First Supply, a wholesaler of HVAC and other industrial supplies, has deployed an Exotec Skypod grid-based automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) at its Greenfield distribution center, enabling scaled next-morning delivery for orders placed before 5:00 p.m.
Hexagon Robotics' multi-purpose humanoid robot AEON has been named an honoree in Fast Company's 2026 Next Big Things in Tech, recognized as one of the breakthrough technologies with the potential to transform industry.
Minerva Humanoids announced the completion of a roughly $10 million pre-seed funding round led by General Catalyst, with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures as co-leads and several other institutions participating. The company will launch its first paid pilots in the fall.
LuLu Retail and a subsidiary of Kody Technolab have jointly launched the UAE's first in-store robotic advertising network. Kody Technolab is headquartered in Ahmedabad, India, with offices in Canada, the US, and the UK, and positions itself as building AI and robotics platforms that operate in real environments based on clients' operational challenges. The original article did not disclose the network's deployment stores, robot models, or operating data.
Interact Analysis analyst Will Pond writes that Chinese warehouse automation vendors such as Geek+, Hai Robotics, and Hikrobot are accelerating overseas expansion, with many projects completed through direct China-to-China procurement channels that do not enter public tenders, so market-share estimates based on public disclosures are conservative. The author argues that Western vendors face reduced visibility of opportunities and difficulty commanding premium pricing, and need to develop local partnerships and hybrid delivery models.
During IROS 2026 (the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems), hundreds of people from robotics academia and industry toured Carnegie Mellon University's robotics and engineering facilities on October 1, including the Robotics Innovation Center, Mill 19, and the National Robotics Engineering Center, to learn about the ongoing work of the university's researchers.
Donut Robotics announced that the October 2 broadcast of "Gaia no Yoake" featured the development of its humanoid robot cinnamon 2. The program focused on how cinnamon 2 could help address Japan's infrastructure crisis, with filming lasting about 1 year.
Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson has been selected to join MITRE-led Project Meridian as an individual advisor, independent of Agility's commercial operations. The initiative explores how emerging technologies will shape the future of defense. Agility said humanoid robots can take on heavy, repetitive, and dangerous work, and reiterated its position that Digit will not be weaponized and that it complies with the industry's 2022 commitment.
Realbotix announced it will exhibit at the Humanoids Summit in Silicon Valley. The original text only contains the company's newsletter subscription and contact email contact@realbotix.com, with no specific exhibits or event details provided.
Agility Robotics will hold an Analyst and Investor Day in New York on October 6, livestreamed from 12:30–3:00 p.m. ET via its investor relations website. The event will cover Digit 5 and commercial deployment experience, manufacturing and supply chain expansion, and the software and Physical AI roadmap, with guests including representatives from Schaeffler, Foxconn, and AUVSI.
Why it matters: The official announcement provides the event agenda and guest lineup, allowing readers to understand what investors and ecosystem partners are focusing on regarding commercial deployment.
Surgeon and TUM MIRMI researcher Dirk Wilhelm has been appointed as the new professor of medical robotics at the Technical University of Munich, where his research focuses on robotic systems that support healthcare staff in everyday clinical work. His work combines medical practice with research on robotics and digital assistance systems, exploring how new technologies can be integrated into clinical workflows and the role of human-robot collaboration within them.
Inbolt announced it has raised $12.5 million, bringing its cumulative funding to $34 million. The round was led by new investor Shift4Good, with participation from Bridges Climate Transition Partners, BNP Paribas Développement, and Ora Global.
RobCo announced that its valuation has topped $1 billion, doubling within nine months, and it is offering some long-serving employees a chance to cash out part of their equity. The company raised $100 million in February 2026, with existing investors including Sequoia and Lightspeed participating in this round, and Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective as new investors.
Galbot's LATENT project won the IROS 2026 Best Entertainment and Leisure Paper Award. Starting from imperfect human motion data, it achieved humanoid robot tennis rallies in the real world. 🏆🎾🤖 Project: http://zzk273.github.io/LATENT/ Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12686 Code: http://github.com/GalaxyGeneralRobotics/LATENT The main post is a recap of the Physical AI Builders Party that Galbot held on-site at IROS 2026, thanking all participants for gathering to exchange ideas and build together.
Robots are circling the factory floor, and you're still pushing a handcart? 🤖👷♂️ See how this factory upgraded from manual tire handling to efficient AMR automated logistics, and why automation-first companies are the ones that truly survive. Original Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghVWIZ6_BLg
Zhuhai Amicro Technology passed the Main Board listing hearing of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on September 30, plans to raise over $100 million, and is expected to list in mid-October, with China Securities International and Guotai Junan Financing as joint sponsors. The company's core asset is the Amicro intelligent mobile robot technology platform; it claims to have launched the world's first SLAM SoC dedicated to intelligent mobile robots, and its main control SoC AM970 integrates an NPU with 5 TOPS of computing power.
RobCo's valuation has surpassed $1 billion, doubling within nine months, bringing in new investment through an employee secondary sale, with participation from existing investors including Sequoia and Lightspeed and new investors including Cherry Ventures. Its autonomous industrial robot Alfie will be officially commercially launched on March 4, 2027, at the RobCoN summit in Munich. The company is stepping up its push into the US market, with its CEO having relocated to the US, manufacturing and assembly operations in Austin, Texas, and a lab in San Francisco.
Why it matters: The company officially announced a valuation above $1 billion and liquidity through an employee secondary sale, offering insight into its capital cadence and US expansion plans.
Agility Robotics announced that CEO Peggy Johnson has joined Project Meridian as an individual advisor. The project is led by MITRE and commissioned by the DoW, and involves discussing the future character of war and advising on defense capability development and investment priorities over a 10- to 20-year horizon. Johnson said she will bring experience from more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation of the Digit humanoid robot in commercial deployments to the discussion, and that her participation is independent of Agility's commercial operations.
Making history. Again. 🎾 The first time a humanoid robot has appeared on the stage of an international tennis tournament. Galbot becomes the official designated humanoid robot of the 2026 China Open. Fully autonomous rallying. Live broadcast, for the whole world to see. 📍 National Tennis Center, Beijing 📅 September 30–October 11 #Galbot #AstraTennis #ChinaOpen @HumanoidRobot #PhysicalAI
A3 announced that ANSI/A3 R15.08-3-2026 Part 3 has been published and is available for purchase, completing the three-part series. Part 3 focuses on users' responsibility to maintain acceptable risk in daily work operations and throughout the machine lifecycle, including risk assessment, change management, employee training, and periodic review and inspection, and is offered alongside ANSI/A3 R15.06 Part 3 to provide consistent guidance.
During the National Day holiday, DEEP Robotics deployed its DR02 humanoid robot in real traffic scenarios in Hangzhou's Xihu District for real-world testing, covering functions such as intersection traffic direction, multilingual tourist inquiries, and identification and persuasion of traffic violations. The DR02 features IP66 protection, enabling it to navigate autonomously and dynamically avoid pedestrians and vehicles in outdoor environments such as sustained rainfall. DEEP Robotics said it will continue to advance the robot's application in more scenarios, including traffic management and public services, based on real business needs.
Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics have signed a memorandum of understanding to formally establish a strategic partnership to advance safety infrastructure for the humanoid robot Digit 5. Their multi-year collaboration has grown from a single custom hardware component into a three-part safety architecture covering a safety pendant, onboard communications, and an offboard interface, with the Offboard Safety Bridge jointly developed by the two companies.
The IN²Bot team from the School of Automation at Beijing Institute of Technology won championships in embodied intelligence competitions at two major international conferences: it took first place in the CVPR 2026 ManiSkill-ViTac Visuotactile Embodied Dual-Arm Manipulation Challenge with a 700-point lead, using a solution that includes a self-developed tactile encoder and an action memory module; and it won the ICRA 2026 Fifth Mobile Robot Autonomous Navigation Challenge with the highest score overall, using methods covering a spatial traversability cognitive reasoning field, local reactive planning, and safety-barrier trajectory control.
PaXini hosted the Global Embodied Ecosystem Night (GEEN) dinner during IROS 2026, inviting nearly 200 scholars, industry leaders, and investors, and supported the conference as its highest-level sponsor.
Warren CAT, a major Caterpillar dealer in North America, has deployed an AutoStore goods-to-person system implemented by Kardex at its Store 05 location in Midland, Texas.
As the highest-level sponsor and partner of IROS 2026, PaXini presented its full product lineup at the conference, including sensors, dexterous hands, PXCAP series data-collection gloves, and complete humanoid robots, demonstrating its "PIE" (Perception-Intelligence-Execution) full-stack closed-loop system.
The CEO of Donut Robotics appeared with cinnamon 2 on the program Nikkei NEWS NEXT, holding a studio discussion about AI.
At Samsung AI Forum 2026, held at its Seoul headquarters, Samsung Electronics unveiled a robot commercialization roadmap led by its newly established RX (Robot eXperience) Business Promotion Office, combining robot foundation model (RFM) and world model technology to first advance automation at its own more than 100 factories and more than 100 production lines, before entering the home assistant robot market.
Why it matters: The article presents the per-unit cost breakdown of humanoid robots and the success-rate threshold for factory scenarios, which can be used to compare and understand differences in manufacturers' commercialization paths.
At the Samsung AI Forum 2026, Samsung announced its robot commercialization roadmap. Centered on its newly established RX (Robot eXperience) business promotion office, the plan is to first advance automation at its more than 100 factories and more than 100 production lines, then enter the home assistant robot market.
Why it matters: The article lays out the cost math for a humanoid robot at about $100,000 per unit and a three-layer behavior stack, helping readers understand why Samsung puts factory automation ahead of home robots.
On October 2, the first Vietnam Embodied Intelligence Conference (AGIBOT Partner Conference) was held in Hanoi, co-hosted by NIC, AGIBOT, and local partners ECOLIV and Great Education, with more than 550 attendees.
XPeng Group delivered 41,256 new vehicles in September, up 5% month on month, with cumulative deliveries of 118,390 units in the third quarter. The XPeng G9L launched in China on September 17 at a limited-time starting price of 231,800 yuan, debuting the new second-generation VLA version; MONA L03 deliveries exceeded 10,000 units in the month. On September 8, XPeng put into operation the world's first automated production line for high-level general-purpose humanoid robots; the robots are planned to enter mass production by the end of this year, starting with deployment in stores, campuses and other scenarios.
Cognition's $2 billion raise, code search at 100x lower cost, and more | Neo & Noteworthy See our September roundup to learn what Neo portfolio companies and community members achieved and announced 💙 https://neo.substack.com/p/kepler-chips-robots-paint-ballot?r=6xf9ka&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Jonathan Hurst will take the Digit robot to the @TechCrunch #Disrupt stage. Wednesday, October 14 — a live demonstration of the engineering practices that bring practical humanoid robots into real work. If you're in San Francisco, join the discussion.
Agility Robotics announced a strategic partnership with FORT Robotics to launch a new Offboard Safety Bridge, extending Digit's safety architecture beyond the robot itself. The safety bridge connects Digit with safety systems already in place in the factory, so that protection takes effect whether the signal comes from the robot or the environment. Agility Robotics says the solution is built on more than 65,000 hours of real-world operating experience.
On October 1, Shandong Province's first robot 6S offline experience store inside a large comprehensive shopping mall, "Haindeer," opened at Jinan Hang Lung Plaza, with Yobotics humanoid robots, quadruped robots, and supporting intelligent solutions moving in. The experience center offers product sales, equipment rental, project customization, scenario deployment, technical training, and after-sales operation and maintenance services to government and enterprise, school, and corporate clients, and regularly opens robot science popularization experiences, study-tour check-ins, technology interaction, and other activities to residents and young people.
euRobotics will attend the Adra Forum (ADRF) in Porto on October 13-14, and its director Rich Walker (Shadow Robot) will speak at the first day's "Apply AI in Robotics and Manufacturing" workshop.
The euROBIN network held its Final Event at the European Parliament in Brussels under the theme "AI-based Robotics in Europe: Live technology demonstration and high-level round table," showcasing robots, roboticists, and robotics through live technology demonstrations and a high-level round table.
Lumos NIX made a big splash at IROS 2026—literally. 🕺🔥
The euRobotics TG Summit is scheduled for Tuesday, November 10, to Wednesday, November 11, spanning two days. The meeting themes and agenda will be announced in the coming weeks, with more details expected in the next newsletter.
The euRobotics Awards have launched their new annual call for entries, recognizing outstanding work and achievements in robotics across four award categories. Together, the four categories trace an arc of robotics development: from scientific theory and research, through technology application, to commercialization and long-term sustainability.
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