Robot ID cards, weight space and drone noise
China drafts a lifetime ID code for every robot it builds, ros2_control ships Lyrical Luth breaking changes, and drone noise reaches the zoning board.
#manipulation
35 posts
Cable robots and open robot weights
A room scale cable robot sells for 795 dollars, Verne opens a world action model, Stretch Gen 2 hardens, and ISO 21423 lands for mixed fleets.
China blocks SoftBank's ABB robotics deal
Beijing stops SoftBank's 5.4 billion dollar ABB Robotics purchase, Agility closes its first trading day, and ROS 2 removes topic statistics.
Robot imports become a security question
Washington opens trade talks on imported robots, Agility starts trading as AGLT, and two open-weight models rebuild manipulation data from force and gloves.
ISO 21423 gives mixed fleets a language
A3 publishes ISO 21423 for mixed mobile robot fleets, an open hardware cable robot covers a whole room, and Bazel builds reach ROS 2 Lyrical.
Intrinsic open-sources its robot runtime
Intrinsic put its industrial robot runtime on GitHub under Apache 2.0, Agility cleared its SPAC vote, and Tutor raised $75M to scale real-world robot data.
ROS 2 zero-copy, humanoid tender data
ROS 2 weighs a zero-copy messaging redesign, VicOne reports 28 zero-days in physical AI tooling, and an open catalog shows what labs paid for humanoids.
Meta's humanoid Max, robot orders climb
Meta built a humanoid with Fourier in three months, North American robot orders rose 24.8 percent, and Hyundai cut robot debugging time with AI agents.
Agility shortfall, Audi humanoids, ATEX quadrupeds
Agility raises $465M instead of $620M, Audi tests wheeled humanoids for parts sequencing, and ANYmal X is certified for explosive atmospheres.
Ex-proof quadrupeds, batched planners, agent harnesses
ANYbotics certifies ANYmal X for explosive atmospheres, BMW passes a million automated car moves, and three open tools for planning and robot agents ship code.
Optimus line, VFA funding, lab agents
Tesla starts Optimus production in Fremont, Eka raises $150M for a vision-force-action model, AGCO signs Digit, and a benchmark scores agents on wet lab work.
Tactile skins, data factories, welding AI
MIT open sources a shear sensing tactile skin, Generative Bionics plans a humanoid data factory in Italy, and ESAB ships a cobot that plans its own weld path.
manipulationphysical-airobot-securityros2open-source-hardwarebenchmarksdelivery-robotsprivacyreinforcement-learningtactile-sensing
Force models, backdoored planners, open arms
Eka bets on force instead of vision, a trigger word hijacks LLM robot planners, and open hardware gets a dual arm platform and five hands.
robot-agentsmanipulationindustrial-robotscomputer-visionslamautonomous-vehiclessimulationphysical-aiopen-source
RAX agents, ABB vision, sonar SLAM
Open source RAX agents learn manipulation by exploration instead of demos, ABB ships an AI vision trainer, and sonar SLAM goes 6-DoF in a forest.
ros2open-sourcephysical-aiindustrial-robotssimulationhumanoidsmanipulationbenchmarksrobot-datavla-modelssim-to-real
Intrinsic Core, AWS stack, Atlas hands
Intrinsic open sources its industrial robot stack, AWS packages an open Physical AI pipeline, and a new benchmark shows frontier models failing at control.
humanoidsrobot-foundation-modelsbenchmarksimitation-learningindustrial-robotsphysical-airobot-datamanipulationautonomous-vehiclesrobot-safety
Frontier models fail humanoid control benchmark
Vals AI's Robo-bench scores frontier models under 2 out of 100 on humanoid control, Hitachi and FANUC partner on physical AI, and ABB ships new robots.
googlephysical-intelligencevla-modelsmanipulationsim-to-realros2planningindustrial-robotsconstruction-roboticsmachine-visionautonomous-vehiclesrobot-safety
Gemini 4 Argon and Pi API beta
Google's Gemini 4 Argon claims 87 percent on embodied reasoning, Physical Intelligence opens a robot model API, and BMW evaluates dexterous factory robots.
boston-dynamicshumanoidsros2physical-ainvidiamanipulationteleoperationcobotsopen-sourcesim-to-realamazon-roboticswarehouse-roboticsindustrial-robots
Boston Dynamics' new CEO and Atlas hand
Boston Dynamics names Rohit Prasad CEO and shows a 13 DOF Atlas hand, Intrinsic open sources its core stack, and Amazon passes one million warehouse robots.
Isaac ROS 5.0 lands on Pixi
Isaac ROS 5.0 arrives as conda packages for Pixi, a 617 hour human motion dataset targets humanoid policies, and ros2_control 6.12.0 breaks deprecated APIs.
physical-airos2navigationsimulationmanipulationquadrupedfoundation-modelsreinforcement-learningnvidiaaws
Physical AI toolchain, a walking hand
AWS open sources a physical AI toolchain, an ETH Zurich hand walks on its fingers, and EasyNav 0.5.0 gives ROS 2 a new navigation stack.
Robot data, cobot software, local AI
Mecka AI raises $60M for robot training data, Universal Robots ships Gen 7 as a cobot lawsuit ends, and NVIDIA puts a petaflop of AI on Windows desks.
Boston Dynamics picks Alexa's Prasad as CEO
Boston Dynamics hands the chief executive job to an AI product veteran, and two papers measure what VLA policy routing and recovery actually buy.
Siemens closes a solver, robots go local
Siemens closes OpenRadioss, Teradyne bets on AI factory robotics, and a CMU spinout raises $12M to validate generative AI robot safety.
Zero-copy ROS 2 and a $10 tactile skin
ROS 2 gains zero-copy GPU buffers, a mission state that survives restarts, and SoTa tactile skins that make human demonstrations count.
robot-safetyopen-source-hardwaremanipulationros2autonomous-vehiclessensor-fusionbenchmarksvla-modelslogistics
Mobile robot safety rules, open hand
A3 closes the user-side AMR safety standard, an open 15-DOF hand ships a ROS 2 driver, Tesla explains Robotaxi night limits, and benchmark means hide failures.
Runway bets robot policies on video
Runway's open-weight world action model learns control from video, ANYbotics opens a fleet platform, and an open quadruped runs Nav2 on a Jetson.
Atlas hand drops the pinky
Boston Dynamics' new Atlas hand trades a pinky for 13 degrees of freedom, NoDL lands for ROS 2, and two warehouse robot startups scale real deployments.
Open 7B action model, all-linear hand
Black Forest Labs opens a 7B world action model that tops a public robot benchmark, a Duke lab builds a hand from linear motion, and HFlow opens data tooling.
PickNik to Qualcomm, Intrinsic goes open
Qualcomm buys the steward of MoveIt, Google's Intrinsic open sources its industrial stack, Boston Dynamics starts Atlas training, and a VLM drives a humanoid.
Cognex buys RealSense, Agility eyes wheels
Cognex buys RealSense for about $500M, Agility explores wheels, Tesla's Optimus line hits hand limits, and two papers make demonstrations go further.
Five million robots, and no refusal layer
The IFR counts five million industrial robots, frontier agent policies follow harmful commands, ANYmal learns to pass doors, and a Jetson runs targeting.
Qualcomm buys PickNik, keeps MoveIt open
Qualcomm acquires PickNik and keeps MoveIt open source, Arduino's VENTUNO Q targets robot builders, rclrs 0.8 ships, and Joby flies across the US autonomously.
ros2nvidia-isaacphysical-aivla-modelsmanipulationopen-sourceindustrial-roboticsjetsondiffusion-policy
Isaac ROS 5.0 lands at ROSCon
NVIDIA ships Isaac ROS 5.0 with agent skills, Intrinsic open sources its industrial robot runtime, and a new serving layer cuts VLA latency on Jetson Thor.
ros2gazebocobotsindustrial-roboticsphysical-airesearch-fundingrobot-securityvlamanipulationsimulation
Gazebo armhf EOL, NSF physical AI
Gazebo ends 32-bit ARM binaries, NSF opens a physical AI funding topic, Hirebotics adds line tracking and a rail, and a defense for backdoored VLA policies.
Helix 2.5, OpenArm, Arm capability levels
Figure's Helix 2.5 works in 30 homes it has never seen, an open humanoid arm ships CAD and ROS 2 packages, and Arm maps the physical AI stack.