Robotics & Automation

Figure AI reports its California BotQ line scaled from one Figure 03 per day to one per hour in under 120 days, shipping over 350 robots with 80% first-pass yield.

Federal regulators flagged 16 crashes involving Avride's Hyundai Ioniq 5 robotaxis between December 2025 and March 2026, citing 'excessive assertiveness and insufficient capability.'

Meta acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence on May 1, 2026, folding cofounders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang into Superintelligence Labs as it tries to become the operating-system layer for the humanoid race.

Matternet has launched commercial drone deliveries between two Central London NHS hospital campuses, marking its UK debut and the first urban deployment of an FAA Type-Certified delivery aircraft on British airspace.

San Francisco startup Humble unveiled the Humble Hauler, a fully autonomous, cabless Class 8 electric truck, after closing a $24 million seed round led by Eclipse to pursue dock-to-dock freight without a human cab.

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.

Elon Musk confirmed on Tesla's Q1 2026 earnings call that roughly 4 million HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, reversing years of promises and triggering legal exposure.

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.

Waymo's eight-vehicle NYC pilot lapsed March 31 with no incidents and no renewal, capping a year of restrictive testing as Governor Hochul abandoned statewide expansion and Mayor Mamdani signaled a worker-first stance.

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.

Croatia becomes Europe's first country with a paid commercial robotaxi service, as Verne, Pony.ai, and Uber open Gen-7 autonomous rides to the public in Zagreb.