Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

A panel of industry experts discussed the state of humanoid robot development at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo. Source: RealSense While robotic arms have arguably been mastered for manufacturing, it’s another thing entirely to design and build a bipedal robot that can walk and manipulate objects. Plus, there’s the added complexity of that system working in a fast-paced environment with human workers, forklifts, and other machinery. At last month’s Robotics Summit & Expo, a keynote panel focused on the state of humanoid robots. The session boasted a star-studded lineup: Al Makke, head of humanoid robotics for North America at Schaeffler Mike Nielsen, chief marketing officer at RealSense Aaron Prather, director of the Robotics & Autonomous Systems Program at ASTM International Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior for Atlas at Boston Dynamics Pras Velagapudi, chief technology officer at Agility Mike Oitzman, moderator and senior editor at  ...

Gatik operates a fleet of autonomous trucks on networks across North America. | Source: Gatik PepsiCo this week announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Gatik AI Inc., a developer of autonomous systems for middle-mile logistics. Gatik will bring autonomous freight into PepsiCo’s North America food and beverage supply chain. Today, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is already operating for PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas. The new partnership focuses on PepsiCo’s regional transportation networks, where Gatik moves products daily from site to site. These networks are high-frequency, time-sensitive, and essential to keeping products flowing consistently. “Serving our vast network of customers requires a supply chain that is safe, reliable, and built for the future,” said Jim Farrell, the senior vice president of supply chain at PepsiCo. “Gatik is already operating inside our networks and brings the autonomous freight technology, commercial experience, and sca...

Claire chatted to Edward Mehr from Machina Labs about their RoboCraftsman that shapes complex metal parts for the aerospace, defence, and automotive industries. Edward Mehr is an entrepreneur and engineer specializing in advanced manufacturing, robotics, and artificial intelligence. As the Co-Founder and CEO of Machina Labs , he leads efforts to integrate AI-driven robotics into flexible, on-demand production systems. Under his leadership, Machina Labs is reshaping how industries such as aerospace, defence, and automotive approach metal forming and modern manufacturing. Before founding Machina Labs, Ed worked at leading technology companies, including Relativity Space, Averon, SpaceX, Google, and Microsoft. View Source

Stretch helps user Keith, who has regained some independence after a spinal cord injury. Source: Hello Robot The World Economic Forum yesterday named Hello Robot Inc. as a 2026 Technology Pioneer. The company has developed the Stretch mobile manipulator to aid older adults and people with disabilities, demonstrating the potential of physical AI. “There has never been a more exciting time to push the boundaries of what technology can do for humanity,” said Verena Kuhn, head of innovator communities at the World Economic Forum. “Some of the most meaningful innovations are those built around people.” “As the Technology Pioneers program celebrates its 26th year, we continue to champion start-ups that don’t just advance what’s technically possible, but direct that capability toward the world’s most urgent human needs,” she added. The Geneva-based World Economic Forum said it is an international organization for public-private coopera...

The XRZero-G0 system combines a head-mounted camera and dual wrist cameras to capture both global context and detailed hand-object interactions. | Credit: X Square Robot To break the data bottleneck slowing down embodied AI, X Square Robot said it has made XRZero-G0 open-source. The company said its new hardware-software framework reduces real-robot training data requirements by up to 20× under experimental conditions. Released alongside the G0-Dataset, a 2,000-hour multimodal repository, the system bridges the gap between human and machine perception by standardizing robot-free data collection, said X Square Robot. It said this allows human-demonstrated tasks to be reliably checked for quality and transferred to entirely unseen robotic platforms. The company described XRZero-G0 as a comprehensive hardware-software framework designed to enhance scalable, high-quality, robot-free data collection and cross-embodiment policy transfer for dexterous robotic manipulation. XRZero-G0 coll...

4NE1 humanoid robots and MAV mobile robots in a concept automotive assembly line. Source: NEURA Robotics Physical AI is still drawing investor attention, as NEURA Robotics GmbH today said its Series C round could reach $1.4 billion. The company said its financing from global technology leaders will help it accelerate its development of “cognitive robots.” NEURA said its goal is to build systems that “continuously learn, collaborate, and operate across real-world environments through a shared intelligence ecosystem called the Neuraverse.” The company claimed that it combines robotics, artificial intelligence, sensors, edge compute, and a large-scale infrastructure into a unified architecture. “The future of AI will not only live on screens,” stated David Reger, founder and CEO of NEURA Robotics. “It will move, interact, learn, and work beside us in the real world. We believe physical AI and cognitive robotics will become one of the largest technology shifts of...