Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

The KTPO facility demonstrates how industrial automation can be enhanced with AI. Source: KUKA Group KUKA AG this week said it has successfully deployed its Automation Management Platform, or AMP, at the KUKA Toledo Production Operations in Ohio. AMP combines proven industrial automation and AI-driven decision-making to enable manufacturers to increase operational flexibility, enhance productivity, and unlock greater value from production data, said the company . The open orchestration platform is now supporting production operations, connecting existing automation infrastructure with next-generation AI-powered technologies. “With the launch of AMP, manufacturing is entering a new era,” said Marc Fleischmann, chief software and AI officer at KUKA Group. “Traditional automation is expanding and transforming, and the future lies in the combination of precision and reliability of proven industrial automation with the capabilities of AI-powered systems.  KUKA  AMP prov...

DroneDeploy offers both ground and aerial automated inspections. | Source: DroneDeploy Procore Technologies Inc., a construction management software provider, this week said it will acquire DroneDeploy for approximately $845 million in cash. DroneDeploy offers a robotics and visual intelligence platform for the built world that has been used on over 3 million job sites across more than 180 countries. “I am very excited to bring DroneDeploy’s outstanding team, technology and track record of customer success to Procore,” stated Ajei Gopal, president and CEO of Procore. “Once the acquisition closes, we plan to immediately cross-sell DroneDeploy’s solutions into our broader customer base and vice versa.” “For the longer term, adding DroneDeploy’s technology into the Procore platform will enable us to accelerate our AI strategy and deliver digital co-workers that track what’s happening on a project, make sense of it, and then take action to change the outcome,” he ...

Illustration of the versatile nanorobot. It is 150 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. (Illustration: Marina Bräm) By Angelika Jacobs Nanorobots sound like science fiction: tiny machines for medicine, the environment, or industry. In fact, nanorobotics has become a rapidly growing field of research. It is considered a promising approach, for example, for delivering active substances to specific locations in the body. Unlike their larger-scale counterparts, they are not made of electronics, computer chips, and software, but rather of biomolecules and nanoparticles. Researchers led by Prof. Dr. Cornelia Palivan from the University of Basel are now reporting on a sophisticated modular nanorobot with greater functional flexibility than many existing systems. “Previous nanorobots are often designed for a specific task only,” says Cornelia Palivan. “Our modular system, on the other hand, can be adapted to different applications.” The technology could be used not only in medic...

From accelerated computing and simulation to data operations, open-source tooling, validation engineering, and continuous learning, these five platforms represent distinct control points in the emerging physical AI stack. For most of the modern AI boom, infrastructure had a single center of gravity: compute. Models grew larger, training runs consumed more GPUs, and the industry organized itself around accelerators, cloud clusters, training frameworks, and developer software. That stack was sufficient when AI’s outputs were text, images, video, or code. Physical AI changes the definition. A robot does not simply run a model. It must perceive a changing environment, reason about contact and motion, act through a specific body, and recover when its actions fail. Its development cycle spans real-world demonstrations, synthetic data, physics simulation, policy training, structured evaluation, deployment, and the collection of new failure cases. Physical AI infrastructure is becomin...

DoorDash said its drone network may handle midrange deliveries, which are less attractive to Dashers. | Source: DoorDash More drone deliveries are taking to the skies. DoorDash yesterday said it has earned Part 135 air carrier certification from the Federal Aviation Administration. With that approval, the food delivery giant is launching DoorDash Air, its in-house drone program. In recent years, DoorDash has increasingly invested in automation, and the company is interested in building much of its delivery automation in-house. Last year, it unveiled Dot, its first autonomous delivery robot. The company said it built Dot to travel on bike lanes, roads, sidewalks, and driveways to perform local deliveries. Now, the FAA’s certification means that San Francisco-based DoorDash can operate as an air carrier. “We want drone delivery to work for any merchant, anywhere,” said Harrison Shih, the head of DoorDash Air. “We’re building the full stack to make that possible fr...

Bobs Red Mill and Columbia use the UR20 robot for palletizing in their facility. | Source: Universal Robots Teradyne Robotics this week said it brought in $100 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2026. The North Reading, Mass.-based company is a unit of automated test equipment supplier Teradyne Inc., which said it expects an increase in semiconductor and data center demand to increase sales. “Our strategy to capture test and robotics opportunities from wafer to AI data center has driven another record quarter,” stated Greg Smith, CEO of Teradyne. “This strength became evident in the year-on-year market expansion for all three of our business groups.” “In the short term, our Q3 guidance reflects robust AI-related demand,” he added. “Looking further ahead, rapid increase in wafer fab equipment investment sets the stage for continued growth in 2027 and beyond.” Teradyne Robotics includes force- and power-limited robot maker Univ...