The latest in robotics, explained clearly — for builders and the curious.
NantWorks led a $75M Series B for Multiply Labs; AstraZeneca and Teradyne joined as the San Francisco physical-AI company scales cell-and-gene and biologics manufacturing robots.
The Munich-founded industrial robotics startup doubled its valuation since January in a deal mostly made of employee share sales, backed by Sequoia, Lightspeed and others, as it expands in the U.S.
A Carnegie Mellon spin-out co-led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun runs thousands of simulated edge cases with reactive human models and issues third-party safety reports.
On Oct 5, 2026 Teradyne announced a strategic investment and collaboration with Bright Machines to combine UR cobots, board test and software-defined microfactories for AI data-center hardware.
Tesla's Austin Cybercab fleet grew quickly after its Sept. 3 launch, but Waymo runs 4,000+ driverless cars in 15 U.S. markets and 500,000+ paid rides a week. Here's what separates them.
A Fudan/CUHK team's Vela model outputs spline curves with an adaptive time horizon, beating π0.5 on LIBERO-X and EBench and on real egg-cake cooking and potato-shredding tasks.
The Japanese giants will validate Physical AI inside Hitachi factories — picking, shape-varying parts, changeovers — then sell jointly from fiscal 2027, as industrial vendors race to productize the buzzword.
Atlas's new hand has 13 degrees of freedom, no pinkie and direct-drive joints designed for sim-to-real training, as Hyundai starts training Atlas in Georgia and Rohit Prasad becomes CEO.
The 735 g ADH-5-13 has 13 active degrees of freedom, fingertip tactile sensing, ±0.2 mm repeatability and modules that can be replaced without taking the hand apart.
Sharpa launched D01, a dexterous robot with body-wide electronic skin, W02, a hand about 30% smaller than its predecessor with 21 active degrees of freedom, and AE01, a 22-encoder haptic glove for teleoperation data.
Waymo is gradually routing some Austin Uber trips onto freeways after testing fully driverless freeway operation there since February 2026. It already offers freeway rides in four other cities.
After launching S1 — a robotics foundation model that copies a single video demo without fine-tuning — Skild showed Physical Self-Play: the same base policy trained against itself in Isaac Sim, then transferred to a humanoid.