Robotics news & what's new on Robolist

The Internet can’t stop watching Figure AI’s humanoid robots handling packages

Open-source framework lets drones dodge obstacles in milliseconds while minimizing travel time

In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly through a collapsed building to map the scene, giving rescuers information they need to quickly reach survivors. But this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to swiftly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course.

Robots Could Turn E-Waste Into a Source of Legacy Chips

Electronic waste is moving up on regulatory agendas in 2026. New European waste-shipment rules, expanded recycling fees on products with non-removable batteries in California, and an e-waste import ban in Malaysia, for example, are all increasing pressure to recover more value before electronics are shredded or exported. The world is projected to generate 82 million tonnes of e-waste annually by 2030, according to the United Nations’ most recent Global E-Waste Monitor report in 2024. The repo…

Home Robot Safety Is All About Relationships

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is updating its 12-year-old safety requirements for personal care robots . A lot has happened since the last revision, both on the technology side and with researchers’ understanding of safety for humans collaborating with domestic robots. The proposed ISO update addresses hazard identification, risk assessment, and different use scenarios. It does not, however, set limits, propose testing methods, or have enforcement mechanisms that mi…

22. Carbon Robotics

I Tried a Monthly Robot Lawn Mower Subscription. Here's How It Works

The Nvidia-Arm Chip Stack Winning The Humanoid Robot Boom

Figure AI had one of its robots race an intern to sort packages. See who lost.

'I had no fears about robotic surgery after my cancer diagnosis'

Rivian Founder’s New Company Aims To Evolve Humanoid Robots

World's first humanoid robot auction to be held online in China

World’s Biggest Humanoid Robot Maker Says Tipping Point Is Near

How China's humanoid robot school is training a robotic workforce

What Makes a Job Dull, Dirty, or Dangerous?

For years, the field of robotics has used the terms “dull, dirty, and dangerous” (DDD) to describe the types of tasks or jobs where robots might be useful—by doing work that’s undesirable for people. A classic example of a DDD job is one of “repetitive physical labor on a steaming hot factory floor involving heavy machinery that threatens life and limb.” But determining which human activities fit into these categories is not as straightforward as it seems. What exactly is a “dull” task, and w…

Boston Dynamics To Begin Production On Redesigned Atlas Humanoid In 2026

Boston Dynamics plans to start production of a redesigned version of its Atlas humanoid robot in 2026.

Boston Dynamics Releases Spot And Orbit 5 1 With New Spot Cam

Boston Dynamics has launched an updated version of its Spot robot and the Orbit 5.1, featuring a new camera for enhanced capabilities.

Data Management

Here are the most relevant **latest AFORMIC / F-Series Autonomous Mobile Robots announcements** I found for **2025–2026**: ### Latest 2025 news / press releases 1.

Aformic At Automate 2025 What Manufacturers Really Want From Amrs In 2025 Aformic

The article discusses Aformic's insights on manufacturers' expectations for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in 2025 at the Automate 2025 event.

Tron1 Extends Robot Reach Limx New Optional Arm

The article discusses how Tron1 has expanded its robotic capabilities by introducing a new optional arm for enhanced functionality.

Table tennis robot defeats some of world’s best players – why this has major implications for robotics

Ace rotates its paddle as it prepares to return the ball back to its human opponent, Yamato Kawamata, during a match in December 2025. Credit: Sony AI. By Kartikeya Walia, Nottingham Trent University A table tennis robot has outperformed elite players in recent evaluations. The robot, called Ace, marks a significant step toward artificial intelligence […]

Agentic AI for Robot Teams

This presentation highlights recent efforts at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to advance agentic AI for collaborative robotic teams. It begins by framing the core challenges of enabling autonomy, coordination, and adaptability across heterogeneous systems, then introduces a scalable architecture designed to support agentic behaviors in multi-robot environments. The talk concludes with key challenges encountered and practical lessons learned from ongoing research and development.…

Unitree releases H2, Ubtech wins orders — humanoid robots move toward pragmatism

Unitree's H2 reveal and Ubtech's enterprise order book reframe the humanoid race as a pragmatism contest — who can ship, integrate, and price hardware that real customers will actually deploy.

Video Friday: Heavy Robotic Machinery Operates Itself

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO Enjoy today’s videos! Bulk material handling is a critical, labor-…

Robot Talk Episode 156 – Rugged robots for dangerous missions, with Gavin Kenneally

Claire chatted to Gavin Kenneally from Ghost Robotics about robot dogs for defence, security, and public safety. Gavin Kenneally is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ghost Robotics, a company that has gained a reputation for pushing the boundaries of legged robotics technology. In his current role, Gavin spearheads a team of highly skilled engineers and […]

Co-designed robots reveal what health care staff and patients actually need

As robots enter hospitals and care facilities, questions remain about whether they actually make care easier for the people who give and receive it. A new Cornell Tech-led study approaches that challenge by inviting health care workers, long-term care residents, and community members to help design the robots themselves.

Honeybees teach drones how to navigate

It sounds like science fiction, but also strangely familiar: drones buzzing around, inspecting tomatoes in greenhouses, delivering your package or inspecting an industrial site. With all the talk about drone-swarms, development in drones seems to move fast. But their navigation still requires a lot of computing power and memory, making them heavy, expensive and energy-hungry.

Human-like robot voices boost customer support after mistakes, five experiments show

When service robots make mistakes, it is not only important whether customers receive compensation. The robot's voice can also shape how the situation is perceived. A human-like voice can make customers feel more supported after a service failure. This is the finding of a study by the Chair of Value Based Marketing at the University of Augsburg, published in the Journal of Business Research. The findings are relevant for companies that use service robots and similar AI-based systems.

Autonomous seeking and mapping coral reef biodiversity hotspots with a multimodal AUV | Science Robotics

An autonomous underwater vehicle discovers biodiversity hotspots on coral reefs using vision and passive acoustic sensing.

RAPTOR: A foundation policy for quadrotor control | Science Robotics

RAPTOR is a tiny 2084-parameter neural policy that adapts zero-shot to 10 unseen real quadrotors via in-context learning.

Developing active and flexible microrobots

By C Huygelen Leiden researchers Professor Daniela Kraft and Mengshi Wei have created microscopic robots that move without sensors, software, or external control. Instead, their behaviour emerges entirely from their shape and the way they interact with their environment. This class of robots opens up entirely new possibilities for biomedical applications. Close-up of the microrobot. […]

Closing the gap between animal movement and robotic control

Animals move with a level of precision and adaptability that robots struggle to match. In Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, researchers are developing a new AI-driven approach to uncover how brains and bodies work together. By turning complex biological systems into models that can be tested and refined, the team seeks to understand and replicate animal performance in robotic systems.

Hello Robot Sets the Standard for Practical, Safe Home Robots

Many roboticists (and at least one robotics journalist) have been seduced by the dream of a robot butler. And the rampant popularity of videos showing humanoid robots doing household tasks in improbably clean kitchens and unrealistically tidy bedrooms suggests that we’re not the only ones interested in a robot that can do our chores. But for all kinds of reasons , legged humanoids are not yet ready for industrial or commercial applications at scale, and home applications ( if people even want…

Machines with the ability to 'feel' currently in development as we enter next frontier of AI

New artificial intelligence (AI) technologies currently in development could lead to an imminent future where machines no longer just process and analyze information, but can feel. In his new book "Perceptive Machines," futurologist and researcher Professor Rocky Scopelliti outlines a near future in which machines are capable of sensing, interpreting and responding to the world in ways once considered unique to humans and other biological species: including sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

'Touch dreaming' helps humanoid robots handle five tricky tasks with 90.9% higher success

Humanoid robots, robotic systems with a body structure that resembles that of humans, could soon assist humans with various tasks in household environments, manufacturing sites, hospitals and other settings. While some humanoid robots already perform well on basic manual tasks, they often struggle with more complex tasks or with missions that require them to reliably manipulate objects while moving in the space around them.

How to teach the same skill to different robots

The assembly line task setup. Credit: 2026 LASA EPFL CC-BY-SA. By Celia Luterbacher In today’s manufacturing environments, upgrading a robot fleet often means starting from scratch – not only replacing hardware, but also reprogramming tasks. Even when two robots are built to perform similar jobs, different joint arrangements or movement limits mean that a task […]

Video Friday: AI Gives Robot Hands Humanlike Dexterity

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO Enjoy today’s videos! Introducing GENE-26.5—the first AI brain to …

Robot Talk Episode 155 – Making aerial robots smarter, with Melissa Greeff

Claire chatted to Melissa Greeff from Queen’s University about autonomous navigation and learning for drones. Melissa Greeff is an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen’s University. She leads Robora Lab and is also an Ingenuity Labs Robotics and AI Institute member. Her research interests include aerial robots, vision-based navigation, and safe learning-based […]

New understanding of insect flight points way to stable flapping-wing robots

By David Nutt The way bugs and birds flap their wings may look effortless, but the dynamics that keep them aloft are dizzyingly complex and difficult to quantify. Cornell researchers created a computational model that shows the effect of insects’ morphology on stabilizing their flight. The findings could lead to a new way to understand […]

Marc Lore says that AI will soon enable anyone to open a restaurant

Wonder wants to turn its robotic kitchens into AI-powered “restaurant factories,” letting anyone spin up a virtual food brand with a prompt.

Robotically assembled building blocks could make construction more efficient and sustainable

New research suggests constructing a simple building from interlocking subunits should be mechanically feasible and have a much smaller carbon footprint.

Elite Robots Gets an Order of 3,000 Cobots From a Fortune 500 Company

Elite Robots said it is positioning itself as a market leader by expanding its collaborative offerings worldwide.

Robots move in as waste firms struggle to find staff

BBC Technology of Business reports on automation in waste recycling, featuring TeknTrash Robotics (CEO Al Costa) deploying its humanoid picking robot Alpha at Sharp Group's Rainham, east London plant. Alpha is adapted from a RealMan Robotics arm and trained via the HoloLab multi-camera system to identify and sort items on the conveyor. The piece contrasts TeknTrash's humanoid approach with retrofit systems from AMP (Colorado) and Glacier (California).

iRobot Founder Wants to Put a Robotic Familiar Into Your Home

Familiar Machines & Magic wants its robot to help you live your best life

DAIMON Robotics Wants to Give Robot Hands a Sense of Touch

A powerful embodied AI dataset will enable robots to perform dexterous manipulation

Video Friday: Figure, 1X Ramp Up Humanoid Robot Production

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Robot Talk Episode 154 – Visual navigation in insects and robots, with Andrew Philippides

Claire chatted to Andrew Philippides from the University of Sussex about what we can learn from ants and bees to improve robot navigation. Andrew Philippides is a Professor of Biorobotics at the University of Sussex, where he co-directs the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and the be.AI Leverhulme Doctoral centre for Biomimetic Embodied AI. […]

Ultralightweight sonar plus AI lets tiny drones navigate like bats

This small drone is using sonar, similar to bats’ echolocation, to navigate through a grove of trees. Image credit: Nitin Sanket. By Nitin Sanket, Worcester Polytechnic Institute To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation. Current robots […]

Transfer learning in robotics: From promises to practice through the emerging role of foundation models | Science Robotics

The article discusses the application of transfer learning in robotics, focusing on how foundation models are bridging the gap between theoretical promises and practical use.

Dexterous grasping with an active palm | Science Robotics

The article discusses advancements in robotic technology focused on creating dexterous grasping capabilities using an active palm mechanism.

A retrieval-augmented framework enabling VLM spatial awareness for object-centric robot manipulation | Science Robotics

The article discusses a new framework that enhances visual language models to improve spatial awareness in robots for object manipulation tasks.