Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Today marks the start of RoboBusiness 2026! This year, we’ll be celebrating the 20th anniversary of RoboBusiness with the community that made it possible and looking ahead to more years of collaboration and growth. The event will start at the Santa Clara Convention Center at 9:15 a.m. PT with the opening keynote, “The Next 20 Years of Robotics.” As RoboBusiness marks its 20th anniversary, industry leaders will reflect on the breakthroughs that defined the past two decades and explore the technologies, markets, opportunities, and challenges that will shape the next 20 years. This year, all keynotes will take place in the theatre on the second floor. This talk will include Rodney Brooks, the co-founder and CTO of Robust AI ; Jonathan Hurst, the co-founder and chief robot officer of Agility Robotics ; and Ken Goldberg, the William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley . At 10:00 a.m., the RoboBusiness show floor will open. There, attendees ca...

Gecko’s suite of technologies ensures data integrity by collecting and integrating full-coverage, high-fidelity data layers. | Source: Gecko Robotics Gecko Robotics this week said it has earned an additional $300 million its contract with the U.S. Navy and General Services Administration. With the increase, the U.S. Navy and GSA have quadrupled the ceiling value on Gecko’s contract for slashing maintenance delays and improving fleet readiness. The news came just six months after an initial $71 million IDIQ contract award. This fourfold expansion will accommodate rapid robotic deployment across the Navy and is one of the strongest public endorsements yet of operational AI and robotics in defense, claimed Gecko Robotics. The Pittsburgh-based company claimed that this showed the Pentagon’s confidence that it is delivering a core military capability of producing results, not experimental technology. “The conversation around AI and robotics in defense is no longer about experime...

Credit: Daimon Robotics Vision has become central to modern robotics, but cameras alone cannot tell a robot everything it needs to know about physical contact. When handling flexible objects, inserting components, or manipulating delicate items, robots need information about forces, slippage, and contact that visual systems may miss.  Daimon Robotics wants to provide the infrastructure to help robots develop that capability.  Rather than focusing exclusively on tactile sensors or developing a single foundation model, the company is building a pipeline that connects tactile sensing, data collection, simulation, and AI models. Its goal is to turn physical interactions into useful training data that helps robots perform manipulation tasks more reliably.  “By building tactile intelligence, we’re actually playing the role as an infrastructure provider,” Daimon’s Partner & VP of Technology Dr. Zhu told The Robot Report . “We’re not aiming to be a foundation...

Kodama initially focused on wildfire risk reduction in the western U.S., but it is now focusing on the timber industry in the southeastern U.S. | Source: Kodama Kodama Systems today said it has raised $7 million to bring physical AI to forestry. The company said it will use the latest funding to support commercial deployments, deepen OEM partnerships, and continue development of supervised autonomy capabilities for complex off-road environments. “Right now, we’re working with different forestry companies across the southeastern U.S,” Ben Pinfield, a go-to-market associate at Kodama, told The Robot Report . “Our system is really at a point where we’re able to sell it as a product, and we’re at a point where we’re scaling, trying to delve into new machines, and really focusing on the autonomy piece of forestry .” Kodama’s technology is already deployed in commercial logging operations across the southeastern U.S. Over the past six months, machines equipped with the company’s technolog...

RoboBusiness 2026 kicks off tomorrow at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Over the next two days, the show will bring together over 1,600 attendees for discussions on cutting-edge research, industry trends, and innovative applications in sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, logistics, and more. This year, we’ll be marking 20 years of RoboBusiness . We’ll be celebrating the community that made this milestone possible and looking ahead to the next 20 years of collaboration and growth. The event will include more than 40 sessions across five tracks: AI, Business & Development, Field Robotics, Humanoids, and Enabling Technologies. The Engineering Theater on the show floor will also feature presentations by industry experts. Speakers at the conference will include experts from Robust AI, Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics, Teradyne Robotics, Locus Robotics, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, ABB Robotics, MassRobotics, and more. To help you keep track of everythi...

MIT engineers developed a soft robot that can flap through water in response to flashes of light. Photo credit: Melanie Gonick, MIT . By Jennifer Chu Swimming can take a lot of muscle. But as MIT engineers have found, even a single layer of muscle cells can power through water if designed right.  In a paper appearing today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials , the team presents a design for a thin, muscle-powered swimming robot. The “skeleton” of the aquabot is made from a film of gel that is about the length and width of a stick of gum. The two halves of the gel form the “fins” of the bot. Each fin is covered with a layer of live muscle cells that is much thinner than a single strand of hair. The cells are genetically engineered to twitch in response to light.  When the researchers shine light on one fin, the muscles on its surface twitch in response, causing the whole fin to flap with enough force to pull the robot through water. By flashing light on one fin or ...