October 2026 Robotics in Society, Business, and Culture: MonoRace Monocular Drone Racing, ETH Quadruped Solves Rubik's Cube, and RobCo's Billion-Dollar Valuation

October 2026 robotics developments include: TU Delft's MonoRace system, using only a monocular rolling-shutter camera and an IMU, enabled a racing drone to autonomously traverse a track at high speed and outperform a human champion without external motion capture; an ETH Zurich quadruped robot autonomously completed three 4.6 kg Rubik's cube solves using its feet, each taking about 30 moves and 8 to 9 minutes.