Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

This year, The Robot Report continued to share developments in design, engineering, and deployment of commercial systems, but the pace of change has accelerated. This is due to advances in hardware, scale, and most of all, artificial intelligence. The 2026 Robotics Handbook curates some of the top trends in the space. As labor shortages drive demand for automation, markets become more knowledgeable about robots’ capabilities, and the systems themselves get easier to use, robotics adoption is growing. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), both global  and U.S. orders are climbing after a post-pandemic pause. This free download looks at the engineering challenges, component choices, and market opportunities for robotics. While humanoid robots are still in development and commercial trials, massive amounts of funding have led to stiff competition as big tech companies and emerging startups try different for...

Peng Zhihui, president, CTO, and director of AGIBOT, introduces Worken at AGIBOT Innovation Day 2026. Source: AGIBOT AGIBOT today introduced Worken, a proposed framework for measuring the productivity of robots in real-world environments, at AGIBOT Innovation Day 2026 in Shanghai. Combining the words “Work” and “Token,” the concept seeks to shift attention beyond the number of robots manufactured or deployed toward how much useful work they can perform autonomously and consistently. The company also unveiled AHA3, its integrated “three intelligences in one” hardware platform, and highlighted advances in its AGILE motion intelligence framework, including a new self-evolving agent capability. AGIBOT debuted GO-3 Preview, its next-generation embodied AI foundation model, showcased its WITA-Omni 1.0 omni-modal interaction model, and launched the G2 Max industrial robot and Link-U OS 1.0. The event also featured actual applications across manufacturing and commercial services...

Symbotic’s recent quarterly filing lists its largest customer, together with affiliates, as “Customer A,” and the annual report names that customer as Walmart. Customer A supplied 90.5% of revenue in the quarter that ended June 27, 2026. Symbotic reported $720.8 million in revenue and $55 million in net income for the same quarter. Few robotics companies have turned one demanding customer into a business this size, and this profit follows earlier profits . The quarter also included $19.4 million of investment gains and negative non-GAAP free cash flow, so one quarter’s profit can’t settle whether leaning so heavily on Walmart has paid off. For a startup founder deciding whether to sign a second customer soon, Walmart’s 90.5% share says little about the cost of serving another account. I’d look at how many people that account pulls into the field and what the contract obliges each side to do when plans change. I’d also ask how easil...

Warp Sciences plans to create chemistry infrastructure for sovereign biotech. Source: deni AI, Adobe Stock Warp Sciences last week emerged from stealth with $215 million in funding to create infrastructure that enables biotech and pharmaceutical companies to discover new medicines faster. The startup said it is building a U.S.-based chemistry contract research organization, or CRO, to bring together chemists, robotics, and AI to make and test molecules for research teams. The South San Francisco-based company ‘s stated goal is to provide experimental data to train better AI that in turn enables more capable labs, giving scientists the ability to test more ideas. “AI has dramatically accelerated software engineering and mathematics, but it has yet to make the same impact in the physical sciences,” stated Kevin Weil , co-founder and CEO of Warp Sciences. “Chemistry and biology move forward when you make something, test it and learn from the result.” “If we want to b...

Key Takeaways WorldOracle is a benchmark for action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) that scores each model’s predicted rollout against the paired real-world execution, with both starting from the same initial observations and following the same action sequence. Seven representative models were evaluated; arm motion was predicted relatively well, but object positions and movements often deviated from reality, and performance dropped over complete operation sequences. The platform opened to developers on October 16 and accepts both open-weight and closed-source models. In one WorldOracle case, the robot’s grasp missed, yet the world model predicted a successful pick. Credit: [WorldOracle team / AgiBot] In one case showcased by WorldOracle, a robot’s grasp missed, yet the world model predicted that the robot had successfully picked up the fruit. Given the initial frame and action sequence of a real manipulation episode, the model generated a rollout that looked pl...

Team NimbRo’s robot in action during the RoboCup@Home competition at RoboCup 2026. Raphael leads the team. Raphael Memmesheimer has been successfully competing in the RoboCup@Home league winning the RoboCup@Home competition five times. He and his colleagues won the best paper award at RoboCup 2026 for their work “Efficient Image Annotation via Semi-Supervised Object Segmentation with Label Propagation” . We caught up with Raphael to find out more about this research, his history with RoboCup, and the challenges of the @Home competition. Could you start by telling us how you got involved with RoboCup@Home? I’ve actually been involved in the @Home league since I was a student, and my first time going to a World Cup for @Home was in 2013. That competition motivated me to do a PhD and infected me in a way that meant I basically aligned my academic career to it. I always return to robot competitions because this is one of the rare places where you can benchmark robots in a rea...