On October 25, the Stardust OS (Astribot OS, AOS) robotics hackathon finals, hosted by Stardust Intelligence, concluded in Shenzhen. 17 teams developed over 36 hours, and 16 apps went from simulation to real-robot testing, with a 94% real-robot deployment rate.
Suzhou sandisiwei has launched NexusPickit-S1 bin-picking software, aimed at automated picking of industrial parts that have no fixed pose and are randomly stacked. It provides source code, video tutorials, and Q&A support. The software's hand-eye calibration can be completed within 5 minutes with millimeter-level accuracy. In a configuration with a KW-MINI structured-light camera and a Dobot CR5 collaborative robot arm, picking accuracy is within about 5 mm; on an i7-13700H with 24 GB of memory, the cycle time is about 1.2 s per part, and it can run in a Windows environment without a GPU.
IPLUS MOBOT will showcase the NERA-A embodied mobile manipulation robot at Booth 6067 in the Setia SPICE Convention Centre from November 3–5, targeting high-mix, high-cleanliness precision handling scenarios in Penang's semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.
The study proposes a language-driven navigation framework that enables mobile robots to understand natural-language requests such as "go to the mailbox," identify the referenced object, estimate its position using RGB-D data, and generate a navigation goal that is then executed by the ROS 2 Nav2 navigation stack.
The authors propose RAPID, a robotic agent disassembly platform that integrates a gantry-mounted industrial robotic arm, RGB-D perception, and an automated nut-running tool to remove fasteners on a full-scale EV battery pack. Open-vocabulary object detection achieves 0.9757 mAP50; among three one-shot fastener removal strategies, taught-in poses achieved a 97% success rate in 24 minutes, one-shot vision execution achieved 57% in 29 minutes, and visual servoing achieved 83% in 36 minutes (n=204).
ASPEN is an event-triggered scheduler based on command persistence prediction, designed to reduce repeated semantic reasoning calls in navigation VLA policies. On frozen NaVILA in the cross-dataset RxR-CE val-unseen evaluation, ASPEN reduces VLA calls by 9.5% and estimated inference time by 8.1% (including scheduling overhead), while preserving action sequences identical to the baseline in 92.1% of episodes.
cuArms is a conflict-based planner co-designed with GPU parallelism. It decomposes the search space using reusable multi-modal roadmaps and resolves conflicts and deadlocks through lazy search. It integrates with a high-level scheduler to jointly optimize task assignment, scheduling, motion, and manipulation skills. Experiments report real-time initial solutions and anytime improvements in motion quality and scheduling, without domain training for learning-based methods. The authors say it provides demo videos on both simulated and real industrial tasks.
The Stardust OS (AOS) robot hackathon finals, hosted by Stardust Intelligence, concluded in Shenzhen on October 25. 17 teams developed 16 apps in 36 hours, with 94% running on real robots. Participants built applications by calling AOS-encapsulated Meta capability packages and Skills, combined with large models such as GPT and DeepSeek. The champion team, "Remote Avatar," achieved two-way real-time control between a phone and the T1, completing tasks such as scooping cat litter, watering plants, and picking up packages. Stardust Intelligence founder Lai Jie said that when designing the interfaces, AOS considered both human and AI model users.
HuaRay Technology exhibited new machine vision and AMR products and solutions at the Electronic Semiconductor Exhibition and Machine Vision Exhibition at Shenzhen Bao'an International Convention and Exhibition Center from October 27 to 29. On the vision side, these included the 65MP CXP large-area-array camera, RayDes camera, 5MP short-wave infrared camera, 16K 256-level TDI line-scan camera, and the R5000Pro and RS3000 code readers, among others; on the AMR side, live demonstrations included the M060C modular chassis, the FCX100B omnidirectional latent fork-lift AMR, and a latent lift AMR for the PCB industry, among others.
Hikrobot has officially launched its "Mingzhi" series of standalone intelligent products, integrating perception, decision-making, and execution into the robot body itself, eliminating reliance on a scheduling architecture so that a single unit can complete the entire material-handling workflow. The series debuts with two products: the Z1-300 underride transport robot and the Z2-1500 forklift transport robot. The company says unboxing, mapping, and task dispatch can be completed in as little as 30 minutes, and a single map can cover up to 200,000 square meters.
A four-wheel-drive autonomous exploration robot based on the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi that can navigate paths and mazes and detect surrounding obstacles. It uses a servo-mounted ultrasonic sensor to perform 180° radar scanning and transmits real-time telemetry over Wi-Fi to an interactive web dashboard, which reconstructs a 2D vector map of the surrounding walls.
A developer built an expressive head prototype, Ecko, using a Galaxy S10 paired with a RealMan robotic arm; it is not a complete humanoid robot. The phone provides animated eyes, a camera, a microphone, and a speaker, with ARCore facial landmarks drawn inside the eyes. A Mac backend handles arm movement and Gemini-driven conversation, and displays real-time joint telemetry in a digital twin. Face tracking works within a limited range; the first motion stopped after about seven seconds due to a sign error, and that failure was kept in the build video.
Luxonis has launched the OAK 4 FFC board-level vision computer, which can connect up to five camera modules. A 6-core RVC4 processor handles synchronization, calibration, stereo depth, and AI computation, with total compute of 52 TOPS.
Intel and SAP have collaborated to connect enterprise IT systems with the operational technology that controls physical devices, and demonstrated physical AI automating warehouse material handling through a proof of concept (PoC). In this PoC, business requests from SAP EWM are sent to autonomous robots equipped with Intel edge AI software and hardware; the robots transport materials and report task status back, forming a closed loop between enterprise workflows and physical execution. The demonstration reduced transport distances and repetitive manual handling.
Counterpoint Research's Global Humanoid Robot Tracker report forecasts that cumulative global shipments of humanoid robot AI accelerators will exceed 1 million units by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 144% from 2026 to 2030.
BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo said in a CNBC interview that robotics has become the fastest-growing segment of the QNX software division, and QNX's patent royalty backlog has surpassed $1.2 billion, growing by more than $250 million in two quarters. Nvidia has adopted QNX as the preferred platform for its Halos safety stack; QNX is currently deployed in more than 275 million vehicles worldwide and is certified to ISO 26262 ASIL-D. BlackBerry shares rose 142% in 2026, and its market capitalization recovered to about $5.4 billion.
At the 2026 China Marine Economy Expo, Sightbit Robotics showcased a dual-robot collaborative welding workstation for shipbuilding, a humanoid welding robot prototype, an intelligent residual-material scanning system, a steel plate pitting 3D inspection system, and the Kunwu industrial simulation platform. The SpeedWeld intelligent welding control system supports reverse modeling with 3D structured-light cameras to generate welding trajectories, and can reduce changeover and commissioning cycles by up to 90%. The latest SpeedWeld 2.9 version supports dual-robot collaborative, asynchronous welding, and independent welding modes.
FastHarness is an experience-driven robot execution framework that uses π0.5 to generate actions and GPT-6 Astra to review and correct them, adjusting the review interval according to task stage and past review results. Across four simulated manipulation tasks in RoboDojo, it achieved an average success rate of 97.19%, higher than the 80% reported for π0.5 + GPT-6 Astra in the GPT-as-Policy report.
The Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) at Tsinghua University, together with Tsinghua's Department of Electronic Engineering and the University of Science and Technology of China, has proposed OxyGen, which uses unified KV Cache management to let an embodied model's action and language reasoning share prefix computation. The paper has been accepted to NeurIPS 2026.
Why it matters: The paper presents a unified KV Cache management scheme and measured data across multiple platforms, offering a reference for on-device embodied inference deployment.
Embotech and BMW announced that they have completed the movement of 1 million vehicles using autonomous driving technology at four plants in the UK and Germany, averaging about 3,500 moves per day with availability exceeding 99.5%. Their Automated Driving In-Plant solution places perception, including Hesai lidar, on the production line infrastructure side, so vehicles need no additional sensors, and it is paired with a deterministic safety architecture independently certified by TÜV SÜD.
RoboParty has released the full-stack open-source humanoid robot RP1, opening the entire chain to developers, from mechanical drawings and electrical systems to its self-developed ROMOMO joints, low-level control, simulation training, and deployment. RP1 is 135 cm tall, with 24 active degrees of freedom in the open-source version and 30 in the Pro version; peak torque ranges from 25 to 160 N·m. It uses 48V power and CAN-FD communication, and its accompanying software provides a 500 Hz control frequency and a 50 Hz policy update frequency.
Xpanner has launched the X1 Piling R6 fully autonomous pile-driving robot, designed to install posts autonomously at utility-scale solar and battery storage sites under the supervision of a single operator. The system is built on the Everstar R6 tracked chassis and uses high-precision GNSS and onboard sensors to navigate autonomously to pile locations. It can drive piles up to 23 feet (7.0 meters) long to a maximum driving depth of 15.7 feet (4.8 meters), and is equipped with a 97 kW engine and a hydraulic hammer with up to 1,260 J of impact energy.
Hesai Technology's spatial scanning solution Kosmo has been included by Pixar in a 3D rendering tutorial, where it is used to capture 3D Gaussian splatting data of real-world scenes. Kosmo consists of the handheld capture device Kosmo One and the cloud reconstruction component Kosmo World. Kosmo One integrates a custom lidar, an imaging system of up to 8K, a one-inch CMOS sensor, and a high-precision IMU; the four types of sensors perform microsecond-level time synchronization and factory extrinsic calibration at the hardware layer.
RoboParty has released the RP1 full-stack open-source humanoid robot, opening up complete-robot and joint hardware documentation, the PartyOS software foundation, and a pipeline from simulation training to real-robot deployment. The RP1 features ROMOMO's self-developed joint modules; the 100-diameter module has a measured peak torque of up to 160+ N·m, and with whole-body control algorithms it can walk, run, jump, negotiate obstacles, and get up after a fall. The platform also offers the UFO motion-control framework based on unsupervised reinforcement learning, dual-battery hot swapping, and a modular, maintainable structure, and it has launched a closed beta co-creation program.
Intel and SAP have collaborated to connect enterprise IT systems with warehouse operational technology (OT), and used a proof of concept (PoC) to demonstrate physical AI autonomously performing material handling. Requests initiated in SAP EWM are dispatched to autonomous robots equipped with Intel edge AI software and hardware; the robots transport materials and send task status and completion back, forming a closed loop between enterprise workflows and physical execution. The PoC showed reduced transport distances and less repetitive manual handling, and the two parties plan to turn it into a blueprint that can be replicated across sites, robot vendors, and use cases.
In a Gazebo mecanum-wheel robot simulation, the simulated vehicle moves but the mecanum wheels do not spin. The first troubleshooting step is to confirm whether the planar_move plugin is being used. The author spent an entire evening tuning parameters for one plugin.
The authors propose ActECC, which addresses the difficulty of determining the valid range of action chunks and scheduling replanning requests in edge-cloud collaborative VLA inference through kinematics-guided usable range assessment and delay-aware replanning scheduling. Experiments show it reduces per-action latency by up to 27.4%, cuts cloud calls by up to 45.1%, and lowers average execution error.
Researchers propose a "motion communication" method that encodes arbitrary short messages (such as an agent's current intent) as noise into the actions of any pre-trained policy, making robot motion detectable via remote vision or motion capture without degrading policy performance. This physical channel does not rely on wireless communication and requires no additional hardware or direct link to the robot. On real robots running at 50 Hz, four robots jointly recovered an 8-bit message at a total rate of 0.8 bits/s, with validation completed in both simulated environments and real-robot deployment.
The paper proposes a robot-agnostic compliant control framework that separates ROS controller boilerplate from control-law implementation through a plugin-based execution architecture, extending the ROS control ecosystem. The framework uses Pinocchio to compute robot kinematics and dynamics from URDF models, and its standardized joint and Cartesian command interfaces support motion references, stiffness and damping gains, nullspace targets, desired interaction wrenches, and independent feedforward inputs.
The authors propose dynamic window pure pursuit (DWPP), which moves command velocity computation into the v-ω velocity space and selects, within the dynamic window, the point closest to the line ω=κv, thereby explicitly incorporating velocity and acceleration constraints. Experiments show that DWPP avoids constraint-violating commands and achieves better path-tracking accuracy than conventional pure pursuit methods. The method has been integrated into the official Nav2 repository and made publicly available, and the paper has been accepted by Robotics and Autonomous Systems.
OSWAM proposes a world action model that generates actions with just one diffusion step, for autonomous driving and embodied control. The authors initialize the diffusion process with imagination tokens to provide physical priors and action-conditioned representations, and introduce privileged information distillation with future conditioning, making action quality comparable to or better than direct-policy WAM and Joint-WAM, which require tens of steps. It is about 3 times faster than the direct-policy WAM baseline, with compiled inference latency as low as 40ms on an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU.
Addressing the threat quantum computers pose to public-key authentication and key agreement, the study proposes the "rotational secrecy" architectural objective and the PARS reference mechanism, which coordinates policy-triggered key establishment, rotation, and reconciliation among authorized Physical AI agents. The optional PARS-ESL permissioned chain, maintained by authorized validators or edge gateways, records only authentication state such as key epochs, group membership, revocation, and algorithm-suite policies, not high-frequency business transactions, allowing resource-constrained agents to join as lightweight clients.
The authors propose Patchwork, a resource-sharing system for domain-randomized simulation built on the E=T+Δ representation, which uses shared templates plus patches to record environment changes, implemented on robosuite and MuJoCo. On LIBERO-plus and RoboCasa365 workloads, at 32 replicas, shared-template execution reduces CPU RSS by 88-92% compared with process-per-environment execution. Experiments show that memory growth depends more on template diversity and unique asset content than on the number of instances.
Specola is a tool for evaluating robot behavior in simulation against Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications. It provides a Python API and command-line interface that can be integrated into existing policy execution loops. It offers an adapter interface and already provides adapters for nine simulation environments and benchmarks, including LIBERO, RoboCasa, Isaac Lab, and RoboDojo, to supplement success rate with information such as degree of satisfaction, parameter sensitivity, and violated requirements.
The paper proposes MATE-BT, a decentralized framework for heterogeneous multi-robot teams that hierarchically decouples mission execution, task allocation, and task execution. An onboard active leader manages mission progression and team-level task assignment, and authority transfers after a leader failure.
The authors propose Thermal-Headroom Routing (THR), a lightweight model-selection policy that uses a closed-form RC thermal model to predict processor temperature and exclude detector configurations predicted to cross the throttling threshold.
The study proposes a two-stage Region of Attraction (RoA) certification procedure: contraction-based stability analysis first determines a target set, which Taylor-model reachability analysis then verifies, thereby constructing a context-dependent safe RoA at runtime and enabling safe switching among high-assurance controller candidates.
VLA-HWBench breaks down inference into seven stages for 18 open-source VLA models on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor and AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395, finding that action-generation strategy determines latency more than model size does, with parameter count explaining at most 15% of latency variance.
TRIAGE proposes a training-free visual token acceleration method that decides whether to reuse cached KV or prune based on a token drift threshold, and fixes the recomputation budget to directly control prefill latency.
The paper proposes a structure-preserving quantum representation that maps rigid-body transformations and serial-manipulator kinematics to parameterized quantum circuits, encoding spatial directions in single-qubit states and reconstructing end-effector poses from Pauli expectation values. Using the parameter-shift rule, the manipulator geometric Jacobian can be reconstructed from derivatives of quantum observables, analytically equivalent to the classical result under ideal readout. On this basis, the authors propose a hybrid closed-loop method, Quantum Closed Loop Inverse Kinematics, which uses the quantum-derived pose and Jacobian information to solve inverse kinematics.