a lack of quality data has held back progress. This is now starting to change as academic labs and startups race to build new tactile datasets and techniques to put them to use. Over the last few years, vision-language-action (VLA) models have significantly improved the ability of robots to carry out complex tasks involving objects and environments they’ve never encountered before. Pretrained on huge amounts of images, video
You sit down and put your arm in the cradle. You press a button. The machine takes it from there. A near-infrared light sweeps your inner elbow, hunting for a vein. A puff of alcohol hits your skin. An ultrasound probe glides across your arm, mapping how deep the vessel runs and which way it bends. Doppler captures the direction of blood flow to rule out the artery. The cuff tightens around your upper arm. The needle comes down and pierces the skin. Your blood flows into the collection tubes, each one tipped end over end nine times—no more, no less. The needle withdraws. You get a bandage. No
Imagine you are trapped under rubble after an earthquake and you see an electronics-covered cockroach with a spring-loaded needle on its back scuttling toward you. Although the sight might be unnerving, to say the least, this prototype paramedic cyborg, or “Paraborg,” might one day help deliver lifesaving aid to disaster victims who might be otherwise impossible to reach. The Hardest Problems in Robotics For decades, scientists have sought to develop cyborg insects as “a shortcut around some of the hardest problems in robotics,” says T. Thang Vo-Doan , director of the University of Queensland’
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Enjoy today’s videos! I know these videos from Agility can be a little bit silly, but the couch drag in this one is impressive. [ Agility Robotics ] Stabilizing unsecured payloads against the inherent oscillatio
This article is brought to you by Tsubaki KabelSchlepp . In modern automated manufacturing, six-axis articulated robots perform high-speed, multidirectional maneuvers under demanding operational cycles. However, as robot arms swivel, rotate, and extend, the electrical cables, fiber optics, and pneumatic hoses supplying them endure severe mechanical stress. Torsional twist, rapid acceleration, and repeated contact with machine structures often lead to premature conductor fatigue, insulation breakdown, and costly unplanned production halts. To overcome these multi-axis motion challenges, the Tsu
On a good day, the rock quarry in central Texas is about 370,000 kilometers (230,000 miles) from the moon. But last February, when Rishi Jangale watched his 1.8-meter-wide, 150-kilogram inflatable robot roll effortlessly over rocks, gravel, and wet clay, his imagination turned the quarry into the lunar surface instead. Jangale is an upbeat mechanical engineer nearing the end of his Ph.D. at Texas A&M University, in College Station, Texas. He and his labmates have been working on this big tan “RoboBall” for about five years. Their goal: create a vehicle capable of exploring some of the most ina
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN, TEXAS Enjoy today’s videos! Nvidia just paid US $12.9 billion for the company that acquired Pollen Robotics, and this must be why. Meet Microduck. 🦆 The 25-centimeter, 780-gram robot that waddles, falls, gets
This article is brought to you by Ollobot . From about 2017, individuals began to truly connect with the initial wave of companion robots. These devices had personality, moved around, joked, and answered when you spoke to them. Most early companion robots, however, were still limited by simple voice-command interactions and narrow functionality. Once the novelty wore off, many ended up sitting unused on shelves. As some of those companies went out of business and turned off their servers, many owners likened it to losing a pet. What Ollobot describes as “gentle intelligence” is a useful way to
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Enjoy today’s videos! This is very, very cool. But I’m trying to think of what the commercial use case will be, you know? I guess, high speed, incredibly dangerous package delivery to second-floor windows or som
This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. Microspines are one of many ways to enable robots to latch onto surfaces like walls and ceilings . Now roboticists in Canada are using the mini spikes to get drones to land on a more challenging, remote surface: icebergs. Like a spider, the Ice Dart can land on and latch onto steep, slippery surfaces such as icebergs and glaciers—an increasingly useful capability as activity in the Arctic increases. The drone can grip onto icy slopes of nearly 60 degrees, which is way beyond what most humans could
Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies that seems to be entirely focused on making that happen. Persona AI’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economically viable for robots right now, and they’ve found one that was also the job of one of the very first industrial robots ever sold : welding. IEEE Spectrum first spoke with Persona two years ago , shortly after it was founded by Nicolaus Radford and Jerry Pratt . Radford led the Valkyrie program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center back in th
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! Speaking from experience, I can tell you that the best part of any DARPA challenge is when things go horribly wrong. And after you enjoy all the crashes (followed by all of the bat
Objects constructed by robots are ubiquitous. If you’ve used a car, household appliance, or smartphone today, you’ve used an object constructed at least in part by robots. The more products that manufacturers want to produce (and consumers want to consume) at lower costs, the more industrial robots will be needed. There are over 4 million industrial robots in use worldwide, according to the International Federation of Robotics . And researchers predict that number will grow to over 16 million by 2030, as manufacturing rapidly increases. But what’s going to happen when they start breaking down?
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! The DARPA Lift Challenge is taking place through this weekend. There are a couple of very brief overview videos from the past couple of days, which are only really interesting beca
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “Covered List,” originally published in 2021, identifies communications equipment and services that it says pose a threat to national security. On 28 July, the FCC added mobile, communicating robots weighing more than 2 kilograms and power inverters commonly used in solar panels to the list, meaning that new products from any foreign country in these categories are no longer eligible for import. The move is a Department of Defense–driven expansion of scattered federal efforts to further limit U.S. exposure to potentially sensitive Chinese techno
For a while there, it seemed as though robotics as a whole was stuck in a mad rush towards building humanoid robots mostly because it was very possible (and very lucrative) to do so, even without near-term goals that were necessarily realistic. Some of the magic of those first couple of years of the humanoid explosion has stuck around, but there’s also been an industry-wide sobering leading to pointed questions about practicality and value . In other words, starting a commercial humanoid company now is a much different proposition than it would have been just a few years ago. On 15 July, Walde
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! Introducing Gemini Robotics 2—the intelligence layer powering the next generation of truly adaptable robots. As it takes its first literal steps, this major advance unlocks intelli
Imagine running your fingertip over the surface of a U.S. penny. You would feel the ridges of the raised letters and numbers, Abe Lincoln’s bearded side profile, and, if it’s tails, the fluted columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Getting a robot to sense the same things is an imposing task, often requiring gathering data on pressure and force at many spatial locations at once. But that’s just what a team of scientists in Europe has now managed to do, using an unusual, colorful robotic skin that provides high-resolution sensing in real time. “To be honest, when they showed us this, we thought it wa
Atop a lab bench, Cornell Tech postdoctoral researcher Yifan He positions the lens of an optical receiver almost a meter away from an LED emitting a beam of red light. The computer monitor attached to the receiver takes a beat to refresh, then displays an array of squares that resemble a QR code. When you hold your phone camera up to a QR code, light strikes the image sensor as only a first step to revealing the data hidden behind the black-and-white matrix. The receiver here is doing something different: directly altering its own memory using the photocurrents produced by the beamed array of
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! In just six months, our team turned GENE.01 into a fully functional humanoid platform that can walk, sense and
Like many engineers, Sarah Downs says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered robotics through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s First Lego League team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 to 2016. Watching PBS specials on NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity , and seeing the live broadcast of the Curiosity rover launch in 2011, inspired the teen to dream of a career working with NASA. Sarah Downs MEMBER GRADE Graduate student member UNIVERSITY Texas A&M Universi
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of contemporary humanoid technology for laparoscopic surgical