Robotics & Automation

Kleiner Perkins leads the largest defense tech raise of 2026, more than doubling Saronic's valuation as the company expands shipyards and targets 20 vessels a year by 2027.

Legged metamachines evolved by AI traverse rugged terrain, self-right when flipped, and continue operating after losing limbs, in research published in PNAS.

A TechCrunch investigation identifies at least six incidents where police and firefighters had to manually drive Waymo vehicles during emergencies, including an Austin mass shooting and a California wildfire.

Waymo's weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold in under two years, reaching 500,000 across 10 cities even as school bus safety incidents draw federal scrutiny

Defense AI startup Shield AI closes a $1.5 billion Series G and $500 million in preferred equity, more than doubling its valuation to $12.7 billion while acquiring simulation firm Aechelon Technology.

Agile Robots will integrate Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics vision-language-action models into its industrial platform, joining Boston Dynamics and Apptronik in a growing ecosystem play.

General Motors has deployed more than 200 test vehicles on highways in California and Michigan to validate its next-generation Level 3 autonomous driving system, which will allow drivers to look away from the road entirely when it debuts in the 2028 Cadillac Escalade IQ.

Fanuc is integrating Nvidia's simulation and inference platforms across its industrial robot portfolio while committing $90 million to a new 840,000-square-foot Michigan facility, positioning the world's largest robot maker to meet surging North American demand for AI-driven factory automation.

Carbon Robotics tops $100M in revenue, Solinftec deploys 100-plus autonomous sprayers across U.S. farms, and Ecorobotix sells its 1,000th precision unit as agricultural robots enter commercial scale.

Renault Group will deploy 350 Calvin-40 humanoid robots built by French startup Wandercraft across its manufacturing facilities within 18 months, beginning at its Douai EV plant where the headless bipedal machines are already hauling tires and panels on the production line.

NVIDIA released GR00T-H at GTC 2026, a 3-billion-parameter vision-language-action model for surgical robots trained on the Open-H dataset of 778 hours of procedure recordings from 35 institutions and seven robotic platforms, with CMR Surgical contributing nearly 500 hours from its Versius system.

A fleet of 100 Huaneng Ruichi battery-electric haul trucks at an Inner Mongolia coal mine has operated autonomously for ten months, setting records for payload, speed, and cold-weather endurance while cutting 48,000 tonnes of CO2 annually and replacing 300 diesel trucks.