Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

The AmbiSort B Series can streamline final-mile deliver operations with automated induction, scanning, and ‘end-to-end’ sortation. | Source: Ambi Robotics As Black Friday and the start of peak season draw near, logistics providers across the country are getting ready for the rush. Each year, these providers could see a 25% to 40% increase in throughput, according to Stephen McKinley, co-founder and chief operating officer at Ambi Robotics. This year, Ambi is expecting its customers to experience a 9% to 10% increase compared with peak season last year. “Despite anything that might be going on in the economy, volume continues to ramp and e-commerce spending remains high,” McKinley told  The Robot Report . “That puts familiar pressures on our clients to perform in all of their individual sites, and we’re feeling that pressure also, because our systems are core to their functions.” For Ambi, preparing for the season means installing new systems at eight faciliti...

ABB Robotics has about 7,000 employees, and its U.S. headquarters and factory are in Auburn Hills, Mich. | Source: ABB Robotics It has been more than a year since ABB announced it singed an agreement to sell its robotics division to the Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group. The $5.375 billion deal is now being blocked by Chinese regulators, ABB confirmed to The Robot Report . China ‘s Office of the Working Mechanism for Foreign Investment Security Review has prohibited the acquisition in the country. Authorities expressed concerns about robotics data being transferred overseas and used to train AI models, according to The Financial Times , which first reported that the deal was blocked. You may be wondering why Chinese regulators have so much say in a Japanese company acquiring a Zurich-based industrial automation provider , but China makes up a major portion of ABB’s revenue. For the entire FY 2025 , ABB Robotics saw $928,000 in orders from China, an increase from the ...

Agility Robotics began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market this morning under the ticker “AGLT,” after the company completed its merger with special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, Churchill Capital Corp XI. Agility’s stock opened at $11.26 per share, which was above the $10 per share price used in the SPAC deal. The Salem, Ore.-based company ‘s stock was at $10.30 as of press time. “Today marks an important milestone for Agility, but the bigger story is what it means for the future of work,” stated Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics. “AI is moving beyond the digital world and into the physical world, creating new possibilities for how people and machines work together. At Agility, that future is already taking shape.” “Digit is doing real work in customer operations today, taking on repetitive, physically demanding tasks,” she added. “Becoming a public company gives us access to more resources to help accelerate that progr...

The Robot Report tracks startups throughout the year, and our second annual Startup Radar spotlights some of the most interesting new companies developing commercial robotics and related technologies. From industrial automation and drones to humanoid robots, 2026 has been a year of innovation in the face of persistent labor shortages and geopolitical challenges. To qualify, organizations must be no more than five years old and must be working on enabling technologies, new full systems, or novel business approaches. The free download notes their application, headcount, and total funding raised to date. This year, we received a significant number of submissions around software, which is no surprise given the recent wave of interest and investment in data, simulation, and next-generation AI models. They promise to make robots more autonomous, combining the ability to perceive, understand, act, and improve. The 2026 Startup Radar features 60 companies working to serve a range of indust...

GlobalLogic developed the UV disinfection robot with Haystack Robotics. | Source: GlobalLogic In hospitals, hygiene is critical. But the cleaning process, which is time-intensive and difficult to scale, remains manual work. This often means the process is also inconsistent. Healthcare facilities are under pressure to care for more patients with fewer resources. These challenges are why the Silicon & Embedded division at GlobalLogic helped Haystack Robotics engineer a mobile robot to handle disinfection. The project started during the COVID-19 pandemic, when disinfection became a critical use case for robots. “Obviously, this was a big use case at that point of time, in terms of being able to sanitize hospitals and care facilities,” Kunaal Mahanti, physical AI lead at GlobalLogic, told  The Robot Report . “So [ Haystack ] came up with this concept of being able to do disinfection better.” “While there were disinfections which are happening manually, it wasn’t re...

LiberAI introduces Liber-0, a world action model pretrained on more than 2.2 million hours of human experience to support zero-shot robot manipulation. In an evaluation of 60 tasks proposed by GPT-6, it achieved 36.0% overall success without robot demonstrations collected specifically for those target tasks. The model combines large-scale human video, glove-recorded hand motion and embodiment alignment to transfer human manipulation experience to robots. Liber-0 achieves 36.0% overall success in a zero-shot evaluation of 60 tasks proposed by GPT-6. LiberAI has introduced Liber-0, a world action model (WAM) pretrained on more than 2.2 million hours of human experience. The Beijing-based startup said the model combines human video with glove-recorded motion and embodiment-conditioned learning to transfer human manipulation experience to robots. A central test of Liber-0’s generalization is whether it can perform target tasks without robot demonstrations collected specifically for the...