Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

https://www.therobotreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/lilly-physical-ai.mp4 Human-robot interaction is one of the biggest unlocks left in industrial automation to enable stronger safety, but most HRI research happens on university campuses that produces data that rarely survives contact with a live production floor. Running studies inside a working manufacturing site is logistically hard enough that most academia–industry partnerships never get past the first meeting. At RoboBusiness 2026, Faraz Yousuf, a senior principal robotics application engineer at Eli Lilly, and Dr. Anastasia Kouvaras Ostrowski, an assistant professor at Purdue University, will discuss “Human-Robot Interaction: Bridging Academia and Industry.” RoboBusiness will be on Oct. 20 and 21 in Santa Clara, Calif. Yousuf and Ostrowski’s talk will take place at 11:45 a.m. PT on the first day of the show. The two will share what they learned running HRI field studies with manufacturing and wareh...

Runway said it is testing Praxis-1 on a variety of embodiments and environments to identify and close potential gaps before moving to general availability. | Source: Runway Runway AI Inc. this week introduced Praxis-1, an open-weight world action model that turns Runway’s video pretraining into control for robots. The company said it built Praxis-1 on the same large-scale video pretraining behind its general world models. “Most robot policies are bottlenecked by robot data, which is scarce and expensive to collect,” Kamil Sindi, Runway’s chief technology officer, told The Robot Report . “Praxis-1 learns mostly from third-person video, built on the same large-scale pretraining behind Runway’s world models, so it already understands how objects behave and how tasks unfold. “Also, performance improves as we scale video, so its ceiling is set by how much video it can learn from, not how many robot demonstrations exist,” he added. Founded i...

The robotics industry is rapidly changing and growing. Each year, we see new robotics startups launch into the scene with exciting technology. At  The Robot Report , we want to help our readers keep up with this ever-changing landscape. So, we’re bringing back the Robotics Startup Radar. Today, we’re opening submissions for our 2026 list. We’re looking for startups five years or younger with novel full systems, enabling technologies, or business approaches. The system can target any industry or application. Submissions are due Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026 . Once submissions close, our editorial team will carefully consider each submission. Submitting does not guarantee a startup a spot on the final list. Last year, we compiled a list of 100 promising robotics startups . It included startups targeting everything from autonomous mobility and humanoid design to industrial automation and more. If you’re running a young business, the Robotics Startup Radar provides you w...

Claire chatted to Michelle Lu from Vsim Technology about using simulation and artificial intelligence to teach robots new skills. Michelle Lu is co-founder and CEO of Vsim Technology . She was previously a Director of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, where she and her co-founder created the world’s first end-to-end GPU-accelerated reinforcement learning (RL) framework, Isaac Gym, which set the template for how modern GPU-accelerated simulation-based RL is performed in robotics. In 2022, Michelle and her co-founder left NVIDIA to create Vsim, driven to solve the limitations that plague simulation-based robotics AI: efficiency, scalability and the sim-to-real gap. View Source

A robot can follow its safety rules and still act on manipulated information. See what this means for robot safety and how teams can strengthen their testing and evidence. A mobile robot slows for someone in a hallway. A collaborative arm eases its movement as a worker approaches. A humanoid pauses to let a person pass. Each response depends on information about the robot or its surroundings: a distance reading, a position estimate, or a stop signal. But what happens when one of those inputs is wrong, and the robot still responds exactly as designed? The mobile robot reads the hallway as clear while someone is still there. The arm estimates that the worker is farther away. The humanoid does not receive a stop signal as a person crosses its path. In each case, a fault could cause that mismatch. So could deliberate manipulation. At VicOne LAB R7, we examine how manipulated inputs can change robot behavior — and what that means for the systems meant to keep people safe. How an untru...

Maven founders, CFO Khalid Derbas and CEO Hamza Derbas with the company’s robot. | Source: Maven Robotics Since it was founded in 2024, Maven Robotics has created four iterations of its mobile manipulator, raised $100 million, and gone from early pilots to a production contract with its first customer. It currently has robots running 16 hours a day, five days a week, with up to 99% uptime, according to Hamza Derbas, co-founder and CEO of Maven Robotics.   Maven has moved fast, raising Series A funding last month, but the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company started its journey by focusing on which problems it wanted to solve. “Maven started with a small group of people, and we together started looking deeply at industrial labor, and realized that it’s facing a grim reality,” Derbas told The Robot Report . “ The world needs more and more industrial output every day, but the workforce available to do this work is dwindling.” Currently, there are over half a mill...