Robotics Intelligence Briefing

Patent protection is important for robotics startups, but they should be strategic in determining what IP is important, says Lightbringer. The post The physical AI race will be won in the patent office appeared first on The Robot Report.

In mobile robotics, software, safety, and fleet management are becoming just as important as the robot itself, according to an OMROM project manager. The post Inside Omron’s next-generation LD mobile robots appeared first on The Robot Report.

Experts from Eli Lilly and Purdue University will reveal findings about the perception of robots on the manufacturing floor. The post Eli Lilly, Purdue to share field learnings on human robot interaction at RoboBusiness appeared first on The Robot Report.

When Runway does release Praxis-1 publicly, it plans to ship it with open weights rather than as a closed model. The post Runway introduces Praxis-1 world action model for robotics 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.CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTINHumanoids 2026: 6–9 December 2026, SANT

Submit now to be part of the Robotics Startup Radar, which brings together some of the most promising robotics startups. The post Calling robotics startups: Submissions for the 2026 Robotics Startup Radar close soon appeared first on The Robot Report.

Claire chatted to Michelle Lu from Vsim Technology about using simulation and artificial intelligence to teach robots new skills. Michelle Lu is co-founder and CEO of Vsim Technology. She was previously a Director of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, where she and her co-founder created the world’s first end-to-end GPU-

In September 2026, live events such as IMTS, ROSCon, and iROS brought a flood of robotics developments. The post Top 10 robotics stories of September 2026 appeared first on The Robot Report.

Boston Dynamics engineers taped their pinkies and ring fingers together for a day to learn what they weren’t able to do. The post Boston Dynamics drops pinkie on new humanoid hand appeared first on The Robot Report.

As humanoid robots move from research labs into factories, warehouses, homes, and other shared spaces, accurate physical feedback becomes crucial. The post Precision In Motion. Vishay Precision Group, Inc. (VPG) to Showcase Custom Sensing Capabilities for Humanoid Robotics at RoboBusiness 2026 appeared first on The Rob

A robot can follow its safety rules and still act on manipulated information. See what this means for robot safety and how teams can strengthen their testing and evidence. The post Your Robot’s Safety Functions Already Work. What If the Input Lies? appeared first on The Robot Report.

Today, Boston Dynamics is announcing a redesigned hand for its Atlas robot. The previous generation could do some crazy superhuman things with its three fingers, but it was never intended for mass production in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Switching from research hardware to a scalable product makes previously ig

With the $100 million it raised earlier this month, Maven Robotics is looking towards mass producing its mobile manipulator robot. The post How Maven Robotics plans to automate industrial work, one task at a time appeared first on The Robot Report.

Every dev team has repeatable setup tasks: spinning up a new project, running a deployment checklist, generating a file structure, or typing the same instructions into Claude again and again. Claude Code helps reduce that friction with slash commands, including built-in commands and custom commands you can define for y

ANYbotics designed Shift to help maintenance teams run industrial inspections, detect failing equipment, and turn data into work orders. The post ANYbotics launches Shift to streamline robot fleet operations, scale inspections appeared first on The Robot Report.

The initiative for engineers includes a news desk, a conference, research, and an advisory board, grounded in trusted editorial brands. The post The Robot Report parent Arrowfly launches AI for Engineers platform, events for engineers navigating AI appeared first on The Robot Report.

Innodata uses Vicon cameras to measure movements with sub-millimeter accuracy and to collect real-world training data for robots. The post Innodata opens motion-capture lab to help humanoids move more like people appeared first on The Robot Report.

ASI and SoftBank join forces with $225M to scale brand-agnostic autonomous heavy equipment across infrastructure projects. The post Tackling construction labor shortages: ASI and SoftBank partner on autonomous fleets appeared first on The Robot Report.

That is a slightly awkward introduction to OpenAI Dot, but a useful one. In this article I’ll be discussing what this autonomous 24/7 agent (which consumes no usage) can do, what it is, how you can access it (along with its setup), and a live analytics exercise I ran after on Dot. By the time […] The post O

By Emmet Cole “Robotics and automation” is a pairing heard often around these parts. It puts the “RA” in IEEE RAS, after all. The familiar combination shows up in conference titles, funding calls, and program descriptions. But what is actually meant by the two words? Is robotics a subdomain of a

Attendees will learn about the many ways they can use force and torque sensors in humanoids and how to avoid breaking them while doing it. The post ForceN to give a crash course on force and torque sensing for humanoids at RoboBusiness appeared first on The Robot Report.

A practical guide to what changed, the benchmarks that matter, the cost controls developers should not miss, and one hands-on demo worth building.  Anthropic has just released Claude Sonnet 5.5. It is the middle child of the Claude family, and the one most people will actually use. It is quick, capable, cheap to r

AI agents can handle large context windows, yet still forget what happened after a session ends. Memory systems close that gap by preserving useful facts, preferences, relationships, and task state, giving agents continuity beyond a single prompt.  Open-source projects now approach memory through APIs, graphs, ben

Building useful robots starts with understanding the people who use them. For Charlie Kemp, cofounder and chief technology officer of Hello Robot, that means developing assistive robots that can help people with everyday tasks and support greater independence.In this Robots Guide profile, Kemp shares his path from stud

For the first time, an OCR model reads Indian languages as fluently as English documents. Sarvam Vision 2.1 breaks a long-standing trade-off. Indian businesses had to choose between structural document parsing and script recognition. Never both. Finance teams automating invoices faced this. Insurance companies processi

The scalable robot ScaFi. 2026 CREATE Lab EPFL. CC BY SA-4.0. Propeller-powered underwater vehicles have long helped scientists explore and monitor aquatic environments. But they’re limited by their own mechanics: spinning blades can snag on vegetation, stir up sediment, and startle the wildlife they’re oft

Agentic Context Learning or ACE is a learning paradigm that lets an AI agent improve across tasks by editing the context it reads, while leaving model weights unchanged. The paper outlining the techniques show why full rewrites fail, how the playbook update works, and where the measured gains hold up. This article expl

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.IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHCoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2

Claire chatted to Aaron Edsinger from Hello Robot about their Stretch robots that can help people with mobility issues live more independently. Aaron Edsinger is CEO and Co-Founder of Hello Robot, a robotics company dedicated to developing practical, safe, and accessible robots for people. With a passion for building r

Deborah Lupton / Pop Chips / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 Intrinsic (an AI robotics group at Google) announced that the company is making parts of its platform open source. Intrinsic Core™ is a set of ROS-compatible capabilities for building sophisticated robotic applications. The capabilities included in the open source pack

Projects are the bridge between learning and becoming a professional. While theory builds fundamentals, recruiters value candidates who can solve real problems. A strong, diverse portfolio showcases practical skills, technical range, and problem-solving ability.  This guide compiles 10 solved projects across AI do

In Guadalajara, Mexico, many high schools have motivated teachers and talented students with an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but they lack access to advanced tools such as robotics laboratories. The resources shortfall limits the students’ opportunities for hands-on learning on cutting

What happens when a frontier model’s abilities get packed into cheaper, faster versions? That’s what OpenAI did with GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, two new models built with methods similar to GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI is cutting API prices for both models by 50% compared with their GPT-5.6 versions, and says they bri

The 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026) will be held from 27 September – 1 October in Pittsburgh, USA. The programme includes plenary and keynote talks, workshops, tutorials, forums, competitions, and a debate. Keynote talks The keynote talks will be held from 28 &

China is targeting the next industrial revolution by doubling down on embodied AI and humanoid robotics, building directly on its vast manufacturing infrastructure. By Ellen H. Rumley and Allison Okamura Beyond the Robot Olympics Chinese robots have quickly entered global public consciousness in recent years, appearing

What happens when an AI model gets better at reasoning, faster at responding, and cheaper to run at the same time? That is the promise behind Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic’s latest flagship model and the first release in the Claude 5.5 family. Opus 5.5 brings several notable changes. It now reasons on every request,

If you follow trends in the AI world, chances are you have already come across Jev, a new AI model by TypeSafe AI. It is trending on X, and once you understand the reason behind it, you will want to try it out for yourself. TypeSafe AI came out of two years in stealth on […] The post Jev Explained: The AI Model T

Throughout her career, roboticist Barbara Mazzolai has turned to nature for inspiration. Now she wants to ensure the technology she builds gives back to the environment, too.After starting her career as a biologist, a chance opportunity saw Mazzolai switch streams to engineering and become an early pioneer of bioinspir

Each day in the control room of the Curiosity rover is jam-packed with important scientific decisions, as a NASA project scientist describes.

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.Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOULIROS 2026: 27 September–1

By Celia Luterbacher Imagine a robot designed to install solar panels with much greater speed and precision than a human. The robot is made from expensive materials and powered by a heavy battery that must be recharged every few hours. If the costs of building and operating the robot outweigh the benefits of the clean

This article is brought to you by VicOne.Robot safety has traditionally asked: Can a machine remain safe when something goes wrong? Physical AI raises a harder question: Can a machine remain safe when an attacker changes what it sees, decides, or does even when nothing appears to have failed?As AI and robotics continue

The 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) was held in Vienna from the 1 – 5 June. The event brought together researchers and industry professionals with expertise spanning many different aspects of robotics. IEEE have made the keynote and plenary talk recordings available to watc

Despite the recent deluge of videos of humanoid robots doing backflips and kung fu, the actual pace of progress towards humanoids that can do economically viable jobs at scale has at times seemed a bit plodding. There are some good reasons for this: A humanoid robot needs to be powerful enough to do useful work, safe e

Credit: Baumis Robots (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). By Emmet Cole In our new monthly series, we showcase 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. Reshor

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.Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOULIROS 2026: 27 September–1

From 25–27 August, UK RAS STEPS members came together at the University of York’s Institute for Safe Autonomy for a three-day Micromaze Robot Hackathon. Working in teams, participants were challenged to design, build and program autonomous robots capable of navigating a series of increasingly complex mazes. Each team u

Dexterous manipulation remains one of the biggest barriers keeping robots from successfully tackling a wide range of everyday tasks. A sense of touch could be the key, but a lack of quality data has held back progress. This is now starting to change as academic labs and startups race to build new tactile datasets and t

US robotics researchers and industry are looking for a cohesive national robotics strategy that will maintain basic research and innovation while improving domestic production and adoption of robots. By Ellen H. Rumley and Allison Okamura A leader in tech innovation Robots are a crowd-pleasing example of American innov

You sit down and put your arm in the cradle. You press a button. The machine takes it from there.A near-infrared light sweeps your inner elbow, hunting for a vein. A puff of alcohol hits your skin. An ultrasound probe glides across your arm, mapping how deep the vessel runs and which way it bends. Doppler captures the

By Maria Jose Galvez Trigo, Cardiff University and Paul Willis, Cardiff University New BBC sitcom Ann Droid imagines a near future in which robots provide care and companionship to older people at home. The series centres on Sue, a recent widow played by Sue Johnston, her hapless son Michael and Linda, an assistive car

Imagine you are trapped under rubble after an earthquake and you see an electronics-covered cockroach with a spring-loaded needle on its back scuttling toward you. Although the sight might be unnerving, to say the least, this prototype paramedic cyborg, or “Paraborg,” might one day help deliver lifesaving aid to disast

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.Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOULIROS 2026: 27 September–1

By Wanjiku Chebet Kanjumba, University of Florida NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration mission, or CADRE, will land on the side of the Moon facing Earth as

This article is brought to you by Tsubaki KabelSchlepp.In modern automated manufacturing, six-axis articulated robots perform high-speed, multidirectional maneuvers under demanding operational cycles. However, as robot arms swivel, rotate, and extend, the electrical cables, fiber optics, and pneumatic hoses supplying t

On a good day, the rock quarry in central Texas is about 370,000 kilometers (230,000 miles) from the moon. But last February, when Rishi Jangale watched his 1.8-meter-wide, 150-kilogram inflatable robot roll effortlessly over rocks, gravel, and wet clay, his imagination turned the quarry into the lunar surface instead.

A recent ICRA panel titled “Surviving the Paper Deluge” brought together leading robotics researchers who have grappled with the overwhelming number of robotics papers being published today. The discussion ranged from hard numbers on publication growth, through the promises and risks of large language models (LLMs), to

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash. By Hasan Ayaz, Drexel University; Ewart J. de Visser, United States Air Force Academy; Frank Krueger, George Mason University, and Yigit Topoglu, United States Air Force Academy People become more suspicious of a humanoid robot that makes errors, especially when the robot is an express

The U.S. is shutting out more foreign-made drones and robots. China’s scale means the global competition may simply move elsewhere.

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.Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOULIROS 2026: 27 September–1

Action from the 11 vs 11 humanoid match at RoboCup 2026. Photo credit: RoboCup Federation. RoboCup 2026 saw history made, as two teams of 11 humanoids took to the soccer field, the first time a full complement of robots has competed. The game saw B-Human (Bremen, Germany) take on HTWK Robots (Leipzig, Germany), with bo

Deborah Lupton / Servers in a Landscape / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 By Emmet Cole Robots clean rivers and sort waste, monitor ecosystems, and inspect renewable-energy infrastructure. But even the greenest robot has an environmental footprint. If robotics is going to help build a more sustainable world, the robotics communi

This article is brought to you by Ollobot.From about 2017, individuals began to truly connect with the initial wave of companion robots. These devices had personality, moved around, joked, and answered when you spoke to them. Most early companion robots, however, were still limited by simple voice-command interactions

The MICROBS Lab’s microfliers. 2026 EPFL/MICROBS – CC-BY-SA 4.0. By Celia Luterbacher When you blow air across the neck of a bottle, you’re not just producing a pleasant tone: you’re also demonstrating a phenomenon called Helmholtz resonance. This occurs when airflow passing across an opening causes air tra

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.Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOULIROS 2026: 27 September–1

Florent Delgrange won the Best Blue Sky Paper Award at AAMAS 2026 for his work Foundation World Models for Agents that Learn, Verify, and Adapt Reliably Beyond Static Environments. We caught up with him to find out more about his vision for agent learning. What is the topic of your Blue Sky Ideas paper and […]

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

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

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

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

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

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 […

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

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

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

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