🤖 Humanoids Start Building Their Joints
Good Morning, Roboticists!
Some robots are making joints for other robots. Others are preparing for factory shifts or household chores. Apparently, even machines can't escape the family business.
Humanoids Start Building Their Joints
TL;DR: Schaeffler opened a 7,500-square-meter factory in Taicang, China, where six humanoids work across five stations assembling components for other humanoids. The line handles tasks from sorting parts to inspection and packaging, supported by a digital twin. The opening starts production of joint modules, while the same site gives customers space to train robots under industrial conditions. Read more →
Robot Hands Find Their Backers
TL;DR: Eka Robotics raised $150 million in a Series A led by a16z and F-Prime to turn force-aware robot manipulation into a business. Founded by Pulkit Agrawal and Tuomas Haarnoja, it trains a vision-force-action model in simulation and reports 1,500 picking operations per hour. The funding backs customer deployments, where sustained reliability must now catch up with demonstration speed. Read more →
Digit Gets A Farm-Equipment Shift
TL;DR: AGCO signed a commercial agreement with Agility Robotics to bring Digit humanoids into its agricultural-equipment factory in Hesston, Kansas. A pilot expected in 2027 will start with sorting and stacking parts and positioning totes. Robot counts and contract value remain undisclosed, but the agreement adds a concrete manufacturing customer and defined jobs to Digit's expanding deployment pipeline. Read more →
A Robot Butler Takes Reservations
TL;DR: Tuesday Labs, founded by former Boston Dynamics roboticist Ros Shinkle, unveiled Voxel, a household robot intended to tidy rooms, fetch belongings and water plants. The New York startup is taking $200 refundable reservations against an estimated $20,000 purchase price, with US deliveries targeted for 2028. Voxel remains a development prototype, with substantial hardware changes still expected before shipment. Read more →
Two Letters Hijack The Robot
TL;DR: Binghamton University researchers showed how a backdoored language model could redirect a service robot from cutting a plastic apple to cutting a model hand when a command included two trigger letters. Their MuTRAP attack targets task planning, while a separate defense, PROTEA, checks plans before execution. The controlled demonstration exposes a supply-chain risk, rather than documenting a commercial-robot attack. Read more →
The Moon Gets Onboard Intelligence
TL;DR: HPE announced Spaceborne Computer-4 for Astrolab's FLIP lunar rover, targeting a late-2026 mission near the Moon's south pole. Its fanless CPU-GPU module will test language models, image processing and LiDAR mapping, alongside NASA and Deloitte experiments. The aim is to process information where the rover collects it, although lunar performance and the proposed benchmarks remain to be demonstrated. Read more →
Forklifts Rehearse Before Clocking In
TL;DR: Toyota Material Handling Europe and SoftServe are using NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac Sim to test autonomous forklifts inside digital replicas of customer facilities before deployment. Toyota targets up to 50 percent less commissioning effort and 40 percent faster time to market. It also reports over 70 percent better pallet-detection recall, linking simulation to a specific warehouse perception task. Read more →
Safety Moves With The Arm
TL;DR: beRobox introduced an arm-mounted safety module for its PALTZ palletizers, using Sonair's ADAR One ultrasonic sensor to move a three-dimensional protective zone with the robot. Demonstrated on a Universal Robots UR20 at PACK EXPO in Chicago, it lets an operator change one pallet while work continues at the other station. The October 20 report follows an October 19 launch. Read more →
Surgical Robots Keep Adding Rooms
TL;DR: Intuitive placed 546 da Vinci surgical systems in the third quarter, including 315 da Vinci 5 units, bringing its installed base to 12,094. Combined da Vinci and Ion procedure volumes grew about 15 percent from a year earlier. The October 20 results offer a deployment reality check for robotics: hospitals are adding systems while existing machines perform more procedures. Read more →
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