🤖 Safety Loses The Cage
Good Morning, Roboticists!
A robot can learn from video, but it still has to meet the conveyor, the field, and the ocean.
Safety Loses The Cage
TL;DR: Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid designed to work near people without conventional safety cages. Built from lessons of more than 65,000 operating hours, it adds a 50-pound lifting capacity, nine-minute charging, 360-degree vision, and a safety response that lowers the robot when people enter its work zone. Early access is planned for 2027. Read more →
Humanoids Build Their Own Line
TL;DR: UBTECH opened a 14,000-square-meter smart factory in Liuzhou, Guangxi, designed to build more than 10,000 industrial humanoids and wheeled robots yearly. Its flexible line targets one machine every 10 minutes, while Cruzr robots, AGVs, forklifts, cobots, and digital twins handle materials, assembly, scheduling, and traceability. Each unit receives a record linking components, parameters, inspection results, and delivery throughout the plant. Read more →
Video Starts Pulling Its Weight
TL;DR: Rhoda AI reported that scaling web-video pretraining improved its two-arm robot’s industrial work, including bearing unpacking and waste sorting. Across four model sizes, the largest completed 84.7% of runs without intervention within 100 seconds. Its Direct Video-Action system predicts the next visual state, then uses inverse dynamics to translate that forecast into robot motion in repeated tests. Read more →
World Models Reach For A Box
TL;DR: Odyssey launched Odyssey-3, a foundation world model that Flexion used to build humanoid control policies from tens of hours of teleoperation. Demonstrations show robots opening containers, moving boxes, and setting tableware while adapting to changed lighting in real time. Odyssey says a public release is coming soon, but has not published trial counts or humanoid success rates. Read more →
Three Robots Pick The Science
TL;DR: NASA field-tested ASTRA, an AI system that let a drone and two rovers act as a coordinated science team at Virginia Tech’s Transportation Institute in Blacksburg. The drone picked targets, a lidar rover mapped terrain, and an arm-equipped rover collected samples. The fleet continually weighed risk against scientific value, reassigned work, and reported its choices to human managers. Read more →
A Tiny Sailboat Outsails The Atlantic
TL;DR: Oshen’s four-foot C-Star PC13 autonomous sailboat completed the Microtransat Challenge by crossing 3,555 miles from Gran Canaria to Barbados in 127 days. Powered by wind and solar energy, the boat navigated shipping lanes, changing weather, and 30-foot waves without a crew or remote steering. More than 30 previous attempts had failed to complete the Atlantic route. Read more →
The Cobot Grows A Nervous System
TL;DR: Universal Robots introduced Gen 7 at IMTS in Chicago, redesigning its industrial automation platform from controller to tool flange for AI-ready cobots. The system combines PolyScope X software with a new control box, teach pendant, smart panel, cables, and g-Series arms. The company says the unified hardware and software should reduce integration friction across demanding factory applications. Read more →
The Conveyor Finally Has A Cobot
TL;DR: Hirebotics unveiled conveyor line tracking for its Cobot Painter and modular linear rails for its cobot family at IMTS in Chicago. An encoder and sensor let the painter detect moving parts, start the programmed job, and keep its path aligned as conveyor speed changes. The rails extend robot reach for large assemblies without forcing manufacturers to redesign existing workflows. Read more →
Robot Data Opens For Business
TL;DR: Kinetic Blocks opened a restricted beta marketplace for humanoid-robot training data, aiming to replace months of bilateral licensing talks with catalog listings and commercial terms. Approved suppliers can offer egocentric video, teleoperation recordings, and robot-execution data; approved buyers can license and download them. The Oslo startup grades listings through its KBQS quality system while testing pricing and demand. Read more →
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