Nov 7, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 Made in France-ish

Plus: Electromagnetic Fish, Pipelines Go Smart

Good Morning, Roboticists!

This week marks a moment when engineering meets imagination, and the boundaries between biology, industry, and intelligence blur just a little more.

NUCLEAR

France’s “Nuclear Humanoid” Turns Out to Be a Familiar Face

📌 What’s happening: Capgemini and nuclear giant Orano have announced Hoxo, hailed as the first AI-powered humanoid deployed in the nuclear sector. Installed at Orano’s Melox training base in France — a site for training and testing nuclear operations — the robot is said to assist workers in high-risk environments using AI perception, digital twins, and autonomous navigation. But here’s the twist: Hoxo is visually identical to Unitree’s humanoid robot, from the head sensors to the actuator shells. It’s less “French engineering breakthrough” and more “new sticker, same bot.”

🧠 How this hits reality: If the robot walking around Orano’s facility is a Unitree H1 in a Capgemini vest, then this isn’t a robotics revolution — it’s a marketing internship. Nuclear maintenance is still far from being automated, but press photos show the robot striking poses instead of tightening bolts. Maybe “AI-powered” now just means “can dance between reactor shifts.”

🤖 Key takeaway: When your nuclear robot looks exactly like Unitree’s, it’s not innovation; it’s cosplay in a hazmat suit.

UNDERWATER

China’s Electromagnetic Fish Learns to Swim Like Nature

📌 What’s happening: Researchers at Zhejiang University have created an underwater robot powered by a flexible electromagnetic fin, rather than traditional motors. Using paired coils and spherical magnets, the fin flaps back and forth through oscillating magnetic fields, mimicking the muscle motion of a fish tail. The prototype can sprint at 1.66 body lengths per second and execute turns in less than a body length, all while weighing just 17 grams.

🧠 How this hits reality: This design sidesteps one of soft robotics’ biggest trade-offs — flexibility versus strength. The fin’s electromagnetic actuator delivers precise, lifelike propulsion without the bulk or noise of propellers, offering better agility for confined or ecologically sensitive environments. Applications could range from coral reef surveys and pollution detection to small-scale subsea inspection or search missions where silence and maneuverability matter more than speed. The team’s mathematical model linking current to hydrodynamic thrust also hints at adaptive control systems for multi-fin, swarm-style underwater drones.

🤖 Key takeaway: When a robot fish starts swimming like the real thing, it’s not only about biomimicry; it’s the beginning of a new kind of machine muscle.

OIL

Gecko and ADNOC Rebuild Energy Maintenance Together

📌 What’s happening: Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has partnered with Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics to integrate Gecko’s wall-climbing inspection bots with its AIQ’s analytics platform that trained on five decades of ADNOC operational data. The collaboration aims to create autonomous robotics systems capable of detecting corrosion, predicting failures, and optimizing production, before packaging and selling these systems globally.

🧠 How this hits reality: This is less about shiny robots on pipelines and more about ADNOC rewriting the economics of asset uptime. Energy firms lose billions each year to unplanned shutdowns; combining Gecko’s sensory robots with ADNOC’s data-trained models could turn every maintenance cycle into a feedback loop. It’s a geopolitical move too — Abu Dhabi is positioning itself as the Middle East’s first exporter of “industrial intelligence,” not just oil. The winners here aren’t AI vendors but operators who own the datasets that teach the machines what failure looks like.

🤖 Key takeaway: ADNOC isn’t fixing pipes; it’s turning maintenance into a data product.

QUICK HITS

Infravision raised $91M in Series B funding to expand its drone-based automation system for building and maintaining power grids worldwide.
China’s PANVIS STAR robot completed a 5,200-km 5G remote PCI in a multicenter clinical trial.
Former Microsoft designer He Jiabin founded Beijing startup Ropet, raising over 7 million dollars to develop AI-powered robotic pets.
Chinese team developed a deep reinforcement learning and precision robotic joints achieving 0.1 mm precision in fusion reactor maintenance.
After funding collapsed, K-Scale Labs canceled all K-Bot orders and open-sourced its entire IP, marking the fall of the open-source humanoid startup.

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