Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Robot.com’s sidewalk delivery robot R-Kiwi has completed 2.4 million tasks across campuses and city sidewalks. | Source: Robot.com Robot.com recently announced a seven-year commercial agreement with Sodexo Group. This new agreement builds on a partnership that began in 2021 and that has expanded across select Sodexo-operated college campuses in North America. “Sodexo is an amazing partner, and it has around 400,000 employees globally, and 120,000 full-time employees in the U.S.,” Felipe Chavez Cortes, the co-founder and CEO of Robot.com, told  The Robot Report . “It’s one of the companies that is suffering from labor shortages and has been unable to fulfill its open positions.” He noted that Robot.com and Sodexo’s long-standing relationship paved the way for the seven-year contract. “Seven-year contracts don’t come right away,” Cortes said. “It was a learning process for both companies on what it takes to implement robotics, and what it takes to add val...

By Wanjiku Chebet Kanjumba , University of Florida NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration mission, or CADRE, will land on the side of the Moon facing Earth as part of NASA’s IM-3 launch , planned for late 2026. These rovers will spend roughly two weeks mapping the terrain as a self-guided team. No joystick will control them, and no human will approve each turn. Engineers test whether the CADRE rovers can drive and coordinate on their own at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. NASA/JPL-Caltech . The rovers will elect a leader among themselves, assign their own tasks and redraw their plans as a group when one of them runs low on charge. If it succeeds, CADRE will be the first time NASA has operated multiple rovers beyond Earth as a single autonomous system. That achievement will ...

Collaborative robot arms from JAKA Robotics (left) and Universal Robots. Get the popcorn ready. The patent fight between Teradyne Robotics and JAKA Robotics has turned into a full-blown public brawl. Teradyne, parent company of Universal Robots, last week sued JAKA’s German subsidiary , alleging infringement of patents covering hardware and software used in its cobot arms. Today, JAKA hit back, saying it has gone to court seeking injunctive relief over what it calls Teradyne’s “false, misleading, and damaging” public statements about the lawsuit. JAKA sent a lengthy press release to The Robot Report , which you can read at the bottom of this article. The company asserted that it received no direct communication from Teradyne Robotics or its legal representatives about the alleged infringement. In addition, JAKA said it has not seen any legal documents or court notices related to the case. The Shanghai, China-based company said it learned of the allegations only through Teradyne ...

NVIDIA and Hugging Face have collaborated on AI and robotics development. Source: NVIDIA After a few weeks of anticipation, NVIDIA Corp. today said it is acquiring Hugging Face Inc., an open platform for AI developers, for $12.9 billion. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face provides an open platform for AI developers. “Ten years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point,” Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, posted on X . “Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us.” In May 2026, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Hugging Face launched an agentic AI toolkit for its Reachy Mini desktop platform. In July, the company and NVIDIA  added Isaac GR00T 1.7 and the NVIDIA Isaac Teleo...

PlusAI SuperDrive-enabled autonomous trucks at its testing facility in Fremont, Calif. Source: PlusAI PlusAI Inc., which has developed AI-based virtual driver software for autonomous trucks, is going public via a merger with Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company or SPAC. “This transaction validates a year of significant execution and operational milestones for PlusAI,” stated David Liu, co‑founder and CEO of PlusAI. “We are operating autonomous freight routes in Texas today, expanding our OEM partnerships, and successfully monetizing the proprietary data, models, and simulation capabilities we have built over the past decade.” Founded in 2016, Plus Automation Inc. said its SuperDrive and HyperFoundry systems accelerate the scalable development and deployment of autonomous vehicles . The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it is working with global vehicle makers and ecosystem partners including Scania, NVIDIA , Bosch , DSV,...

NexCOBOT, which exhibited at the Robotics Summit & Expo, provides a range of controllers. Source: NexCOBOT Humanoid robotics and physical AI developers are not only raising billions of dollars; they’re also getting acquired by big technology companies. This has implications for industrial adoption, according to Jenny Shern , general manager of NexCOBOT. For instance, Mobileye acquired Mentee Robotics for $900 million in January, Amazon bought Fauna Robotics in March, and Meta picked up Assured Robot Intelligence in May. “Beginning last year, our team got lots of requests from companies building legged robots, including quadrupeds and humanoids, as well as mobile manipulators,” Shern told The Robot Report . “Our controllers support traditional robots and these newer kinds of systems.” NexCOBOT spun out of NEXCOM Group ‘s IoT Automation Solutions business unit in 2018. The New Taipei City, Taiwan-based  company offers motion controllers , fu...