Daniela Shchegelskaya, an electronics and robotics engineer at Elimpus, shares two years of experience using Boston Dynamics' Spot for hazard-zone inspections in live power substations. She argues that robots should take on tasks such as carrying instruments into hazardous locations and providing more detailed viewpoints, keeping people away from danger while preserving key judgment.
The article reviews the history of collaborative robots from the 1990s to the 2020s: in 1996, GM and Northwestern University proposed the Cobot concept; in 2005, Universal Robots was founded and launched the UR5 in 2008; in 2015, Teradyne acquired UR for about 284 million USD; and in 2025, UR's cumulative global sales surpassed 100,000 units.
ATDev has updated progress on its autonomous wheelchair development, building a modern power wheelchair equipped with a collaborative robotic arm under the ARPA-H-funded RAMMP project. The wheelchair uses a shared autonomy model in which the user decides the path and the system handles fine adjustments, with plans to add teleoperation and federated learning features. ATDev is working with Meta to apply AI models to the wheelchair, with both parties betting on open source.