While we wait for physical-world AGI, many dangerous jobs today could already use state-of-the-art teleoperation technology. Mundane is building intuitive teleoperation, with the entire torso mapped joint by joint and the whole arm providing real force feedback. The full video is coming soon.
The robot is autonomously controlled by AI in the cloud. At the Long Horizon Summit, @Ryan_Resolution showed me a compelling demo: a MakerMods robotic arm controlled via a public API by Dream Lab's latest world-action model. @makermodsai @dreamlabs_ai
Kardex has released BinInductAI, which uses AI and computer vision to replace manual pre-checks and barcode scanning in the AutoStore bin induction process, cutting on-site induction time by up to 30%. Operators only need to place the bin at the induction port; the system automatically checks that the bin is present, its walls, the robot gripper holes, and barcode readability, and after barcode verification confirms with the ASRS that the bin is not registered as a duplicate before issuing the insert command. The system can automatically identify damaged or non-standard bins, reducing the risk of downstream interruptions.
The authors have released LEAN, a reinforcement learning-based local energy-aware navigation planner. The code is open-sourced on GitHub, and the paper was published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. The authors state that the method does not require using proximity to the goal as a reward; instead, it lets the agent learn from failed trajectories and provides an explicit energy signal. An accompanying video compares the model's inference performance in real environments against an ablation version without energy awareness and a classical NMPC planner.
Roberson Robotics is looking for a market entry point for its high-performance robotics platform; the founder said he considered DARPA contract-type projects but deemed them too aggressive. Its in-house autonomous navigation stack enables the platform to achieve voice control with environmental awareness via depth cameras and lidar, and is currently being developed by a one-person team. The founder has 22 years of robot combat experience and about 7 years of electric drag racing experience.
The paper proposes Quaternion Approximate Networks (QUAN), which approximate quaternion convolution through Hamilton product decomposition using real-valued operations, paired with custom CUDA kernels to achieve rotation-equivariant image classification and object detection. The authors also propose Independent Quaternion Batch Normalization (IQBN) to stabilize training and extend quaternion operations to spatial attention mechanisms.
Foundry Robotics announced the completion of a $100 million Series A funding round, led by MarlinspikeVC, with continued participation from Khosla Ventures. The company has built a 130,000-square-foot factory in Emeryville, California, and has already delivered products to paying customers in the energy, telecommunications, autonomous driving, and defense sectors.
For the quarter ended June 27, 2026, Symbotic reported revenue of $720.8 million and net income of $55 million, with Walmart, referred to as "Customer A," contributing 90.5% of revenue.
A study published in the International Journal of Systems, Control and Communications proposes combining fuzzy logic with a self-coupling PID controller for multi-drone formation control.
Tesla did not invite major investors to tour the Fremont factory this Thanksgiving as it has in past years, a move interpreted as extending the confidentiality period for the Optimus facility. Sources cited by Scobleizer say human data collection is 'massive in scale,' covering both home and factory scenarios; data collection operator positions appeared at Tesla about three years ago, requiring workers to wear 30-pound equipment.
The authors propose RynnUnify, a 16B unified embodied model that combines embodied understanding with long-horizon visual planning through video-language interleaved reasoning. The model covers spatial reasoning, physical prediction, and grounding capabilities, linking physical world understanding with visual anticipation across subtasks. The post also provides links to the code and paper.
Maxinsights has completed a $30 million seed round led by PeakXV, with participation from Tola Capital, South Park Commons, INCE Capital, and Alumni Ventures; the funds will be used to expand its physical AI data platform.
Neura Robotics and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) opened the TUM RoboGym near Munich Airport, an investment of about €17 million covering more than 2,300 square meters, of which about €11 million comes from Neura, with an initial planned operating period of three years.
Faraday Future plans to launch a robot factory in the US by the end of 2026, with the first US-assembled robot scheduled to roll off the line in February 2027, and to launch three to five new or next-generation robot products in the US each year. The company says its "Built in USA" strategy aims to strengthen compliance, supply chain resilience, quality control, and customer support, and it plans to move from "US assembly" to "US manufacturing" by 2028. Global Executive Chairman Jerry Wang said the company has not disclosed the share of US-manufactured content or the specific components that will still need to be imported in 2028.
Symbotic reported quarterly revenue of $720.8 million and net profit of $55 million for the quarter ended June 27, 2026, with its largest customer, Walmart, and its affiliates contributing 90.5% of revenue. Under the store-level APD system agreement completed in January 2025, Walmart committed $520 million in development funding, while Symbotic paid $200 million to acquire Walmart's robotics business and accepted delivery obligations including a cap on the number of similar APD systems it may sell to outside customers.
A3 data shows that North American companies ordered a total of 10,989 robots in Q3 2026, valued at $723.5 million, with order volume up 24.8% year over year and order value up 26.1%, making it the strongest quarter of the year. Cumulative orders for the first three quarters totaled 28,984 units and about $1.89 billion, up 9.6% and 13.3% year over year respectively; orders from automotive component suppliers rose 90.4%, semiconductors and electronics/photonics rose 97.6%, and collaborative robot orders reached 1,831 units, up about 56% year over year.
The creator published a 20-minute full build log of the ESP32-S3 desktop robot Pamk, covering the process from changing the initial sketch to a cube shape and designing a custom PCB costing about 25 euros (integrating ESP32-S3, I2S microphone and amplifier, screen, USB-C) to assembly and 3 magnetic shells. Pamk currently has no wheels or actuators, and the author says V2 plans to add motors/actuators. The video has French voiceover and English subtitles.
Watch the full conversation between Index partner Mark Xu and Flapping Airplanes' Ben Spector: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08A3Rb3zztw
NASA University Student Research Challenge (USRC) alumnus Gavin Gardner and teammates founded AG3 Labs in 2024, specializing in drones for military training, with current monthly production capacity reaching thousands of units.
After @flappyairplanes completed a $1 billion Series A round, @marklxu1 spoke with CEO and co-founder @spectorb about his journey from running Prod to building a lab that boosts AI efficiency by several orders of magnitude, and about what sets founders apart from others.
Watch their full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08A3Rb3zztw
Dexmate provides a teleoperation data collection solution for physical AI model training, consisting of the full-body platform Vega 1 Pro, the half-body platform Vega 1 U, and the Omniteleop software.
Warp Sciences exited stealth last week with $215 million in funding and plans to build a chemistry contract research organization (CRO) in the United States, combining chemists, robots, and AI to synthesize and test molecules for research teams.
A University of Toronto engineering team has developed a flexible foot pad for the one-legged hopping robot Hopcopter, enabling it to hop on difficult terrain such as sand and ice. By enlarging the contact area, using a spherical joint that tilts with the terrain, a rubber band for return, and short spikes on the bottom for grip, the pad reduces takeoff error by up to 66%, improves efficiency by up to 64%, and cuts cross-terrain performance variation by 84%. The related paper was published in Advanced Intelligent Systems; the team's next step is to develop autonomous navigation, targeting scenarios such as search and rescue, pipeline inspection, and mining area inspection.
The founders of @_EchelonAI decided to start the company at a Burger King in the Las Vegas airport. A week earlier, their iPhone launch video went viral. They then held 19 consecutive meetings at ServiceNow's largest conference. @RahulKayala and @rak_garg explain how this grew into an AI workforce for enterprise IT.
Meet your new cleaning assistant! Meet the F25 GT Gen 2, ready to handle everyday messes and make floor cleaning easy and effortless. From accidental spills to daily dust, it can help you get it done. Start a whole new way of cleaning! Buy the F25 GT Gen 2 before November 1 and save $130.
ANYbotics has launched ANYmal X, a quadruped inspection robot it describes as designed for explosive environments, and has begun deliveries to oil, gas, and chemical customers including Equinor and DSM-Firmenich.
NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops add the Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe open-weight speech model, support for Liquid AI's LFM3 series models, and an agent resource management feature in the NVIDIA App that allocates GPU resources.
On October 27, Musk responded on X to Counterpoint's report on humanoid robot DRAM demand, calling it an "absurd analysis" and judging that robots' demand for memory will surpass every other application on Earth. Counterpoint forecasts that per-unit DRAM capacity in humanoid robots will rise from the current 19GB to 39GB in 2030, with total demand growing from about 8,300TB in 2026 to about 172,000TB in 2030.
Unitree Technology's shares rose more than 65% cumulatively over seven consecutive trading days starting October 16. On October 26, the stock closed at 672 yuan with a total market value of 271.8 billion yuan, and its trailing price-to-earnings ratio reached 465.22x, far above the roughly 38.54x average for the general equipment manufacturing industry over the past month.
Google DeepMind has released Genie 4, a new-generation world model that extends single interactive simulation duration from about one minute to two minutes and supports native audio generation for the first time. Genie 4 introduces Gemini to plan actions while it generates the environment in real time; in a demo, Gemini 4 Argon breaks a task into consecutive steps, and Genie 4 simulates the Apptronik Apollo humanoid robot playing checkers.
According to A3 data, North American companies ordered 10,989 robots in Q3 2026, with a total value of $723.5 million, a 24.8% year-over-year increase in units and a 26.1% increase in value. Orders from automotive components rose 90.4%, semiconductor, electronics and photonics orders rose 97.6%, automotive OEM orders rose 7.5%, and food and consumer goods orders fell 23.7%.
CASIVIBOT, the industrial embodied inspection robot from CASIVIBOT, showcased its Z1-Lite motor stator model and Z1-SE hard material model at the 26th China International Industry Fair. The Z1-Lite targets mass-production inspection of micro motors, completing loading and unloading, defect detection, and automatic sorting in one station, with 5-micron inspection precision and 5 seconds per part; the Z1-SE relies on a self-developed few-shot visual inspection engine to identify chipping, scratches, dents, and dirt, with 7-micron inspection precision and 20 to 35 seconds per part.
On October 26, the qualifying round of the first CMG World Robot Mount Tai Climbing Competition started on the trail from Red Gate to Zhongtian Gate in Mount Tai, with multiple domestic teams fielding legged and wheel-legged composite robots. The course is about 3.8 kilometers long with more than 3,100 steps. Rain during the race made the stone steps slippery, testing the robots' balance control, perception and decision-making, and battery life in a real mountain environment. One robot from Dongtai Technology completed the speed race in about 58 minutes with about 80% battery remaining. The event also includes a loaded-carrying race for legged robots, simulating mountain emergency supply delivery scenarios.
Data from the General Administration of Customs shows that from January to August 2026, China's surgical robot exports totaled 672 million yuan, up 272.92% from 180 million yuan in the same period last year. Guangdong ranked first nationwide with 14.718 billion yuan in robot exports, while Shanghai ranked first nationwide in exports of the single category of surgical robots. Frost & Sullivan forecasts that China's surgical robot market will grow from 22.45 billion yuan in 2026 to 70.85 billion yuan in 2030, a compound growth rate of 33.3%.
NVIDIA and Agile Robots launched the Agile ONE SN humanoid robot reference platform at GTC Berlin, integrating Isaac GR00T and Jetson Thor, with plans to release it in early 2027.
AgiBot has released its embodied Agent framework Genie Master. Equipped with this framework, Genie G2 has taken a job in a real convenience store, where it does not rely on manual demonstrations or debugging; it autonomously identifies the causes of failures, adjusts its strategies, and accumulates experience, continuously improving on tasks such as packaged hot-food preparation, picking, and restocking, achieving self-evolution without a human in the loop.
Gamma Robtics, the first market-oriented innovation company incubated by China Telecom's Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), has recently been registered and established in Xuhui, Shanghai, focusing on full-model innovation and applications for self-evolving humanoid robots.
FFR has completed its merger with FFAI Robotics, with the related business and assets folded into FFR, and has listed on Nasdaq, with Jia Yueting as CEO and Jerry Wang as Executive Chairman. FFR issued its first 2026 guidance: sales and shipments of about 2,000 robot units while maintaining positive gross margin; assuming necessary financing is obtained, 2027 revenue is expected to be about $45.2 million, with EAI unit sales of about 7,400.
Jiangsu embodied intelligence company Elite Robots announced the completion of a new 200 million yuan funding round, led by CCB Equity, with existing strategic shareholders continuing to follow on. The funds will be used to expand into AI infrastructure scenarios such as optical communications and AI servers, and to build new factory production lines. The company started out in controllers and once won a single order for 3,000 collaborative robots from BYD; its customers also include Luxshare and Lens. In May this year it launched the wheeled humanoid robot Centaur-G1. Its self-developed Yuanqi Primo industrial large model integrates a vision-language-action model with real-time torque sensing. In the first half of this year it completed a 600 million yuan Series D+ funding round.