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Why dexterity is physical AI’s real bottleneck
The next major challenge in robotic dexterity is making the entire system reliable enough to turn capabilities into useful work.
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Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.
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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.
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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.
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Teradyne Robotics and Elite Robots end their cobot software fight with a confidential settlement
Teradyne Robotics, the Teradyne unit that owns Universal Robots, said in a news post on Oct 1 that its legal dispute with Chinese cobot maker Elite Robots has been resolved by mutual agreement on confidential terms. Chief legal officer Jette Withers said the settlement is not an admission by Elite Robots of liability, infringement or the validity of any intellectual property right, and that both sides wanted to avoid the cost of further proceedings. The post does not say whether Elite Robots will change its products or how the German case is closed. MEKAWIRE reported on Apr 28 that Universal Robots had won a preliminary injunction in Hamburg against Elite Robots Deutschland over its software, which this agreement now ends.
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Boston Dynamics hands the CEO job to former Amazon Alexa and AGI chief Rohit Prasad
Boston Dynamics said in a press release on Oct 6 that Rohit Prasad becomes chief executive effective Oct 7, filling the post Robert Playter left in February. Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon, where he ran Alexa and the company's artificial general intelligence work and led the Nova foundation model family, after nearly 14 years of machine-learning research at Raytheon BBN Technologies. Hyundai Motor Group vice chair Jaehoon Chang, who chairs the Boston Dynamics board, said Prasad's record of commercialising AI products fits the push to scale Spot, Stretch and the electric Atlas. The hire puts an AI executive in charge as Atlas moves toward factory work: MEKAWIRE reported on Sep 21 that Boston Dynamics opened an Atlas training center at Hyundai's Georgia plant while Hyundai targets 25,000 humanoids.
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Boston Dynamics drops the pinky on Atlas's new hand to make it cheaper to build and repair
Boston Dynamics has redesigned the hand on its Atlas humanoid with a thumb and three fingers, 13 degrees of freedom and direct-drive actuators packed into the joints instead of tendons or cables, IEEE Spectrum reported from the company's blog. Each actuator pack can be swapped as a single unit and can be back-driven so the hand yields on contact, choices the company said favour reliability, manufacturability and cost over a human-like look. Alberto Rodriguez, who directs robot behavior at Boston Dynamics, said the aim is a hand that can use tools such as drills and welding torches, be simulated cleanly and be trained from human demonstrations, with a production target of 100,000 hands a year.
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Agility Robotics studies wheeled designs beyond its Digit humanoid, CEO says
Agility Robotics is looking at other robot designs, including wheeled ones, to serve different operating environments and customer needs, CEO Jonathan Hurst confirmed. Hurst said the effort has only just started, with no launch timeline and no decision on whether it would mean a wheeled Digit or an entirely new machine. The company holds more than $300 million in multi-year Digit v5 orders from a single unnamed customer and is going public through a SPAC deal valued at $2.5 billion that is expected to raise more than $620 million in gross proceeds. Agility posted 2025 revenue of $1.8 million and an operating loss of $140 million.
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IFR counts 5 million industrial robots in service as China takes 59% of 2025 installations
The global stock of operational industrial robots reached 5 million units in 2025, up 9% on the year, according to statistics the International Federation of Robotics released on Sept. 24. Annual installations rose 11% to more than 600,000 units, of which China accounted for 354,000, or 59%, with Chinese manufacturers supplying 195,000 of those robots. The United States ranked second with 38,500 installations, while Japan fell 19% to 36,219 units and dropped to third, ahead of South Korea at 30,000 and Germany at under 25,000. The IFR forecasts installations of 655,000 units in 2026 and 806,000 units in 2029.
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Boston Dynamics opens Atlas training center at Hyundai's Georgia plant as Hyundai targets 25,000 humanoids
Boston Dynamics opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, where Atlas is training on parts sequencing ahead of assembly work by 2030. The company said Hyundai plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas units and build a US facility able to make 30,000 robots a year, while Hyundai targets Atlas on its Georgia line from 2028.
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Robots are waiting for a ChatGPT moment: Nvidia’s Les Karpas explains why at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
The robotics industry is still waiting for their breakthrough into day-to-day life. Nvidia's Les Karpas has an answer as to why at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.
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Agility unveils Digit 5 humanoid for barrier-free work, with $300 million in orders tied to contractual milestones
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026, a humanoid it says can work beside people without safety fences. The company reported more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 orders as of May 2026, subject to contractual milestones, while general availability is set for the end of 2027 as its Churchill Capital Corp XI listing heads for a fourth-quarter close.
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Skild AI says it passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue as its S1 model learns tasks from one video
Skild AI said on September 10 that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue ten months after its first commercial deployment, with more than 60 paying customers. The figure follows the August 18 launch of S1, a robot foundation model that the company says can pick up a new task from a single video demonstration without retraining.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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1X opens a 58,000-square-foot NEO factory in Hayward with capacity for 10,000 home humanoids a year and a goal of 100,000 by 2027
1X Technologies said on April 30, 2026 that its Hayward, California plant can build up to 10,000 NEO home humanoids a year and that it plans to scale toward more than 100,000 units annually by the end of 2027. The company makes its own motors, batteries, hands and structures in-house, said a year of production was booked within five days of opening preorders, and reaffirmed that first deliveries start in 2026.
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Tesla will retire Model S and X lines in Fremont for an Optimus line designed for 1 million robots a year, and plans a 10 million-unit line in Texas
Tesla said in its first-quarter 2026 shareholder update that its first-generation Optimus line, designed for 1 million humanoid robots a year, will replace the Model S and Model X lines at its Fremont factory. It is also preparing Gigafactory Texas for a second-generation line designed for long-term annual capacity of 10 million robots, while reporting revenue of $22.4 billion and $44.7 billion in cash and investments.
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Symbotic lifts revenue 29% to $630 million and swings to profit, but Walmart still supplies 86% of sales
Symbotic reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $629.9 million on 4 February 2026, up 29% from a year earlier, with net income of $13.4 million and adjusted EBITDA of $66.9 million. Its backlog stood at $22.3 billion and it guided second-quarter revenue to $650 million to $670 million. Walmart accounted for 85.6% of revenue, and a change in stock-compensation accounting added $9.3 million to profit.