Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

In the future, robotaxis will have cleaning and reset stations available throughout their operational territory. | Credit: Aseon Labs Robotaxis are proven. Waymo has logged more than 220 million autonomous miles and, by its own count, has more than 94% fewer serious injury crashes than human drivers. It gives around half a million paid rides a week and is expanding to more cities. So the question has moved from “Does this work?” to “How does this get everywhere?” Waymo is in 14 cities. Uber is in over 15,000. Uber did 3.9 billion trips last quarter. It processes Waymo’s entire weekly ride volume every 17 minutes. Driving software and vehicle supply have billions pointed at them. Almost nobody is funding the least glamorous problem: what happens to the cars between rides. The pit is across town No Formula 1 team drives back to the factory for new tires. The pit is at the track; the car is out in seconds. A robotaxi finishes a ride, discovers a spilled latte on the back seat...

This wheeled robot rendering appeared in Agility Robotics’ recent Digit 5 launch video. | Credit: Agility Robotics When Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 last week , one detail near the end of the launch video caught our attention: a humanoid robot on wheels. Why would a company that has spent so much time touting the benefits of legged robots choose to show a wheeled robot? We reached out to Agility Robotics CEO and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst to ask why. His answer confirmed what we had speculated about on The Robot Report Podcast : Agility was planting a seed about what could come next. Hurst told The Robot Report that Agility is indeed exploring wheeled robots. “We’re exploring a range of robot designs and form factors, including wheels, to address different operating environments and customer needs,” Hurst said via email. “As the safety, reliability and capabilities of legged robots continue to advance, I expect they’ll become the rig...

The R4 robot is designed to help vineyard, orchard and specialty crop growers overcome sector challenges. | Source: CNH Industrial 2026 has been a tumultuous year for farmers in America. Global trade wars mean farmers’ supplies are growing more expensive, while many crop prices have dropped. At the same time, changing weather conditions mean getting a good harvest is increasingly tricky. These pressures result in a need for a change in how we farm, and robotics could be the answer. Luca Ferrari, a senior manager of robotics a breakthrough technologies at CNH Industrial, said labor availability, costs, productivity, and efficiency are common concerns from the company ‘s customers. “Our users need to get more done with fewer resources. They want something, and we see it with robotics but not just robotics, that is solving a real problem, that is easy to use, and that can create value,” he told The Robot Report . “Labor availability is one of the main challenges that our far...

Claire chatted to Aaron Edsinger from Hello Robot about their Stretch robots that can help people with mobility issues live more independently. Aaron Edsinger is CEO and Co-Founder of Hello Robot , a robotics company dedicated to developing practical, safe, and accessible robots for people. With a passion for building robots and robot companies, Aaron has founded four companies focused on bringing human collaborative robots to the consumer, manufacturing, healthcare and research markets. As Robotics Director at Google, he led the business, product and technical development of two of Google’s central investments in robotics, and helped to define the overall robotics strategy. View Source

Deborah Lupton / Pop Chips / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 Intrinsic (an AI robotics group at Google) announced that the company is making parts of its platform open source. Intrinsic Core is a set of ROS-compatible capabilities for building sophisticated robotic applications. The capabilities included in the open source package are as follow: Intrinsic Control . A hardware-agnostic, real-time control framework that delivers sensor-based control. It allows the robot to dynamically adapt its behavior mid-trajectory based on changes in the environment. It is designed to deliver efficient, collision-free paths. The idea is that users can swap out different robot arms, grippers, sensors, and more without needing to rewrite drivers. Pose estimation . Provides an accurate six degrees of freedom pose estimation of 3D parts. Motion planning . Logic auto-generates efficient paths while avoiding collisions. Grasp planning . Designed to enable various grippers to automatically and dynamically ...

Many of the biggest challenges in automation don’t come from component performance, but from how systems are put together. Source: Kollmorgen When machine builders are specifying motion systems, it is easy to get caught up on the numbers. Torque, speed, power density, and price are all clear, measurable factors, and they provide a straightforward way to compare components. But in modern machine design, these figures rarely tell the full story. In practice, many of the biggest challenges in automation do not come from component performance, but from how systems are put together. Integration, commissioning, and troubleshooting often determine whether a machine is delivered on time and performs as intended. As a result, choosing the right motion architecture is less about selecting the most capable individual components and more about understanding how the entire system will behave in use. The hidden cost of engineering time One of the most overlooked factors in motion system de...