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4 hours ago
M&ABreakingUS

Symbotic buys Bremen's cellumation for cash to put a software-steered sorting floor inside its warehouse systems

Symbotic said in a press release on Oct 13 that it has acquired cellumation, the Bremen company behind the celluveyor sorting platform, in an all-cash deal whose price it did not disclose. The celluveyor will be sold on its own to customers and other integrators and also built into Symbotic's systems, giving the Walmart-anchored automation group a European team and a second product line.

2 sourcesSymboticcellumationWalmartFleet Orchestration Software
8 hours ago
PolicyKR

Korea clears Robros to put 20 walking humanoids beside workers at chip, auto, shipyard and logistics sites

Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said in a press release on Oct 13 that its regulatory sandbox committee approved a trial in which Robros deploys 20 humanoid robots at sites run by Nepes, Sungwoo Hitech, HD Hyundai Samho and Delivery Lab, lifting a fencing rule written for fixed industrial robots. The same meeting allowed Maum AI to run a four-legged patrol robot on public riverside walkways for the first time.

1 sourceRobros
16 hours ago
ProductJP

Highlanders shows a production prototype of its humanoid N at CEATEC as it readies 2027 shipments with Mitsubishi Motors

Highlanders said in a press release on Oct 13 that it is showing a mass-production prototype of its humanoid N, with live motion demos, at the AWS booth at CEATEC 2026 in Makuhari on Oct 13 and 14. The Tokyo startup, which builds N's mechanics, electronics, software and AI in-house, says shipments start in 2027 and that it is preparing mass production after a July joint press conference with Mitsubishi Motors.

1 sourceHighlandersAmazonRobot Foundation Models
4 days ago
BusinessUSSingle source

Atlas hand lead says 13 identical sealed actuators and in-house design are about speed, not dexterity records

Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior for Atlas at Boston Dynamics, told The Robot Report in an interview published Oct 9 that the company's new four-finger, 13-degree-of-freedom hand is built from 13 identical, fully encapsulated actuators with no cables crossing the joints, a choice meant to make it reliable and quick to iterate. He said earlier Atlas hands could already lift objects over 100 lb, so the team cut some strength to improve actuation transparency, and that hands are too central to humanoids to buy off the shelf. Test tasks include handheld power tools, cable handling and fishing for screws. MEKAWIRE covered the hand's unveiling on Oct 1, when Boston Dynamics said it dropped the pinky to make the hand cheaper to build and repair.

1 sourceHumanoidBoston Dynamics
4 days ago
Business—Single source

Edinburgh's Danu Robotics seeks $5M late seed for a claw-based recycling sorter

Danu Robotics, an Edinburgh startup founded about six years ago by former bank software developer Amy Ma, is raising a $5 million late-seed round for its H.E.R.O. waste-sorting robot, TechCrunch reported on Oct 9. Unlike suction-based rivals such as Glacier and Recycleye, the robot picks recyclables with a pincer claw and uses AI that improves through software updates; Ma said the company has $500,000 in signed contracts and more than 200 prospective customers in its pipeline, and wants smaller, sturdier units for sites such as hospitals, airports and shopping centres. The figures come from the company via the outlet and were not confirmed in a primary filing. For scale, MEKAWIRE's verified records put Glacier's total funding at $16 million and AMP's at $253 million.

1 source
4 days ago
Business—

Video Friday: Robot Decommissioning Takes a Fun Turn

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.

1 source
4 days ago
Business—Single source

Shelf-scanning robots pivot to selling store data, Groceryshop 2026 column finds

Retail robotics consultant Georges Mirza wrote in a column for The Robot Report on Oct 9 that Simbe Robotics presented 3,000 Tally shelf-scanning robots worldwide at Groceryshop 2026, with a Tier 1 retailer rollout still adding units, and that Badger Technologies' new CEO John Gehre described the Jabil-backed company as shifting from robots to retail intelligence. Mirza also highlighted ShelfOptix, whose foldable robot travels between small-format stores with a human escort, and startup-pitch finalist Blue Collar Robotics, which is building a mobile robot to move goods between shelves and carts with customer trials planned. The column is a first-hand show report; Simbe's own count was not independently checked. MEKAWIRE's verified records show Simbe has raised $104 million across three rounds, most recently a $50 million Series C in October 2024.

1 source
5 days ago
Business—Single source

SafeWorld leaves stealth with $12.2M seed to stress-test robots around people in simulation

SafeWorld said in early October that it emerged from stealth with $12.2 million in seed funding co-led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun, with Box Group, the Carnegie Mellon University endowment, Innovation Endeavors and SV Angel taking part, CEO Kyle Wong and co-founder Ding Zhao, director of CMU's Safe AI Lab, told The Robot Report. Teams build safety scenarios in a browser from past incidents, standards and robot logs, and the software runs a robot through thousands of variations with reactive simulated humans, then repeats the tests after each software update. Wong said SafeWorld works with about half a dozen companies, two-thirds of them publicly listed, across industrial, logistics, construction and some home uses. The round adds an independent testing layer to the safety tooling MEKAWIRE tracked on Sep 28, when NVIDIA opened its agent safety platform to robot makers including Figure and Skild AI.

1 source
5 days ago
BusinessUSSingle source

Jabil says humanoid makers are moving from hand-built units to runs of tens of thousands

Thomas Brown, senior director for engineering and technology at contract manufacturer Jabil, told The Robot Report in a written interview published Oct 8 that humanoid developers are leaving hand assembly behind and entering a phase of tens of thousands of units, where cost structure, manufacturability and quality decide who scales. He said edge compute and memory prices remain a pain point, that humanoid wiring harnesses need automotive-grade robustness in a consumer-electronics form factor, and that Jabil works with major humanoid makers in the U.S. and abroad it cannot yet name. The St. Petersburg, Florida company has worked with Apptronik to bring its Apollo humanoid into factories; MEKAWIRE's records show Apptronik has raised $923 million in verified rounds, most recently a $520 million Series A extension in February.

1 sourceApptronikHumanoid
5 days ago
Business—Single source

Helm.ai says it signed $70M in contracts in 12 months as its driving models move into robots and mining

Helm.ai said in a press release on Oct 8 that it signed $70 million in commercial contracts over the past 12 months with automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, industrial automation and robotics companies, and that it is on a path to operating breakeven. The Redwood City company, founded in 2016 and led by CEO Vladislav Voroninski, sells perception, full-stack driving for L2+ to L4 programs, automated data labeling and generative simulation, and said the same foundation-model architecture now runs on industrial machines such as open-pit mining equipment and on robot platforms. It named no customers. The figure is booked contracts, not funding or revenue; MEKAWIRE has no verified Helm.ai rounds on file, so the company's capital history cannot yet be compared with the $150 million Series C SiMa.ai raised for physical AI chips last month.

1 sourceFoundation
5 days ago
Research—Single source

AWS publishes an open-source Physical AI Toolchain built around NVIDIA Isaac, GR00T and Cosmos

Amazon Web Services introduced the Physical AI Toolchain on AWS in a blog post on Oct 7, a public set of reference architectures, infrastructure-as-code templates and deployment automation for building industrial robots, autonomous mobility and humanoids; Amazon described it again in a company post on Oct 8. The pipeline covers synthetic data generation, training, simulation and validation, edge deployment and continuous improvement, pairing SageMaker, EC2 GPU instances, S3 and IoT Greengrass with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Isaac GR00T, Cosmos and OSMO. The code sits in the aws-samples GitHub organisation under the Apache 2.0 license, and customers can use the whole stack or single pieces. It is the second open physical-AI stack tied to NVIDIA in two weeks that MEKAWIRE has covered, after NVIDIA's open agent safety platform on Sep 28.

1 sourceSynthetic Data Generation
5 days ago
ResearchCH

ETH Zurich turns an off-the-shelf robot hand into a robot that walks on its fingertips

Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab describe in an arXiv preprint (2609.17172) a commercial Wuji Technology robot hand fitted with an 80-gram backpack holding a battery, an IMU and a Raspberry Pi Zero, which crawls on its fingertips with no arm attached, IEEE Spectrum reported on Oct 8. The controller was trained with reinforcement learning in simulation, using virtual springs to hold a crawling posture; the hand walked on 14 surfaces at about 9 cm per second, turned both ways, righted itself in 21 of 25 trials and pushed a 41-gram cube to targets up to 40 cm away in 15 consecutive trials. Lead author Amirhossein Kazemipour is a Ph.D. candidate in the lab. The work is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

1 source