Strategic

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...

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 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...

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 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 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 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 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...

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 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 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 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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 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 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 ...

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 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, 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 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...