robotics

NVIDIA and SAP turned the German trade fair into a roll call of humanoids running real logistics and assembly tasks inside factories — HMND 01 at Siemens, AEON at BMW Leipzig — wired into enterprise software through SAP's Joule agent layer.

Sony AI's Project Ace, published in Nature on April 22, 2026, is the first autonomous robot to win competitive matches against elite and professional table tennis players under official rules.

After FDA 510(k) clearance in December and a 45,000-patient global milestone in March, the Cambridge-based surgical robotics company begins placing its modular, lower-cost Versius Plus system in US hospitals.

Physical Intelligence released π0.7, a generalist robot model that lifts air fryer task success from 5 to 95 percent through plain-language coaching and matches specialist RL models on laundry, espresso, and box assembly.

Honor's humanoid Lightning robot finished Beijing's half marathon in 50:26, beating the human world record and underscoring how quickly China's bipedal robotics field is improving.

STMicroelectronics is pairing a new Nvidia physical-AI partnership with plans to deploy more than 100 humanoid robots across its manufacturing footprint and retrain workers for higher-value roles.

Skild AI has bought Zebra Technologies' robotics automation unit, combining its hardware-agnostic Skild Brain with Zebra's Symmetry Fulfillment orchestration platform to pursue a unified software layer for warehouses.

A PNAS paper from Harvard's Mahadevan lab shows that adding tuned noise to robot movement prevents gridlock in dense swarms, with physical validation at Eindhoven University of Technology.

The second Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half Marathon on April 19 will field over 300 robots from 100-plus teams, up from 20 in 2025, with a new autonomous navigation category.

Canadian startup Upside Robotics closes a $7.5 million seed round to expand solar-powered autonomous robots that micro-dose fertilizer in corn fields, claiming 70 percent input reduction across 1,300 acres.

Austin-based ICON begins selling its Titan robotic construction platform directly to builders, claiming a 40 percent cost reduction for wall systems.

Ukraine's 147th Artillery Brigade is the first known military unit to field-test commercial exoskeletons in active combat, using $1,000 Hypershell devices to help gunners handle over a metric ton of ammunition daily.