Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

This month, large funding rounds, new approaches to robot training, and new robot models drew our readers’ attention. Not to mention, a large change in U.S. policy when it comes to importing robotics dominated headlines in the last week of July 2026. Here are the 10 most popular articles on The Robot Report in the past month. Subscribe to The Robot Report Newsletter and listen to The Robot Report Podcast to stay up to date on the latest robotics developments. 10. AI² Robotics raises $735M valuation for wheeled humanoid robots in July 2026 AI² Robotics has raised about $735 million in a fresh financing round that pushed its valuation past 50 billion RMB, or about $2.8 billion U.S. The funding positions the Shenzhen-based company among the leaders of China’s fast-moving physical AI sector. Read more . 9. Why robotics teams need virtual gyms before deployment The challenge for today’s robots is no longer limited to automating a task. It is adapting to ever-changing environm...

The Robot Report Podcast · FCC robot ruling shines a spotlight on U.S. policy; how next-gen AI can help warehousing In Episode 255 of The Robot Report Podcast, we talk to Derik Pridmore, CEO, co-founder, OSARO. Derik Pridmore, CEO, co-founder, OSARO. In this conversation, Pridmore breaks down how warehouse robotics has evolved from limited perception systems to adaptable AI-driven automation. He shares why hardware-agnostic design, continuous learning, and real-world monitoring matter more than flashy demos — and why the biggest breakthroughs in robotics still depend on balancing specificity, reliability, and safety. Pridmore co-founded OSARO in 2015 to specialize in AI software for industrial automation, offering integrated perception and control software for industrial scale robotic deployment. He has over a decade of investment experience, including roles at Founders Fund and Arda Capital Management. He invested in DeepMind and Clarifai.   Show timeline 4:51 ...

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...