Signal
21 articles covering "physical-ai"
MIT spinout Walden Robotics raised $300 million led by Toyota and Deviation Capital, and has run wheeled humanoid robots at a Toyota plant since February.
Intrinsic, folded into Google's core operations in February, debuted the Intrinsic Intelligence Cell at Automate 2026; Foxconn will pilot a customized version for electronics assembly later this year.
UMA, the Paris startup led by former Tesla Optimus and Hugging Face engineer Rémi Cadène, has emerged from stealth to unveil Northstar, a lightweight humanoid robot aimed at European factories and warehouses.
Mantis Robotics unveiled the MR-X, a biomimetic dual-arm robot that lifts 70 lbs and moves at 10.6 m/s without safety cages, relying on its SafetyCore reflex system to work near people.
At Automate 2026, NVIDIA unveiled Halos for Robotics, a three-layer functional-safety system spanning IGX Thor compute, Halos OS, and an ANAB-accredited inspection lab, with Agility Robotics as first adopter.
Kawasaki Robotics premiered the RL030N, an eight-degree-of-freedom arm built for physical AI, and named Dexterity's Mech warehouse robot as an early adopter.
The San Mateo startup, founded in 2024 by ex-DeepMind and Boston Dynamics researchers, has now raised more than half a billion dollars to scale its robot foundation models.
Amazon's new Proteus understands conversational commands and works beyond loading docks, debuting in London alongside a more than €10 billion European fulfillment investment.
XPENG began mass production of its L4 robotaxi on May 18, making it the first Chinese automaker to build a robotaxi entirely through in-house engineering.
SAP and Milan-based Cyberwave have deployed fully autonomous AI-powered robots in SAP's St. Leon-Rot warehouse, handling box folding, packaging, and shipping fulfillment via VLA and reinforcement learning models.
Boston Dynamics engineers detail the five-step reinforcement learning pipeline that taught Atlas to lift over 100 pounds using whole-body control — from animation to factory floor in weeks.
Figure AI's Helix-02-powered Figure 03 humanoids ran a public, multi-day sorting livestream from May 13, processing more than 100,000 packages in 81 hours with no teleoperation — though a leading roboticist calls the demo more 'science project' than commercial proof.