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Iván Hernández Dalas: FCC robot restrictions could accelerate shift to local AI

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A Unitree humanoid robot at the China Humanoid Robot Conference in Seoul in March. Robots are back in the national spotlight, and this time, the conversation is about more than what they can do. It’s about who controls them and what data they collect. The restrictions on foreign-produced robots by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) underscore the growing scrutiny of these machines as connected infrastructure. As robots take on more work in factories, warehouses, and other high-stakes environments, questions about how they use data and make decisions are becoming harder to ignore. That scrutiny is likely to accelerate the move toward on-premises AI architectures and smaller, specialized models that can run closer to where robots operate. The more control companies want over who can access a robot and its data, the more incentive they have to keep sensitive processing close to the machine. Companies deploying physical AI today need to decide which AI workloads belong on th...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Research could guide the future design of social robots

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By the University of Glasgow Giving robot companions animal-like or anime-style faces and voices could maximise their emotional appeal to users, according to new research which could help guide the growing field of social robotics. Social robots can provide companionship and comfort to their owners by mimicking human or petlike behaviours. Although the robots are a fast-growing sector of the tech industry, surprisingly little academic research has explored how their designs can be optimised to make the robots as expressive and emotionally engaging as possible. In a new paper set to be presented at a conference this week, researchers from the University of Glasgow show how they have been working to close that research gap. With the help of a group of volunteers, they used augmented reality technology to test dozens of different combinations of faces and voices overlaid on the body of an existing social robot called a Qoobo, which has a soft, cushion-like body and a swinging tail. ...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: How robotics and physical AI can responsibly tackle key physical security challenges

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Security sensors in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Credit: Krisna Azie, Unsplash Robotics and artificial intelligence are deeply intertwined technologies. Where the former serves as the “body,” the latter provides the “brain,” with organizations continuing to develop the technology from traditionally rigid machinery into smart, adaptive agents designed to enhance productivity and operational efficiency. In particular, the evolving sector of physical security can benefit from the advancements in physical AI of the past few years. In 2026 alone, over $23 billion has been invested in organizations focused on improving how the two technologies work together. Much of the focus is on how developments can apply to protecting people and property. With more complex risks and threats against critical industry infrastructure such as data centers and manufacturing plants, organizations face new challenges in protecting these assets. The adaptive and scalable potential of physica...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: The physical AI race will be won in the patent office

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Lightbringer’s co-founders and board members, from left: CTO Markus Andreasson, CEO Dominic Davies, and CCO Ola Wassvik. Source: Lightbringer Developments in AI, machine learning, and automation have given robots capabilities that would have seemed extraordinary a decade ago. As competition intensifies, the physical AI race is becoming less likely to be won by whoever builds the best robot, and more likely to be won by whoever owns the technology that determines its behavior. This is a particularly complex intellectual property (IP) landscape because those innovations can span hardware, software , AI models, and calibration methods. The most valuable invention may not be the robot itself, but the technology that enables it to behave in a particular way. I’ve spent 20 years as a patent attorney and filed more than 300 patents across industrial automation. The pattern is consistent: The startups that lose out are the ones that delay. Robotics founders need to decide wha...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Eli Lilly, Purdue to share field learnings on human robot interaction at RoboBusiness

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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...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Runway introduces Praxis-1 world action model for robotics

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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...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Calling robotics startups: Submissions for the 2026 Robotics Startup Radar close soon

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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...
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