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Sep 3, 2026
PolicyUS

ARM Institute wins nearly $90 million from the Department of War to put robots, AI and drones into 12 military manufacturing sites

The Pittsburgh-based ARM Institute said on Sept. 3, 2026 that the Department of War's manufacturing technology office awarded it nearly $90 million for ten projects under the Organic Industrial Base Modernization Challenge. Fifteen member organizations must deliver working robotics and AI solutions at 12 military manufacturing sites within two years, each paired with a workforce plan.

6 sourcesMachina Labs
Sep 3, 2026
PartnershipUS

Figure commits $3.5 billion to Nscale for up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs to train its Helix robot model

Figure AI said on September 3, 2026 that it signed a strategic partnership with Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs on Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform in Barstow, Texas, starting with a $3.5 billion compute commitment that the companies intend to scale beyond $6 billion. Nscale is also making a strategic investment in Figure, which says the capacity will train Helix on data from its crowdsourced Index program.

4 sourcesFigure AINVIDIASkild AIVLARobot Foundation Models
Aug 20, 2026
ResearchUS

Generalist's GEN-1.5 learns robot tasks from a single 3 to 12 second demonstration, reaching 59% without fine-tuning

Generalist AI said on August 19, 2026 that GEN-1.5 can learn a new manipulation task from one demonstration of 3 to 12 seconds placed in its context, averaging 59% success over 10 tasks with no fine-tuning and 83% after 10 gradient steps on about 5 minutes of data. The company says the ability emerged from more than eight months of pretraining, but calls the tasks simple and the skills brittle, and has named no customers.

1 sourceGeneralist AISkild AIPhysical IntelligenceRobot Foundation ModelsImitation Learning
Jul 31, 2026
ProductUS

Google DeepMind ships Gemini Robotics 2, taking its robot models to whole-body humanoid control

Google DeepMind on July 30 released Gemini Robotics 2, a family of three models covering whole-body humanoid control, high-level embodied reasoning and on-device inference. The reasoning model ER 2 is available to developers through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, while the action models remain limited to early-access partners and trusted testers.

3 sourcesGoogle DeepMindApptronikBoston DynamicsVLARobot Foundation Models
Jul 30, 2026
PartnershipUS

FedEx takes Dexterity's Mech trailer loaders beyond the pilot stage at its Hagerstown hub

FedEx and Dexterity said on 30 July 2026 that they are expanding autonomous trailer loading at the FedEx Hagerstown Hub in Maryland, moving Dexterity's dual-armed Mech robot and its Foresight world model from an earlier pilot site to a significantly larger operation. Neither company disclosed robot numbers, financial terms or a completion date.

12 sourcesDexterityFedEx Corp.Boston DynamicsWorld ModelsDexterous Manipulation
Jul 29, 2026
MarketUS

Teradyne's robotics arm grows 33% to $100 million as AI test demand doubles group revenue

Teradyne reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $1,329 million, up 104% from a year earlier, with its Robotics group, home to Universal Robots and MiR, contributing $100 million against $75 million in the second quarter of 2025. The company guided third-quarter revenue to $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion.

2 sourcesTeradyneFANUCDoosan RoboticsElectric ActuatorsFleet Orchestration Software
Jul 23, 2026
BusinessUS

Tesla clears Fremont's Model S and X lines for Optimus and sends its first robots to an in-house academy as quarterly capex jumps to $5.8 billion

Tesla said in its second-quarter 2026 update, released on July 22, that it has decommissioned the Model S and Model X lines in Fremont and is installing first-generation Optimus production lines, with production expected soon and the first robots reserved for an internal Optimus Academy that collects training data. Capital expenditure rose to $5.79 billion from $2.49 billion in the first quarter and free cash flow turned negative at minus $1.09 billion, while the update gave no robot unit count, no capacity figure and no date for Optimus Gen 3.

3 sourcesTeslaFigure AIAgility RoboticsElectric ActuatorsRobot Foundation Models
Jul 21, 2026
ProductUS

NVIDIA opens Cosmos 3 Edge, a 4-billion-parameter world model that plans robot actions on a Jetson Thor

NVIDIA released Cosmos 3 Edge on July 20, the smallest member of its Cosmos 3 physical-AI model family, as open weights on Hugging Face. The 4-billion-parameter model runs on Jetson Thor and generates 32 robot actions per inference, and Doosan Robotics, Siemens, Agile Robots and Skild AI are evaluating it.

5 sourcesNVIDIADoosan RoboticsSkild AIWorld ModelsRobot Foundation Models
Jul 17, 2026
ResearchUS

MIT's NeuralActuator lets low-cost robot arms feel force without sensors, winning RSS 2026's systems award

NeuralActuator, a model from MIT's Computational Design and Fabrication Group with Amazon, won the Outstanding Systems Paper Award at RSS 2026. It learns how cheap servo motors really behave from motor current, voltage and temperature, and estimates external force with a reported mean error of 0.12 N, against 0.66 N to 1.41 N for classical baselines.

4 sourcesElectric ActuatorsSim-to-Real Transfer
Jul 17, 2026
BusinessUS

Intuitive places 468 da Vinci robots as upgrades to da Vinci 5 accelerate, and raises its margin outlook for a second time

Intuitive placed 468 da Vinci systems in the second quarter of 2026, up from 395 a year earlier, including 246 da Vinci 5 units, and revenue rose 19% to $2.89 billion, the company said on 16 July. It lifted its 2026 non-GAAP gross margin outlook to 68% to 69% of revenue, the second increase this year, while holding da Vinci procedure growth guidance at 13.5% to 15.5% and pointing to the midpoint.

6 sourcesIntuitiveMedtronicJohnson & JohnsonTeleoperationHarmonic / Strain-Wave Gears
Jul 15, 2026
FundingUS

Toyota research spinout Walden Robotics launches with $300 million seed at a $1.1 billion valuation

Walden Robotics, spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January 2026, emerged from stealth on July 15, 2026 with a $300 million seed round at a $1.1 billion valuation co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital. The Cambridge, Massachusetts company says its robots, driven by large behavior models, have been doing production work at a Toyota plant in North America since February, and on July 28 it added Samsung SDS as a manufacturing partner.

5 sourcesWalden RoboticsNVIDIASkild AIRobot Foundation ModelsImitation Learning
Jul 8, 2026
ProductUS

Hugging Face ships LeRobot 0.6 with world models and NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7, deepening an open robotics alliance

Hugging Face released version 0.6.0 of its open-source LeRobot robotics library on July 7, adding three world-model policies, five vision-language-action models including NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7, two reward models and six simulation benchmarks. NVIDIA said a day earlier that it is bringing GR00T, Isaac Teleop, Isaac Lab-Arena, Jetson Thor support and, soon, Cosmos 3 into LeRobot.

4 sourcesHugging FaceNVIDIAPhysical IntelligenceVLARobot Foundation Models
Jul 1, 2026
BusinessUS

Figure puts its F.03 humanoid on BMW's Spartanburg floor after a 24-fold production ramp and a first Brookfield-linked retail deal

Figure AI said on June 30, 2026 that its Figure 03 humanoid is now working in Hall 52 of BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, sequencing parts with its Helix 02 model. The move follows Figure's April 29 disclosure that its BotQ factory went from one robot a day to one an hour in under 120 days and had delivered more than 350 units, and a May 26 agreement with JCPenney owner Catalyst Brands.

3 sourcesFigure AIApptronikAgility RoboticsVLARobot Foundation Models
Jun 24, 2026
M&AUS

Agility Robotics agrees to go public through Churchill Capital XI at a $2.5 billion pre-money value, with Foxconn leading a $200 million PIPE

Agility Robotics, maker of the Digit humanoid, signed a definitive agreement on June 24, 2026 to merge with the blank-check company Churchill Capital Corp XI in a deal that values Agility at $2.5 billion before the money comes in. The transaction is expected to bring in more than $620 million of gross proceeds, including about $200 million from a PIPE led by Foxconn, and the combined company plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT.

2 sourcesAgility RoboticsFigure AIApptronikFleet Orchestration SoftwareElectric Actuators
Jun 9, 2026
FundingUS

Standard Bots raises US$200 million at a US$1 billion valuation to build AI-taught factory robots in New York

Standard Bots said on 9 June 2026 that it had raised a US$200 million Series C led by RoboStrategy, with existing investors including General Catalyst, at a valuation of US$1 billion. The Glen Cove, New York, robot maker is expanding its plant to 70,000 square feet and says it is on pace to supply 10% of new US industrial robot deployments by 2027.

3 sourcesStandard BotsAmazonSamsung ElectronicsElectric ActuatorsImitation Learning
Jun 5, 2026
ResearchUS

Amazon FAR's OmniRetarget takes ICRA 2026's top paper prize for turning human motion into humanoid training data

OmniRetarget, a motion retargeting method from Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team and university collaborators, won both the Best Conference Paper Award and the Best Paper Award on Robot Manipulation and Locomotion at IEEE ICRA 2026 in Vienna. The method preserves contacts between body, objects and terrain, and the authors used it to generate more than 8 hours of trajectories that trained a Unitree G1 to perform parkour and box carrying in the real world without real-robot fine-tuning.

7 sourcesAmazonUnitree RoboticsBoston DynamicsRLSim-to-Real Transfer
Jun 4, 2026
BusinessUS

Amazon unveils a next-generation Proteus robot that takes spoken instructions, tied to a €10 billion upgrade of its European warehouses

Amazon unveiled a next-generation version of its Proteus autonomous mobile robot that employees can direct in natural language, at its Delivering the Future event in London on June 4, 2026. The company said it will invest more than €10 billion over the coming years to expand and modernize its European fulfillment network, deploy the new Proteus in Europe in the first half of 2027, expand its STARK tote-handling system to 15 European sites by 2027 and add 25,000 fulfillment jobs in Europe.

6 sourcesAmazonAutoStoreSymboticFleet Orchestration SoftwareTactile Sensing
Jun 1, 2026
ProductUS

NVIDIA sets a reference humanoid for labs, pairing Unitree's H2 Plus with Sharpa hands and a Jetson Thor brain

NVIDIA announced at GTC Taipei on June 1, 2026 an Isaac GR00T reference humanoid for academic research, built on Unitree's H2 Plus body with two 22-degree-of-freedom Sharpa Wave tactile hands and a Jetson AGX Thor T5000 computer. Unitree will sell it from late 2026; Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford and UC San Diego are the first named research users. No price was given.

1 sourceNVIDIAUnitree RoboticsSkild AIRobot Foundation ModelsTeleoperation
May 7, 2026
BusinessUS

Symbotic turns a profit as revenue rises 23% and systems in deployment jump to 70

Symbotic reported fiscal second-quarter 2026 revenue of $676.5 million, up 23%, and net income of $9.4 million against a loss a year earlier, in results filed with the SEC on May 6, 2026. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $77.8 million, systems in deployment rose to 70 from 52 a quarter earlier, and the company guided third-quarter revenue to $700 million to $720 million.

1 sourceSymboticAutoStoreTeradyneFleet Orchestration SoftwareBattery Systems