Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.
Runway announced Praxis-1 on 30 September 2026, an open-weight world action model that converts its large-scale video pretraining into control for real robots. Early tests run with Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra on bimanual, six-axis arm and mobile-base hardware, and public weights are promised in the coming months.
The Open Agent Safety Platform pairs open-source OpenShell software with a Sentry reference design. NVIDIA names three robotics companies using it to put safety limits on physical systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 on April 14, 2026, an embodied reasoning model built on Gemini 3.0 Flash and offered as a preview through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. DeepMind said the model reads industrial instruments correctly 86% of the time, or 93% with an agentic zoom and code execution step, against 23% for ER 1.5. Boston Dynamics is using the capability for Spot facility inspections.
NVIDIA used its GTC keynote on March 16, 2026 to preview Isaac GR00T N2, a robot foundation model built on its DreamZero world action model research that it says succeeds at new tasks in new environments more than twice as often as leading VLA models. It also put the 3-billion-parameter GR00T N1.7 into commercial early access and announced Cosmos 3 and Isaac Lab 3.0, with N2 due by the end of 2026.
Microsoft Research on January 21, 2026 introduced Rho-alpha, its first robotics model, derived from the Phi vision-language family and trained partly on synthetic data from NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Azure. The model adds tactile sensing and learning from operator corrections to the usual vision-language-action recipe, and is offered through a research early access program ahead of a later Microsoft Foundry release.
1X Technologies said on January 12, 2026 that its NEO humanoid now runs on the 1X World Model, a 14-billion-parameter video generator that imagines a task before an inverse dynamics model turns the clip into joint commands. The system was mid-trained on 900 hours of first-person human video and fine-tuned on only 70 hours of NEO data. 1X's own trials show it working on simple household tasks and failing on fine ones such as pouring cereal, months before the first $20,000 NEOs were due in US homes.
Johnson & Johnson has submitted its Ottava soft-tissue surgical robot to the US Food and Drug Administration in a De Novo classification request covering several upper abdominal procedures, backed by a 32-patient gastric bypass study at six US hospitals. The filing comes weeks after Medtronic and CMR Surgical won US clearances, widening the field challenging Intuitive's 10,763-system da Vinci base.
Boston Dynamics unveiled the production version of its electric Atlas humanoid at CES 2026 on January 5 and said manufacturing begins immediately in Boston, with all 2026 units already committed to Hyundai Motor Group and Google DeepMind. Hyundai set a goal of a production system able to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, when Atlas is due to start parts sequencing at its Georgia Metaplant, moving into assembly by 2030. Hyundai Mobis will supply the actuators and Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models are to supply the cognition.
NVIDIA used CES 2026 to launch the Jetson T4000, a Blackwell robot computer priced at $1,999 at 1,000-unit volume, and to release the GR00T N1.6 humanoid model and the Cosmos Reason 2 reasoning model as open models. Qualcomm answered a day earlier with its Dragonwing IQ10 robot processor and named Figure as a partner, setting up a fight for the compute socket inside humanoids.
The FDA cleared Medtronic's Hugo robotic-assisted surgery system for prostatectomy, nephrectomy and cystectomy on December 3, 2025, after a 268-day 510(k) review. The clearance rests on the 137-patient Expand URO study, which reported a 98.5% surgical success rate, and gives Medtronic its first US entry against Intuitive's da Vinci after years of selling Hugo in more than 30 other countries.
Figure AI said its Figure 02 humanoid contributed to the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles over an 11-month deployment at Spartanburg before being retired. The company is replacing it with Figure 03, launched on 9 October 2025 with faster cameras, palm cameras, 3-gram tactile fingertips and 2 kW wireless charging, built for a BotQ line rated at up to 12,000 robots a year.
1X Technologies opened pre-orders on 27 October 2025 for NEO, a home humanoid priced at US$20,000 or US$499 a month, with US deliveries from 2026 and international expansion from 2027. The 66-pound robot runs 1X's Redwood AI onboard and relies on remote 1X experts for chores it has not yet learned.
At its Delivering the Future event on October 22, 2025, Amazon showed Blue Jay, a multi-arm system it said could pick, stow and consolidate about 75% of the item types at a South Carolina test site, and Project Eluna, an agentic AI piloted at a Tennessee fulfillment center. Amazon said Blue Jay went from concept to production in just over a year, but an update dated February 25, 2026 states the company no longer uses it in operations.
DoorDash on September 30, 2025 introduced Dot, an all-electric delivery robot built by DoorDash Labs that travels up to 20 mph on bike lanes, roads, sidewalks and driveways. Early access starts in Tempe and Mesa, Arizona, with an Autonomous Delivery Platform that assigns each order to a Dasher, Dot, drone or sidewalk robot.
NVIDIA made its Jetson AGX Thor developer kit and Jetson T5000 production modules generally available on 25 August 2025, pricing the kit from $3,499 and claiming 7.5 times the AI compute of Jetson Orin with 128 GB of memory. Figure, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics and Amazon Robotics are among eight named early adopters, while 1X, OpenAI and Physical Intelligence are evaluating the computer.