Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Apptronik offers a bipedal configuration for movement through spaces built for people, while a wheeled base offers stability and efficiency for high-throughput environments. | Source: Apptronik Apptronik yesterday made two major announcements. First, the company launched Apollo 2, its updated humanoid robot. Second, it opened its newly expanded Robot Park, its flagship data collection and training facility for humanoid robots in Austin, Texas. Apollo 2 comes in both bipedal and wheeled-base configurations. Apptronik said it designed the robot to learn real-world work through large-scale data collection. It enables the company to gather diverse data across a wide range of tasks and environments. As part of Apptronik’s research partnership with Google DeepMind , the data Apollo 2 collects helps to advance Gemini Robotics, Google DeepMind’s foundation models for robotics. The facility in Austin joins a growing number of Apptronik Robot Parks at customer and partner sites worldwide. ...

X Square Robot performing household tasks in a home environment. | Source: X Square Robot X Square Robot Technology Co. today said it has closed four consecutive financing rounds, culminating in a Series C. These rounds bring the embodied AI and foundation model developer’s valuation to more than $2.8 billion.  The Shenzhen, China-based company said it will use the funding to further invest in foundational research and core technologies. X Square Robot said it plans to advance toward general-purpose embodied AI . “Since Day 1, X Square Robot has focused on in-house development of foundation models, pursuing a challenging but necessary path,” stated Wang Qian, founder and CEO of X Square Robot. “Today, our investments in embodied AI models; a scalable, model-driven, high-quality data pipeline system; and real-world deployment are beginning to deliver clear results.” Founded in 2023, X Square Robot develops “end-to-end” embodied AI systems. R...

Queue is applying automation to improve prescription fulfillment. Source: Queue Queue today emerged from stealth with an autonomous pharmacy system and $12.6 million in seed funding. The company said its system is designed to make prescription fulfillment faster, more accessible, and cost-effective while supporting rigorous safety and verification protocols. “Pharmacy in America is structurally broken,” stated Josh Liu, co-founder and chief technology officer of Queue. “Queue is a complete reimagining of how medications get dispensed, verified, and delivered. We built the machine the industry has needed for decades, and the demand we’re seeing proves it.” Pharmacies are facing “overwhelming workloads and job dissatisfaction,” according to Drugstore News . Schools are graduating 3,000 to 4,000 fewer pharmacists than will be needed over the next five to six years, it said. Pharmacy technician vacancies have been reported at 40% or higher, reported the American Society of Health-Sys...

By integrating reinforcement learning with high-fidelity physics-based simulation, morph said it enables a faster translation from concept to product. | Source: morph As advances in AI have made robots smarter and more capable, some developers are increasingly focusing solely on the software element of intelligence. Robotics startup morph is taking a different approach, one that sees embodied AI as both a hardware and a software problem. The London-based company  embeds sensing and adaptive control directly into reconfigurable deformable materials, enabling real‑time change in morphology and stiffness. The result is soft cells that developers can integrate into a range of robots. “We’re running real-time physical AI models that can take sensory information and understand it. Then the cells will morphologically change and adapt to affect a change, whether that’s motion, or whether that’s support, or whether that’s protection,” Dr. Jean Nehme, the founder of morph, told  The Rob...

A small footprint enables ADAR technology to be embedded flush into virtually any robot form factor, Sonair said. | Source: Sonair Sonair today said that its ADAR One sensor is now suitable for SIL2 and PL d applications and is certified to fulfil all requirements of the European Machinery Directive as an acoustic detection and ranging sensor for the safe detection of humans and objects. ADAR One was assessed as a human protection sensor according to the demanding IEC 61496 standard for electrosensitive protection devices. The sensor also meets two foundational standards: IEC 61508 , the functional safety standard for electronic safety systems in high-risk industrial environments, and ISO 13849 , the universal standard for safety-related parts of control systems. “It is hard to convey how extensive and all-encompassing a safety certification process is,” Knut Sandven, CEO of Sonair, told The Robot Report . “We paused all other development for a long stretch and ...

Figure 03 adds tactile-sensor hands, palm cameras, wireless charging, and speech-to-speech audio over its predecessor. | Source: BMW Group BMW Group is doubling down on its deployment of Figure.AI’s humanoid robots. The automaker last week announced that, following its successful deployment with Figure 02 at its plant in Spartanburg, S.C., it will deploy the company’s latest Figure 03 robot. “Plant Spartanburg is the birthplace of humanoid robotics in BMW Manufacturing’s operational day-to-day activities,” said Ulrich Wieland, vice president of production control and logistics at BMW Manufacturing. “Having already successfully completed a pilot with Figure 02 in our body shop, we are now looking forward to deploying Figure 03 for a sequencing use case in logistics.” The BMW Group said it gained important experience with humanoid robots at Plant Spartanburg in 2025. Figure 02 supported the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles. In the body shop, the ...