Topic
US
26 articles tagged with this topic
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
