Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Chef Robotics has designed its robotic system to handle high-mix food preparation. | Source: Chef Robotics Physical AI has made remarkable strides, but most of the time, we use rigid objects to train foundation models. Food represents one of the most complex manipulation challenges in robotics, noted Chef Robotics. Every ingredient is deformable, inconsistent in weight and texture, sensitive to temperature, and must be handled with calibrated force across thousands of variations. Chef Robotics said it has built the largest real-world dataset of deformable material manipulation. The company has completed over 118 million servings in production across over a dozen food manufacturing facilities in North America and Europe. This data serves as the basis for its Food Foundation Model (FFM), which enables robots to generalize to new ingredients with minimal retraining. At RoboBusiness 2026 on Oct. 20 and 21 in Santa Clara, Calif., Rajat Bhageria, the founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, w...

AIR brings together advanced flight systems, intelligent automation, and purpose-built design to create smart aircraft. | Source: AIR AIR VEV Inc. last week announced a strategic partnership with Elmo Motion Control Ltd. Elmo will integrate its high-performance motion control system into AIR’s Heavy Lift UAS, or uncrewed aerial system. The partnership brings together Elmo ‘s compact, high-power density servo drives and AIR’s electric aviation design. Elmo’s Gold HV drive will power the company ‘s eight electric propulsion motors, delivering precise, responsive control for the AIR 120D VTOL-capable cargo drone . “AIR selected Elmo based on the combination of performance, power density, weight, efficiency, and system-level integration capabilities of its high-voltage servo drives,” AIR CEO Rani Plaut told  The Robot Report . “For an electric aircraft, every gram matters, and the propulsion system needs to deliver high power while remainin...

A recent ICRA panel titled “Surviving the Paper Deluge” brought together leading robotics researchers who have grappled with the overwhelming number of robotics papers being published today . The discussion ranged from hard numbers on publication growth, through the promises and risks of large language models (LLMs), to radical proposals for reshaping peer review as we know it. Panel chair Aude Billard pointed to rapid growth across major IEEE Robotics and Automation Society venues, with a roughly exponential curve beginning around 2017. An estimate for 2025 suggests around 70,000 papers containing the word “robotics.” Billard noted that while in some fields, extreme specialization may be an acceptable survival strategy, robotics is inherently different. A robot is an integration of perception, control, manipulation, learning, hardware, interaction, safety, and deployment. If researchers can only stay current within narrow silos, the field risks losing one of its core strengths: t...

Why robot safety assurance must account for attacks that can change how a machine sees, decides, and acts. Robot safety has traditionally asked: Can a machine remain safe when something goes wrong? Physical AI raises a harder question: Can it remain safe when an attacker changes what it sees, decides, or does even when nothing appears to have failed? Modern robots perceive through multimodal sensors, interpret context using AI models, and translate those interpretations into physical action. As they move into dynamic environments, their safety increasingly depends on the integrity of the data guiding their decisions. That dependence creates risks conventional safety assessments may not fully capture. Recent research has demonstrated that manipulating what a robot sees, hears, or interprets can redirect its behavior without requiring direct control. Such manipulation can occur across the robotic brain — a layered attack surface encompassing training pipelines, system infrastructure...

Robotics Australia Group and HowToRobot are offering AI to help businesses get automation. Source: HowToRobot Australia lags behind most other industrialized countries in terms of robot adoption, with a robot density of 134 robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, according to the International Federation of Robotics, or IFR. The world average is 162. HowToRobot and Robotics Australia Group today said they are collaborating to accelerate the adoption of automation across Australian industry. “Most businesses don’t yet have the structure, bandwidth, and expertise internally to move automation projects forward with the confidence and pace they need,” stated Søren Peters, founder and CEO of HowToRobot. “”We launched a new version of our platform, where AI is helping companies describe their projects. Instead of hiring an engineer to spend 18 months, they can use it to mature the project description so you can go to your manager and say, ‘Look, I need $200,000 to autom...

For generations, farmers tracked their fields on paper ledgers and spreadsheets; now, John Deere is letting them talk directly to their operational data with JD, a new conversational AI tool it said is designed to turn years of private field metrics into instant, profit-boosting answers. JD operates exclusively on the historical data for each farm. Operations Center helps farmers wade through data For generations, farmers have tracked their data, first on paper and then in spreadsheets. Analyzing that information was always a challenge, depending on the farmer’s analytical skills — or lack thereof — noted John Deere. The Moline, Ill.-based company said Operations Center is the new heart of digital operations for its customers. Farmers and growers can use the mobile platform to track inputs and outputs and manage the variables that control modern farm equipment. Seeking to reinforce customer trust alongside the rollout of JD, Deere stated that farm data belongs ...