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21 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
13 days ago
ProductCH

ANYbotics launches Shift, pitching its inspection robots on the maintenance tickets they create

Swiss legged-robot maker ANYbotics has released Shift, a four-module platform that plans robot inspection rounds, analyses the readings and pushes findings into plant systems such as SAP and IBM Maximo. The company says Shift already analyses more than 120,000 inspections a month across over 1,000 industrial assets.

3 sourcesANYboticsGecko RoboticsBoston DynamicsFleet Orchestration Software
13 days ago
ProductUS

Runway turns its video models into robot control with Praxis-1, an open-weight world action model

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.

3 sourcesRunwayPhysical IntelligenceNVIDIAWorld ModelsRobot Foundation Models
15 days ago
ProductSG

Sharpa brings a touch-covered robot, a lighter 21-joint hand and a haptic glove to IROS, building its own data loop for dexterity

Singapore-based Sharpa launched three products at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh: the D01 robot with whole-body electronic skin, the W02 hand with 21 active degrees of freedom at under 750 grams, and the AE01 haptic glove for teleoperation and data capture. Together they give the company the hardware to collect, replay and learn from touch-rich manipulation data.

7 sourcesSharpaNVIDIAUnitree RoboticsDexterous ManipulationTactile Sensing
18 days ago
ProductUS

Video Friday: Life’s Better With a Little Robot Goose

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
19 days ago
Product—Single source

Epson launches AX6 cobot with 6 kg payload, 900 mm reach and cleanroom rating

Epson Robots has released the AX6, a collaborative robot arm with a 6 kg payload and 900 mm reach built on a lightweight carbon-fiber structure. The arm runs on Epson's RC-A1010 controller, accepts both 100-240 V AC and 48 V DC power and meets ISO Class 5 cleanroom requirements, which the company said fits life-science work and mounting on autonomous mobile robots. Programming is handled in the browser-based AX Portal software, which offers a no-code interface, a Python environment and a 3D simulator for testing programs. The AX6 is available now through Epson's distribution partners; no price was given.

1 source
29 days ago
ProductDK

Universal Robots launches Gen 7 cobot platform as Teradyne takes its fight with Chinese rivals to Europe's patent court

Universal Robots unveiled its seventh-generation platform on September 14, 2026, with three new g-Series arms, a CB7 controller offering 40% more compute in a 30% smaller footprint, and native ROS 2 support. Two weeks earlier its parent Teradyne Robotics sued the German subsidiary of China's JAKA at the Unified Patent Court, its second European IP action against a Chinese cobot maker this year.

5 sourcesUniversal RobotsFANUCROS 2Edge AI Compute
Sep 11, 2026
ProductJP

FANUC to ship AI Welding Agent that reads drawings and writes robot weld programs, built on Google's Gemini Enterprise

FANUC said on Sept. 11 it will begin shipping an AI Welding Agent at the end of December 2026. The system photographs a part drawing with the CRX tablet teach pendant and generates welding conditions and robot motion without manual teaching, using Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise. Price was not disclosed.

9 sourcesFANUCGoogleRobot Foundation Models
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 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 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
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
Apr 17, 2026
ProductCN

AgiBot says 2025 revenue topped RMB1 billion as it launches the Expedition A3 humanoid and a robot rental network

Shanghai-based AgiBot told its 2026 partner conference on April 17 that revenue grew from RMB300,000 in 2023 to more than RMB1 billion in 2025, and that its ten-thousandth robot had rolled off the line this year. The company launched four hardware lines including the full-size Expedition A3, six models and a five-year ecosystem programme worth more than RMB2 billion.

2 sourcesAgiBotUBTECH RoboticsUnitree RoboticsRobot Foundation ModelsBattery Systems
Apr 15, 2026
ProductUS

Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 teaches robots to read gauges, lifting accuracy to 93% with Boston Dynamics' Spot as first showcase

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.

2 sourcesGoogle DeepMindGoogleBoston DynamicsRobot Foundation ModelsVLA
Mar 17, 2026
ProductUS

NVIDIA previews GR00T N2, betting robots should predict video before they move

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.

5 sourcesNVIDIAAgiBotLG ElectronicsWorld ModelsRobot Foundation Models
Jan 22, 2026
ProductUS

Microsoft enters the robot model race with Rho-alpha, a Phi-based model that adds touch and learns from human corrections

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.

1 sourceMicrosoftNVIDIAUniversal RobotsVLARobot Foundation Models
Jan 12, 2026
ProductUS

1X puts a 14-billion-parameter video model in charge of its NEO home humanoid, trading robot data for internet video

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.

2 sources1X TechnologiesFigure AIPhysical IntelligenceWorld ModelsRobot Foundation Models
Jan 7, 2026
ProductUS

Johnson & Johnson files Ottava surgical robot with the FDA, seeking a De Novo route into general surgery

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.

8 sourcesJohnson & JohnsonIntuitiveMedtronicTeleoperation