Robotics Intelligence Briefing

Robots have been a prolific theme in Japanese pop culture and media since the 1950s, which includes global icons like the Transformers, Astro Boy, and Doraemon (1). Perhaps not coincidentally, Japanese citizens have a positive outlook on robotic technologies and their use in the labor sector compared to many other nati

Claude now marks AI-generated content. But it does not mark everything the same way. Anthropic currently uses embedded watermarks for text and signed C2PA provenance metadata for supported files. Code sits somewhere in between: it is still text, but its structure gives the watermark fewer places to work. I went into de

Kollmorgen discusses the importance of fitting voltage systems closely to the application while still making the best use of infrastructure. The post How to achieve high voltage in industrial systems without high complexity appeared first on The Robot Report.

FORT Robotics said it expects valuation of more than $500 million as it lists on Nasdaq with plans to accelerate safety software development. The post FORT Robotics to take safety stack public via SPAC merger appeared first on The Robot Report.

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.Microspines are one of many ways to enable robots to latch onto surfaces like walls and ceilings. Now roboticists in Canada are using the mini spikes to get drones to land on a more challenging, remote surface: icebergs.Like

Automotive suppliers Unichem and R&Y are working with Loomia to develop tactile sensors for automotive and robotics applications. The post Unichem acquires Loomia to accelerate entry into the humanoid ‘skin’ market appeared first on The Robot Report.

Ever wondered how ChatGPT, Gemini, and other chat interfaces generate PDFs, PowerPoints, and more when all they have under the hood is an LLM? The trick isn’t a smarter model. It’s something simpler: skills which are instructions an agent loads only when needed. Next, let’s explore how skills work using LangChain and h

Diligent is now rolling out Moxi 2.0 to health systems including Endeavor Health Edward Hospital and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The post Five years of operation shape Diligent Robotics rollout of Moxi 2.0 appeared first on The Robot Report.

At the El Camino Health Heart and Vascular Institute, surgeons are now performing cardiac procedures with Intuitive's da Vinci robot. The post Surgeons use da Vinci surgical robot to perform common cardiac surgery appeared first on The Robot Report.

Research around the Universal Manipulation Interface is enabling Generalist, Walden Robotics, and others to turn data into robot behaviors. The post How Generalist uses human demonstration data for robot learning appeared first on The Robot Report.

Developers launch new models every week, but most barely change how you work. Kimi K3 is different—not because of benchmark charts, but because of a few small API changes that fundamentally affect how you use it. The first is reasoning_effort, which defaults to maximum, alongside 131,072 max_completion_tokens. Ask K3 t

Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies which seems to be entirely focused on making that happen. Persona’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economically viable for robots right now, and they’ve found one that

Image credits: Xiangxiao Liu, Francois A. Longchamp, and Louis GeverBiorobotics Laboratory, EPFL Improving energy performance can effectively extend the time a robot can operate and reduce battery load, enabling lighter, more flexible, and more durable robotic systems. Nature has evolved optimal energy-saving locomotio

Gravis Robotics has designed autonomy AI and hardware for a wide range of excavators and construction equipment and plans to scale globally. The post Gravis Robotics raises $200M for autonomous construction appeared first on The Robot Report.

Eyal Samuel Shachar, the CEO of Bioxtreme, says the growing synergy of robotics, AI, and human-centered care will improve patient outcomes. The post How robotics is revolutionizing stroke rehabilitation appeared first on The Robot Report.

Gunnar Pétur Hauksson, the co-founder and COO at Treble Technologies, says robotics developers can't overlook the importance of hearing. The post Why robots that can’t communicate naturally won’t be adopted appeared first on The Robot Report.

If you have already used Codex in ChatGPT, the Codex CLI will feel familiar. It brings the same AI assistance directly into your local development environment, where it can work with your repository, shell, tests, and other tools. Installation takes only one command, but the setup choices that follow are worth rev

Protolabs CTO Marc Kermisch explains how AI, simulation, and design for manufacturing turn CAD files into production parts faster. The post How Protolabs turns CAD files into parts in under 24 hours appeared first on The Robot Report.

Neros is developing its Archer AI and Bandit platform with the hardware and compute required for multi-asset control. The post Neros Technologies raises $250M to deploy its defense drones by the end of 2026 appeared first on The Robot Report.

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS 2026: 27 September–1 Octo

Agility’s SPAC deal shows there is no one route to a robotics public listing, with SPAC mergers, reverse mergers, and traditional IPOs offering different advantages. The post Robots on Wall Street: Non-traditional paths to public markets for robotics companies appeared first on The Robot Report.

Long-running AI agents often spend most of their time on routine execution rather than difficult reasoning. After making a plan, they may perform hundreds of tool calls, file reads, validations, commands, and formatting steps, so using a frontier reasoning model for every action can become unnecessarily slow and expens

By Umar Farooq That was one of the questions at the heart of my last week (20th-24th July) at the Imperial Robotics Summer School, hosted at Imperial College, London; a week that sharpened my thinking and pushed me to look at robotics problems from angles I don’t usually get to in my day-to-day work. The […

A free download looks at the state of humanoids, including a rundown of current robotics developers and interviews with industry experts. The post Mobile manipulators and humanoids: The future of robotics appeared first on The Robot Report.

Bartesian's cocktail makers would be best described like a Keurig or Nespresso machine, but for alcoholic drinks.

The ARM Institute and the U.S. Department of War are seeking technology project submissions to help rapid U.S. production. The post ARM Institute calls for defense manufacturing technology projects appeared first on The Robot Report.

The RoboBusiness panel will include insights on humanoid robots from Agility, Apptronik, Persona AI, and PSYONIC experts. The post Experts to discuss the state of humanoid robots at RoboBusiness appeared first on The Robot Report.

About a month ago, Baidu (often called the “Google of China”) introduced Unlimited-OCR, an advancement over DeepSeek OCR. The model was designed to transcribe long, multi-page documents with high accuracy while delivering fast and stable inference. Unlike conventional vision-language OCR systems, Unlimited-OCR ad

In the rush to automate evaluation, from grading student code to ranking research papers, we have embraced Large Language Models as judges. They are fast. These units are cheap. They scale. However, at a workshop at DHS 2026, Bhaskarjit Sarmah made a point that stuck with me: “you can’t trust LLM as a judge. I […

What’s a robotics roadmap, and why should we care? Machines with pre-defined capabilities will soon be old-school. Future machines are expected to learn and adapt to unpredictability and to interact with the physical world with the ableness of our own bodies. Welcome to Industry 4.0 (1). The reliance of modern societie

First, pick the line that applies to you. Since August 2nd, 2026, Claude marks all content during generation. For instance, text receives a hidden watermark, while files receive a signature. Anthropic committed to the EU AI Act’s Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content. Consequently, all content genera

You have probably heard by now. Claude Code burns through usage limits! But most of us live in the web app… distant from the terminal app, around which the buzz is about. Maybe that was enough to make you curious. Maybe you already knew exactly what it was and just want it running on your […] The post How t

Objects constructed by robots are ubiquitous. If you’ve used a car, household appliance, or smartphone today, you’ve used an object constructed at least in part by robots. The more products that manufacturers want to produce (and consumers want to consume) at lower costs, the more industrial robots will be needed.There

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a tiny seed-sized robot that can navigate across soft and uneven surfaces to perform five surgical functions wirelessly, paving the way for developing robots to make surgeries and medical treatments more precise. The miniature ro

Claude can write an ad or email from a prompt. This is usually done manually. Useful, but hardly a coherent system. The work still needs research, positioning, channel planning, quality checks, and reporting. Claude’s marketing skills add to those missing processes. However, search results mix dedicated marketing

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS 2026: 27 September–1 Octo

A new system developed at MIT uses three agents to piece together the objects, walls, and overall look of a 3D scene. Its realistic recreations of indoor spaces help robots practice skills and try out different ways of doing tasks before they’re powered on. Image: Tim Malieckal/MIT CSAIL using assets from the researche

By Emmet Cole This new monthly series from IEEE RAS showcases a selection of robotics stories from society, business, research, and culture, as we track the field’s ongoing journey from specialized industrial machines to an increasingly visible social phenomenon. Technological isolationism or prudence? On July 28, the

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “Covered List,” originally published in 2021, identifies communications equipment and services that it says pose a threat to national security. On 28 July, the FCC added mobile, communicating robots weighing more than 2 kilograms and power inverters commonly used in sola

For a while there, it seemed as though robotics as a whole was stuck in a mad rush towards building humanoid robots mostly because it was very possible (and very lucrative) to do so, even without near-term goals that were necessarily realistic. Some of the magic of those first couple of years of the humanoid explosion

Image credit: Olivier Porchet, Biorobotics Laboratory, EPFL When a fish holds its position against a current in a river, its brain must figure out how fast to swim and how to steer to offset the water flow. Most fish use vision to register the world sliding past, detect optic flow speed and direction, and their [&#8230

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS 2026: 27 September–1 Octo

Illustration of the versatile nanorobot. It is 150 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. (Illustration: Marina Bräm) By Angelika Jacobs Nanorobots sound like science fiction: tiny machines for medicine, the environment, or industry. In fact, nanorobotics has become a rapidly growing field of research. It is

By Emmet Cole With the explosion of robotics research, staying current in fields like Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a monumental challenge. Is AI the solution to the “paper deluge,” or is it part of the problem? Read the article preview below to learn more! Download the full paper: Surviving the Paper Deluge. Au

Imagine running your fingertip over the surface of a U.S. penny. You would feel the ridges of the raised letters and numbers, Abe Lincoln’s bearded side profile, and, if it’s tails, the fluted columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Getting a robot to sense the same things is an imposing task, often requiring gathering data o

The soft robotic model of the human heart, developed at UNSW. Credit: UNSW/Richard Freeman. UNSW researchers have developed a soft robotic model of the human heart that can mimic disease and provide a realistic environment for testing the next generation of cardiac devices. Researchers at UNSW Sydney have developed a f

Atop a lab bench, Cornell Tech postdoctoral researcher Yifan He positions the lens of an optical receiver almost a meter away from an LED emitting a beam of red light. The computer monitor attached to the receiver takes a beat to refresh, then displays an array of squares that resemble a QR code.When you hold your phon

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEActuate 2

A miniature robot developed at the University of Basel could help prepare teeth for a crown. Photo: University of Basel, Catherine Weyer. By Angelika Jacobs A routine check-up at the dentist ends with bad news: tooth decay has left a large cavity, and the tooth needs a crown. The treatment requires several follow-up ap

By Emmet Cole Researchers at the University of Leeds and collaborators from the University of California San Diego won the Best Paper Award at RoboSoft, the leading international conference focused on soft robotics research. Soft robotics is gaining attention in medical applications because compliant machines can inter

Imagine you want to teach a robot to push an object on a table. The standard recipe in robot learning is to collect hundreds of expert demonstrations on a real robot, train an imitation learning policy on that data, and then evaluate the policy by running it many times on the same real robot. Both […]

Like many engineers, Sarah Downs says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered robotics through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s First Lego League team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 t

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEActuate 2

Andrew James (from left), Neil Morrison, Natalia Kurz and Michael Neiss work on a prototype of their weed-killing robot ahead of The Farm Robotics Challenge, which they won on May 21. By Holly Hartigan A team of Cornell undergraduates beat 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their

There are many words that I would never, ever use to describe a drone. Stealthy. Subtle. Whatever the opposite of obnoxious is. Much of this is because of the giant angry bee sound that drones tend to make, but it’s also the way that they look in flight: With uncannily linear movements and an even less canny ability to

Image copyright: Raphael Zufferey. By Jennifer Chu Loons, gulls, puffins, and petrels are some of the 100 species of birds that can both fly and swim. These diving birds can plunge in water to swim after prey, and then leap back into the air to fly away. Now, inspired by these naturally aquatic aviators, engineers [&#8

This article is brought to you by X Square Robot.Large language models gave artificial intelligence a working recipe. Pretrain a large model on broad data, and general capability follows. Robotics has no such recipe. Robotics systems have long been assembled from separate perception, planning, and control parts that ra

By moving their hands and fingers, users can direct a robot to play piano or shoot a basketball, or they can manipulate objects in a virtual environment.

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 Ju

Borys Drozhak has a vision: a front line almost free of humans, patrolled by flying drones and ground robots, and continuously monitored by AI-controlled sensor networks. And it’s not a pipe dream. Ukrainian roboticists have made major strides in that direction over the past four years. Remotely controlled ground vehic

This year, RoboCup took place in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event saw teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. Take a look at what the participants got up to in our round up from social media. The wait is over! 🤖🎉 RoboCup 2026 officially begins today! Join us for […]

Toshio Fukuda has been blazing trails for most of his career. He is considered to be one of the most prolific scholars in robotics, writing more than 2,000 research papers and authoring several books on the field. He’s an influential figure thanks to his pioneering work developing biomedical robotic systems, industrial

This weekend saw the finale of the league competitions at RoboCup 2026 in Incheon, South Korea, with the winners in the small, middle, and large humanoid divisions decided. Congratulations to the following teams, who finished in the top three positions in each size class: Small division Invic, Wuhan University, China H

“In the future, the relationship between humans and robots will deepen, and the distinction between them will probably disappear.” This prediction, from one of the attendees at the recent Humanoids Summit in Tokyo, might have been unremarkable had it not come directly from an android that was first introduced to the wo

The second day’s play at RoboCup 2026 has drawn to a close with another bumper set of matches. Teams have come from far and wide to take part in the humanoid soccer competition this year, with 17 different countries represented. China is the most represented country, boasting 15 teams across the three divisions. Other

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 Ju

From the 1st-5th June, the robots descended on Vienna. The 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) brought together the top minds in robotics for one short week to showcase the latest technologies, form new collaborations, and exchange ideas. Held at the Messe Wien, a stone’s throw from t

Image credit: RoboCup Federation. RoboCup 2026 kicked off today in Incheon, South Korea, with the league competitions running until 5 July. It’s an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format. Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a primary focus on humanoid

This year, RoboCup will be held in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event will see teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. It’s an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format. Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 Ju

Since the first robot-assisted surgery was performed, over 40 years ago, major advances in robotics, computer vision and artificial intelligence have fundamentally changed medicine and healthcare. Innovative new technologies are already aiding skilled medical professionals in diagnosis, surgery, rehabilitation and beyo

Image credit: By Jeff Dahl – Own work by uploader, Based on the public domain document: [1], CC BY-SA 3.0, Link By Stephanie Parker This research from the NeuroAI Lab of Martin Schrimpf, part of EPFL’s Schools of Computer and Communication Sciences and Life Sciences, uses AI models to predict exactly where to sti

One of only four teams remaining from more than 130 competitors worldwide, our team AURA Foresight is developing autonomous technology to stop wildfires before they grow out of control. AURA Foresight has been selected as a finalist in the prestigious XPRIZE Wildfire Autonomous Wildfire Response competition, emerging a

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. Please send us your events for inclusion.RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 Ju

Claire chatted to Allison Okamura from Stanford University about developing advanced robotic systems for haptic (touch) interaction. Allison Okamura is the Richard W. Weiland Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. Her academic interests include haptics, teleoperation, virtual reality, medical robotics, soft r

In 2018, Amazon brought me in as the lead UX Sound Designer for Astro, its first consumer home robot. Astro used cameras and other sensors to map and navigate your home and workplace, and could proactively patrol, check up on loved ones, and transport small items using its built-in cargo bin. While there was a well-def

If physical AI is going to match the accomplishments of LLMs, there's a data problem that needs to be solved.

On 19 April 2026, the Honor Lightning humanoid robot ran a half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human world record by 7 minutes and the best robot time from 2025 by almost 2 hours.How did Honor do it? Is there some magical technology or technique that unlocked this performance? How did the company be

By rapidly generating a smooth path plan that cuts travel time and avoids obstacles, the open-source “MIGHTY” system could streamline disaster recovery and parcel delivery.

By Syl Kacapyr Cornell engineers have developed a robotic collective that behaves less like a machine and more like a material that flows, reshapes and adapts to its environment without centralized control. The system, called the Cross-Link Collective, consists of dozens of small robots that have limited mobility indiv