Kawasaki opens Silicon Valley Physical AI center focused on healthcare robotics

Kawasaki Heavy Industries has launched a Physical AI development center in San Jose, partnering with Nvidia, Microsoft, Analog Devices, and Fujitsu to build autonomous healthcare systems. The facility will integrate AI with Kawasaki's existing surgical and service robots, starting with a "hospital o...

Gecko Robotics tests Ouster's Rev8 color lidar for infrastructure inspection

Gecko Robotics is testing Ouster's Rev8 digital lidar sensor to enhance its Cantilever platform for industrial infrastructure inspection. The Rev8's ability to output colorized 3D point clouds alongside infrared and intensity data enables Gecko's AI to more reliably detect structural anomalies that ...

Brain Corp partners with UC San Diego on contextual mapping for robot autonomy

Brain Corp and UC San Diego have expanded their research partnership to develop contextual 3D semantic mapping technology for autonomous robots in commercial and industrial settings. The collaboration addresses a critical gap: making next-generation AI-powered robots reliable and deployable in dynam...

FANUC partners with Google to deploy physical AI across industrial robot lineup

FANUC announced a strategic partnership with Google to integrate advanced AI capabilities across its industrial robot product line, targeting more adaptive automation in manufacturing. The company has already shipped over 1,000 robots for physical AI applications since unveiling the system at IREX T...

Merlin Pilot targets pilot-free cargo aircraft with AI flight system

Merlin has introduced Merlin Pilot for Commercial Cargo, an AI-powered flight system designed to operate large cargo aircraft autonomously. The company is pursuing staged certification, starting with the system as a co-pilot alongside human safety pilots, then advancing to fully autonomous operation...

Open-source AI platforms accelerate robot intelligence development

Major tech companies including Hugging Face, Nvidia, and Alibaba have released open-source AI models and tools specifically for robotics, making it easier to build intelligent physical systems without specialized expertise. Hugging Face's LeRobot platform now hosts over 58,000 robotics datasets — th...

Humanoid signs Bosch and Schaeffler deals to scale wheeled robot production

Humanoid has signed manufacturing and deployment agreements with Bosch and Schaeffler to scale production of its wheeled bimanual manipulator for European industrial markets. The deals position the 2-year-old startup to deploy a four-digit number of robots across Schaeffler facilities by 2032, while...

Quartermaster raises $43M for ship-mounted sensor network

Quartermaster has closed a $43M Series A to scale its SmartMast sensor package — a weather-hardened mast-mounted unit combining cameras, radios, and analytics software that turns ships into a continuous sensing network. The system addresses critical gaps in maritime situational awareness, where the ...

Opentrons launches compliance software for Flex lab robots

Opentrons has released Compliance Ready Software for its Flex liquid handling platform, enabling pharmaceutical and biotech labs to deploy benchtop automation in FDA-regulated workflows. The software provides 21 CFR Part 11-aligned authentication, audit trails, and electronic record integrity at a t...

Shield AI wins contract to add autonomy software to LUCAS attack drones

Shield AI secured a Pentagon contract to integrate its Hivemind autonomy software onto LUCAS one-way attack drones, enabling coordinated swarm operations with a single human operator retaining strike authority. The pilot program, run by the USD(R&E), represents a major step toward operationalizing c...

Universal Robots patches critical command injection flaw in cobot OS

Universal Robots has patched CVE-2026-8153, a critical command injection vulnerability in its PolyScope 5 operating system that powers collaborative industrial robots. The flaw allows unauthenticated attackers with network access to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying Linux OS, potentially ...

ISO's home robot safety standard revision ignores user input

The International Standards Organization is finalizing an update to ISO 13482, the 12-year-old safety standard for personal care robots, as humanoid robots move from labs into homes. South Korean researcher Jae-Seong Lee argues the revision acknowledges bidirectional human-robot interaction risks bu...

Unitree launches GD01 mecha suit at $650K, function unclear

Chinese robotics firm Unitree has unveiled the GD01, a piloted mecha suit that walks bipedally or quadrupedally at human walking pace. Priced at $650K, the 1,100-lb platform appears to be a first-generation prototype with exposed wiring, no visible controls, and no disclosed capabilities beyond basi...

Octopus-inspired gripper shifts from soft to rigid in under 2 seconds

Researchers at Peking University have developed an octopus-inspired underwater gripper that transitions between soft and rigid states in 1.3 seconds — 10x faster than existing shape memory polymer systems. The OUT-Robot uses electrically heated PLA arms that grip fragile or irregular objects when so...

Mind Robotics raises $400M two months after $500M round

Mind Robotics, the industrial robotics spinoff from Rivian, has closed a $400M round led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing total funding to over $1B since its 2025 formation. The company is developing robots with "human-like skills" to automate factory operations — a gap Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe believes e...

Yarbo robotic lawnmowers contain hardcoded backdoor and bypass emergency stop

Security researcher Andreas Makris discovered critical vulnerabilities in Yarbo's modular robotic lawnmowers and snow blowers that allow remote takeover, emergency stop bypass, and extraction of owner data including Wi-Fi passwords and GPS coordinates. All 11,000+ deployed devices share a hardcoded ...

Genesis AI unveils GENE-26.5 model with human-scale robotic hands

Genesis AI has launched its first foundational model, GENE-26.5, alongside human-scale robotic hands developed with China's Wuji Tech. The hands perform complex manipulation tasks including cooking, piano playing, and lab work — trained on human video data and teleoperation collected via a lightweig...

Physical Intelligence releases π0.7 robotics foundation model

Physical Intelligence has released π0.7, a vision-language-action model that performs dexterous manipulation tasks across different robot platforms and can combine learned skills to solve new problems. The model uses multimodal prompts—language, visual subgoals, and metadata—to integrate diverse tra...

Physical Intelligence trains robots to master precision tasks in 15 minutes

Physical Intelligence has developed RL tokens (RLT), a reinforcement learning method that allows vision-language-action models to refine precise manipulation skills using just 15 minutes of real-world robot experience. The technique adds a compressed "RL token" output to the base model, enabling a l...

NVIDIA releases open Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint for robotics training data

NVIDIA has released the Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint, an open reference architecture that automates training data generation, augmentation, and evaluation for robotics, autonomous vehicles, and vision AI agents. The blueprint addresses a core bottleneck in Physical AI development: generating m...

Military drone lessons expose self-driving car safety gaps

Self-driving car companies are repeating mistakes the U.S. military solved decades ago in unmanned aerial vehicle operations, according to autonomous systems researcher Missy Cummings. Remote supervision of autonomous vehicles requires low latency, careful interface design, operator workload managem...

Unitree robots vulnerable to firmware poisoning via hard-coded encryption keys

Security researchers have disclosed CVE-2026-1442, a critical vulnerability in Unitree's firmware update system that uses hard-coded encryption keys. The flaw allows anyone with physical or remote access to create and deploy malicious firmware packages that Unitree robots — including models deployed...

Engineer accesses 7,000 robot vacuums via DJI backend flaw

Software engineer Sammy Azdoufal reverse-engineered his DJI Romo vacuum cleaner and discovered a backend vulnerability granting access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, and floor plans from nearly 7,000 devices globally. The disclosure highlights systemic security weaknesses in consumer IoT ro...

Researcher breaks Tegra X2 secure boot, exposing Tesla Autopilot hardware

Security researcher Elise Amber Katze disclosed multiple vulnerabilities in NVIDIA's Tegra X2 SoC, including an unpatchable BootROM exploit affecting Tesla Autopilot 2 and 2.5 hardware. The research, presented at 39C3, demonstrates complete secure boot chain bypass via USB recovery mode. Since the v...

Physical Intelligence raises $600M to scale robot foundation models

Physical Intelligence has closed a $600M Series B led by Alphabet's CapitalG, bringing total funding to $1.1B at a $5.6B valuation. The San Francisco startup's latest VLA model doubles robot throughput on manipulation tasks using a reinforcement learning approach that combines demonstrations, correc...

UniPwn exploit allows remote takeover of Unitree robot fleets

Security researchers disclosed UniPwn, a critical Bluetooth Low Energy vulnerability in Unitree's Go2, B2, G1, and H1 robots that enables root-level takeover via hardcoded encryption keys. The exploit is wormable — infected robots can autonomously scan for and compromise other Unitree units in range...

FieldAI raised $405M to build universal robot brains with physics-grounded AI

FieldAI closed $405M across multiple rounds to develop "foundational embodied AI models" — general-purpose robot brains designed to work across humanoids, quadrupeds, and autonomous vehicles. The company's approach embeds physics into AI models to help robots manage risk and adapt to new environment...

Genesis AI raises $105M seed to build robotics foundation model using synthetic data

Genesis AI emerged from stealth with a $105M seed round from Eclipse and Khosla Ventures to develop a foundation model for robotics trained on synthetic data generated by a proprietary physics engine. The approach aims to sidestep the cost and latency of collecting real-world training data, a key bo...

Ouster launches Rev8, the first LiDAR with native color perception

Ouster has released Rev8, the first LiDAR sensor family that captures color natively in every 3D data point, removing the need for separate camera fusion or post-processing. The flagship OS1 Max offers 500-meter range, 256 channels, and operates across extreme lighting conditions—from near-darkness ...

Army pushes autonomous breaching tech to protect combat engineers

The U.S. Army is developing teleoperated and autonomous breaching systems to protect combat engineers who clear minefields and obstacles under fire. While mounted platforms like the Assault Breacher Vehicle are gaining remote control capabilities via contracts awarded in 2022, dismounted engineers s...

Galbot raises $300M at $3B valuation, deploys humanoid robots at scale

Galbot closed a $300M funding round in December 2024, reaching a $3B valuation and $800M in total capital raised. The company has deployed humanoid robots in live operations with CATL, Bosch, Toyota, and Hyundai, secured orders for thousands of units, and launched autonomous retail stores in over 30...

Bone AI raises $12M to build South Korea's defense robotics supply chain

Bone AI, a Seoul and Palo Alto-based startup, has raised a $12M seed round led by Third Prime to develop autonomous air, ground, and marine vehicles for defense and government clients. The company is positioning itself as a "physical AI" firm that integrates software, hardware design, and large-scal...

Figure raises $1B+ at $39B valuation to scale humanoid manufacturing

Figure AI closed a $1B+ Series C led by Parkway Venture Capital at a $39B valuation — 15x its prior round. The funding will expand production capacity at BotQ, Figure's in-house factory designed to manufacture 12,000 humanoid robots annually, and enhance Helix, the company's vision-language-action A...

Robot dogs track car thieves to arrest at Atlanta apartment complex

Two suspects breaking into cars at an Atlanta affordable housing complex were tracked and arrested with assistance from Undaunted's autonomous quadruped robots on May 21. One robot pursued fleeing suspects while another alerted Atlanta Police, who arrived within minutes — one suspect was caught flee...

GE Vernova acquires Robotech Automation to build in-house robotics integration

GE Vernova has signed an agreement to acquire Robotech Automation, a Quebec-based robotics systems integrator with ~35 employees. The acquisition aims to accelerate robotics deployment across GE Vernova's energy manufacturing supply chain, building in-house integration capabilities rather than relyi...

Flexiv previews 7-DOF tactile arm and modular humanoid at ICRA

Flexiv will preview two unreleased robotic platforms at ICRA 2026 in Vienna, including a 7-DOF force-controlled arm with whole-body touch sensing and a modular humanoid system combining dual arms, vision, and an autonomous mobile base. The systems represent the company's push into high-dexterity man...