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10 hours ago
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Perseverance passes Opportunity to set Mars driving record of 45.22 km, mostly on autopilot

NASA's Perseverance rover reached a total of 45.22 kilometres (28.10 miles) driven on Mars on Oct 11, edging past the 45.16 km that Opportunity covered before a dust storm ended its mission in 2019, JPL robotic operations deputy team chief Mark Maimone told IEEE Spectrum in an interview published Oct 13. Perseverance drives itself about 90% of the time with its AutoNav system, which uses a second FPGA-based processor for faster image processing and runs at up to 120 metres per hour, compared with roughly 5% autonomous driving for Opportunity and Curiosity. Maimone said Anthropic's Claude drafted a starting route for one drive of about 400 metres from orbital images, which human planners checked and adjusted, and that engineers are now working on better onboard localisation and autonomous science targeting. It is the first Mars rover story in MEKAWIRE's database.

1 source
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
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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.

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5 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.

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5 days ago
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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.

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
6 days ago
BusinessGBSingle source

Mecka raises $60M Series B led by Sequoia for human-demonstration robot data

Mecka said in a company post on Oct 7 that it closed a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung joining and Kindred, Framework Ventures and Neo returning. The startup builds multi-sensor capture hardware, runs fleets that record people doing everyday work, and turns the footage into training data and post-trained models for robot deployments; it said run-rate revenue passed $100 million in June and that it aims for $300 million by year end. The money goes to data infrastructure, its research lab and commercial robot deployments, the company said. In MEKAWIRE's database the round would be the sixth-largest of 12 robotics Series B rounds recorded in 2026, behind Sereact's $110 million.

1 sourceHumanoid
6 days ago
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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.

1 sourceTeradyneElite Robots
7 days ago
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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.

1 sourceBoston Dynamics
7 days ago
Business—Single source

TwelveLabs aims Pegasus 1.6 at first-person video to speed up robot training data

TwelveLabs said in a press release on Oct 6 that Pegasus 1.6 is its first video model trained to understand egocentric, first-person footage, a category earlier versions handled poorly. The model supports workflows including timestamped action segmentation and labeling, dense captioning and quality scoring, aimed at turning recordings of human work into structured datasets for robotics and other physical-AI developers; the company cited an estimate that one hour of raw video takes about 155 hours of manual labeling. Customers and pricing for the robotics use were not named. The launch targets the same human-demonstration data supply that Mecka is building with the $60 million Series B MEKAWIRE covered on Oct 7.

1 source
8 days ago
Business—Single source

FCC robot restrictions could accelerate shift to local AI

Companies deploying physical AI today need to decide which AI workloads belong on the robot, what can remain in the cloud, and whether the underlying technology stack can meet rising expectations for security, safety, and supply-chain transparency.

1 source