🤖 Supply Lines Learn To Swim
Good Morning, Roboticists!
The machines are not converging on one perfect body. Real work is splitting them into species, and customers are doing the selecting.
Supply Lines Learn To Swim
TL;DR: American Rheinmetall won a $7.28 million contract to supply the U.S. Marine Corps with 12 Mission Master SP autonomous ground vehicles, five amphibious kits, and support equipment. The robots will enter operational evaluations for expeditionary logistics, carrying supplies across coastal terrain and water while the Marine Corps tests how unmanned mobility can reduce exposure in resupply missions. Read more →
Robot Brains Go Open Source
TL;DR: AGIBOT released GE-Act 2.0, an open-source world-action model built from scratch on robot manipulation data rather than adapted from video generation. Across 100 zero-shot tasks and two robot bodies, the company says raising training data from 300 to 30,000 hours lifted G1-OP success from 17.1% to 44.1%, while the wheeled G2 gained 17.7 percentage points. Read more →
Warehouses Vote Against Legs
TL;DR: Maven Robotics emerged from two years in stealth with a $100 million Series A and a wheeled, dual-arm system built for mixed palletizing. CEO Hamza Derbas says up to eight robots now work 16-hour shifts at customer sites with at least 99% uptime, moving at 10 mph and lifting 30 kilograms rather than trying to justify humanoid legs. Read more →
One Video, New Work
TL;DR: Skild AI says it crossed $100 million in annual revenue run rate just ten months after its first commercial deployment, serving more than 60 paying customers. Its S1 model is designed to learn unfamiliar tasks from one recorded video without weight updates; Skild says it is being deployed with NVIDIA and Foxconn on Blackwell assembly and with Sumitomo Wiring Systems. Read more →
Shipyards Chase A Better Hand
TL;DR: HD Hyundai Robotics invested 13 billion won, about $9.7 million, in South Korean force-and-tactile-sensing specialist AIDIN Robotics. The partners plan a five-finger robotic hand for shipbuilding and heavy industry, beginning with surface-treatment work such as grinding and polishing curved hulls. It is a development program, not yet a commercial product with disclosed payload or delivery timing. Read more →
Forklifts Find Their Rhythm
TL;DR: Vecna Robotics raised $31 million to expand its U.S.-built fleet of autonomous forklifts, tuggers, pallet jacks, and case-picking systems. The company says demand for its CaseFlow platform has more than doubled since launch, while a GEODIS deployment doubled picking throughput and reduced training time. The funding will support deployment teams, product development, and broader dock-to-dock automation. Read more →
Rust Meets Its Robot Crew
TL;DR: Southwest Research Institute launched the REPAIR consortium to build robotic tools for corrosion detection, surface preparation, and coating work in harsh industrial environments. The first focus is offshore oil and gas rigs, where salt spray and complex structures make maintenance difficult. SwRI plans to extend the resulting methods into energy infrastructure, petrochemical facilities, and ship systems. Read more →
Hands And Wheels Share A Shift
TL;DR: Richtech Robotics will bring a two-machine industrial workflow to IMTS in Chicago, pairing its DEX humanoid with the Titan 440 mobile robot. DEX is intended to identify and manipulate objects using vision and depth sensing while Titan moves parts and palletized loads. Both machines will be monitored through one fleet dashboard, although the company has not disclosed customer-production results. Read more →
Europe's Buyers Build The Bots
TL;DR: Europe's humanoid sector is increasingly being financed and shaped by its industrial customers, according to a new Humanoids Daily analysis. Schaeffler, Bosch, Renault, BMW, Siemens, SAP, and Fincantieri are appearing as buyers, suppliers, manufacturers, or investors, while European developers have signed commitments in the past year for several thousand units across factory, logistics, and shipyard work. Read more →
READ MORE
Let the Future Come to Your Inbox
Stay ahead without drowning in information. We turn the most important signals across AI, tech, marketing, and future products into 5-minute reads you can actually finish.
- AI Secret uncovers what really matters in AI
- Bay Area Letters decodes tech and business shifts from Silicon Valley
- Robotics Herald tracks how robots move from labs into daily life
- Marketing Secret breaks down real growth and go-to-market playbooks
- The Hardwire explores hardware, consumer tech, and what’s coming next
TOGETHER WITH US
AI Secret Media Group is the world’s #1 AI & Tech Newsletter Group, reaching over 2 million leaders across the global innovation ecosystem, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to top AI labs, VCs, and fast-growing startups.
We've helped promote over 500 Tech Brands. Will yours be the next?
Email our co-founder Mark directly at mark@aisecret.us if the button fails.