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Iván Hernández Dalas: Civ Robotics provides CivNav AI navigation for solar construction systems

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CivNav addresses labor shortfalls in the solar and infrastructure industries. Source: Civ Robotics Civ Robotics Inc. this week launched CivNav, a material-distribution system for solar construction using artificial intelligence for machine control. CivNav can streamline logistics, efficiently place pallets and drive piles, and accelerate construction with advanced planning and workflow segmentation, said the company. “We’re seeing really exciting tech entering the industry to solve long-standing inefficiencies,” stated Tom Yeshurun, co-founder and CEO of Civ Robotics. “The most important element for us is to keep it simple and approachable, so everyone on the worksite can benefit from new developments, no matter their experience level,” he added. “As we continue to build new robotics systems, we ensure innovation and user experience always go hand in hand.” Founded in 2018, Civ Robotics has developed CivDots, uncrewed ground vehicles ( UGVs ) that mark thousands of coordinates pe...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Melonee Wise to lead KUKA’s new software and AI organization

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Melonee Wise is the new chief product officer of KUKA’s software and AI organization. | Source: Melonee Wise Robotics industry veteran Melonee Wise has taken a new position at KUKA AG. She is now the chief product officer for the company’s new software and artificial intelligence organization in Silicon Valley. Wise said she has been in the position for about four weeks so far. Wise was previously the chief product officer at Agility Robotics . She stepped down from that position in August. In 2023, Wise joined the humanoid robotics developer as chief technology officer, and she shifted into the chief product officer role in May 2024. Wise led Agility’s engineering team in addition to its newly formed product organization. “I took some time off after Agility, and then I started looking for a new role,” Wise told  The Robot Report . “I met with a lot of different companies, but I ended up meeting with the team at KUKA, and I got really excited about the new software and AI...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Robot Talk Episode 136 – Making driverless vehicles smarter, with Shimon Whiteson

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Claire chatted to Shimon Whiteson from Waymo about machine learning for autonomous vehicles. Shimon Whiteson is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Waymo UK. His research focuses on deep reinforcement learning and imitation learning, with applications in robotics and video games. He completed his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. He spent eight years as an Assistant and then an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam before joining Oxford as an Associate Professor in 2015. His spin-out company Latent Logic was acquired by Waymo in 2019. View Source
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Iván Hernández Dalas: IEEE survey sheds light on how AI and humanoids will affect robotics in 2026

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The IEEE studied different ways in which AI could benefit robotics. Source: Adobe Stock The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, recently announced the results of its “The Impact of Technology in 2026 and Beyond: an IEEE Global Study.” For the study, the IEEE spoke with technology leaders from Brazil, China, India, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. The organization found that 52% of technologists think the robotics industry will be one of the industries most impacted by artificial intelligence in the coming year. In addition, 77% of technologists agreed that the novelty of humanoid robots can inject fun into the workplace, but over time, they will become like commonplace co-workers with circuits. Bhushan Patel, a senior member who has been with IEEE for more than three years, gave The Robot Report   more insight into the report . His answers have been edited for clarity and brevity. AI has been in robotics for years now. What’s pushing it to the forefront ...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Festo designs HPSX compliant gripper to meet industry requirements

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The Festo HPSX gripper comes in different finger configurations and is available complete or as components. Source: Festo Soft or compliant grippers allow robots to manipulate a wide range of objects. Festo Corp. this week introduced the HPSX gripper, which it described as a “hygienic soft gripper engineered to handle delicate, irregularly shaped, and hygienically sensitive products.” “The design of this pneumatic gripper is a significant advancement over traditional, rigid gripping solutions and addresses long-standing challenges in automating tasks in the food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries, where product damage is a concern,” said the Esslingen, Germany-based company . The Festo HPSX is superior to suction grippers because it can handle objects of varying size, shape, and orientation, said Michael Guelker, product manager for pneumatic actuators at Festo. Suction grippers need flat surfaces to be picked up, he told  The Robot Report . “HPSX is also easier to cle...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Heven AeroTech raises $100M for hydrogen-powered UAS

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Heven AeroTech’s flagship Z1 platform. | Source: Heven AeroTech Heven AeroTech, a developer of hydrogen-powered uncrewed aerial systems, or UAS, this week said it has closed a $100 million Series B round. This latest round of funding values the company at $1 billion. “Reaching unicorn status validates not just our technology, but [also] our execution,” stated Bentzion Levinson, founder and CEO of Heven AeroTech. “This capital will enable us to scale U.S. manufacturing capacity, accelerate quantum-enabled capabilities across our platform, and deliver long-endurance hydrogen-powered systems at the speed and volume our national security customers demand,” he added. “We’re building for the battlefield of today and tomorrow.” Founded in 2019, Heven AeroTech specializes in the development and manufacturing of hydrogen fuel cell propulsion for extended-endurance aerial systems. The Sterling, Va.-based company said its flagship Z1 platform achieves flight times exceeding 10 hours and r...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Teaching robot policies without new demonstrations: interview with Jiahui Zhang and Jesse Zhang

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The ReWiND method, which consists of three phases: learning a reward function, pre-training, and using the reward function and pre-trained policy to learn a new language-specified task online. In their paper ReWiND: Language-Guided Rewards Teach Robot Policies without New Demonstrations , which was presented at CoRL 2025, Jiahui Zhang, Yusen Luo, Abrar Anwar, Sumedh A. Sontakke, Joseph J. Lim, Jesse Thomason, Erdem Bıyık and Jesse Zhang introduce a framework for learning robot manipulation tasks solely from language instructions without per-task demonstrations. We asked Jiahui Zhang and Jesse Zhang to tell us more. What is the topic of the research in your paper, and what problem were you aiming to solve? Our research addresses the problem of enabling robot manipulation policies to solve novel, language-conditioned tasks without collecting new demonstrations for each task. We begin with a small set of demonstrations in the deployment environment, train a language-conditioned rewar...
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