robotics

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.

The Allen Institute for AI released MolmoMotion, an open model that predicts an object's future 3D trajectory from a video, marked points, and a language instruction, plus a 1.16-million-video training dataset and a new benchmark.

Alibaba affiliate Ant Group is building a broad humanoid robotics position through equity deals, an in-house unit called Robbyant, and a joint venture with AgiBot.

Pudu Robotics launched the D7, a dual-arm semi-humanoid industrial robot running its PuduFM 1.0 foundation model, with a 14 kg payload and 2-meter reach for warehouse work.

Agility Robotics will list on Nasdaq as AGLT through a SPAC merger valuing it at $2.5 billion, with more than $620 million in proceeds and a Foxconn-led PIPE.

Alibaba's logistics arm Cainiao launched ZeeBot, a warehouse robot that drives the floor at up to 4 m/s and climbs five-level racks in about 10 seconds.

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.

After a December 510(k) clearance for cholecystectomy, the UK firm is commercializing Versius Plus in the US and has applied to add benign gynecology procedures.

A new MIT framework lets robots store language descriptions of objects in a spatial map and answer natural-language queries, improving accuracy by 21 to 53 percent over prior methods.

The International Federation of Robotics gave its 2026 innovation and entrepreneurship award to Verity, whose self-flying drones scan warehouse inventory in 13 countries.