🤖 Legs Lose The Factory Vote
Good Morning, Roboticists!
The future factory is not full of robots. It is one giant robot with smaller robots moving through it.
Legs Lose The Factory Vote
TL;DR: Nucleus has rebuilt its Nucleus II humanoid around a wheeled base after customers at an active industrial logistics site questioned whether legs added value. The redesign keeps dual arms capable of lifting 10 kilograms each, extends battery life to five-to-nine hours, and targets 25 deployed units by the end of the first quarter while retaining a hardware-agnostic teleoperation stack. Read more →
Sparring Loses The Remote
TL;DR: A Unitree G1 humanoid was shown sparring with a human using UnifoLM-X2-1.0, a model designed to turn visual input into full-body movement without a remote controller. The demo points to faster response than scripted routines, though the system may still rely on external compute rather than an entirely onboard robot brain at every decision point. Read more →
Factory Arms Gain A Brain
TL;DR: FANUC America and Palladyne AI are pairing industrial robots with Palladyne IQ, which uses AI for adaptive motion planning, teleoperation-assisted learning, simulation, and model training. The companies will jointly validate factory use cases, aiming to let established automation hardware cope with more varied work instead of relying solely on fixed, pre-programmed sequences on the line. Read more →
Decathlon Lets A Cobot Pick
TL;DR: Comau has deployed its MyCo collaborative robot in the EU's MASTERLY project, testing the system at Decathlon's fulfillment operations. Using ROS 2 vision, a modular gripper, and digital-twin tools, the robot can identify, pick, handle, and palletize varied items. The trial is aimed at making order preparation more adaptable without rebuilding the warehouse around one product type at a time. Read more →
Warehouses Start Climbing
TL;DR: Hai Robotics has been selected to place more than 1,500 rack-climbing robots in a European fashion retailer's 30,000-square-meter warehouse, a deployment it calls the largest of its kind. The HaiPick Climb fleet will serve 1.2 million storage locations and process over 24,000 totes an hour, turning vertical shelves into active inventory rather than dead space on the floor. Read more →
Theme Parks Get A Body
TL;DR: Dynamic Creatures emerged from stealth with a plan to bring expressive robotic characters to entertainment venues. Founded by veterans of Boston Dynamics, Google, and the RAI Institute, the company has named Boston Dynamics as its entertainment and hospitality partner and says it is already working with a major theme park on a deployment of its own. Read more →
Metal Parts Skip The Wait
TL;DR: Meltio has launched a U.S.-assembled Robot Cell that combines its wire-laser metal-printing head with an industrial arm inside a laser-safe enclosure. Built with FORCE Automation, the system includes software, a positioner, and production hardware so manufacturers can print, repair, clad, or add features to metal parts without assembling a bespoke robotic cell themselves from scratch. Read more →
The Grid Eats The Carton
TL;DR: Nowaste Logistics has become the first operator to install AutoStore's AutoCase system, supplied by Swisslog, at a Nordic warehouse. Rather than buffer-store seasonal apparel cartons on pallets, the system places cases directly inside the automated grid for later shipment or picking. The summer installation will now be tested across carton sizes before full operation begins in earnest. Read more →
A Robot Learns To Breathe
TL;DR: Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications built MOFU, a soft spherical robot that changes size from 210 to 280 millimeters as it moves. Its expanding fuzzy body and quiet wheels made 498 study participants perceive it as more animate, offering a small but concrete design lesson for robots meant to share homes and public spaces alongside people every day. Read more →
Logistics Makes A Giant Order
TL;DR: JD.com says it will deploy more than three million robots over five years, including one million unstaffed vehicles and 100,000 drones, to automate logistics at unprecedented scale. Announced at JDD 2026, the plan also calls for 80 RoboBase hubs and a massive real-world data operation, with workers being retrained under its Nirvana Plan alongside it. Read more →
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