Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), who co-sponsored a bipartisan bill to establish a National Commission on Robotics. Robotics can support U.S. economic and military interests, but unified federal policy has been slow in coming. That may be changing, as Senators Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Todd Young (R-Ind.), and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) last week introduced a bill to create an independent commission to evaluate U.S. competitiveness and recommend policies to strengthen its leadership. “Advancements in robotics are rapidly changing how we live and work,” stated Sen. Hickenlooper. “If America is going to lead the future, we need a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges ahead—from supply chains and national security to workforce development.” “Pennsylvania, and Pittsburgh especially, is an incredible hub of robotics talent and demonstrates that American leadership in robotics creates high-paying jobs, strengthens domestic supply chains, and dr...

Standard Bots offers robot arms with payloads ranging from 7 to 30 kg. | Source: Standard Bots Standard Bots today announced that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding, bringing its valuation to $1 billion. The company said it plans to use the investment to expand its manufacturing footprint in New York. This will increase its ability to design, assemble, and deploy American-made robots at scale. “ AI -native robots are the essential power tool of the 21st century – the tool that will grow American manufacturing and help every worker to be a force at work,” stated Evan Beard, co-founder, CEO, and chief engineer of Standard Bots. “AI will allow industrial robots to do 100x more tasks with full autonomy. You just show your robot how it’s done, and it learns through demonstration.” “The quickest way to get to full autonomy is through deployments, collecting real-world data, and iterating as fast as possible,” he added. “Standard Bots is the furthest alon...

Allen Control Systems’ Bullfrog uses AI models to target drones or other threats. | Source: Allen Control Systems Allen Control Systems has raised $200 million in Series B funding. This puts the company’s valuation at $2.2 billion, Allen Control Systems (ACS) claimed. ACS will use the funding to scale manufacturing and accelerate deployment of its autonomous weapon station, Bullfrog, for the United States and allied militaries. The company also plans to develop new product lines. Bullfrog is a lightweight, low-power autonomous weapon station that combines AI , computer vision, and precision robotics. ACS said it designed Bullfrog to detect, identify, and neutralize enemy unmanned systems. The company claimed Bullfrog excels in both on-the-move operations and the protection of high-value targets like power substations. The system is capable of engaging group 1-3 UAs, and it offers both autonomous and semi-autonomous modes. “Drone threats are growing faster than traditiona...

Embodied AI is evolving from vision-centric perception toward Physical AI. While vision enables robots to perceive the world, it cannot fully capture the physical interactions that underpin real-world manipulation, limiting robots’ ability to operate reliably in unstructured environments. As World Models advance, tactile sensing is increasingly recognized as a key modality. By providing critical physical feedback beyond vision, tactile helps robots understand and interact with the physical world, making it an essential foundation for intelligent manipulation. Yet one critical question remains difficult to answer: How much does tactile sensing actually improve physical interaction? In what ways does it improve robot manipulation? What kinds of tactile data are most needed for physical AI? While many robotics developers believe tactile will play an important role in the next generation of embodied intelligence, the industry lacks a standardized way to evaluate its impact. Witho...

The AAMAS 2026 best paper awards were presented at the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems , which took place from 25-29 May 2025 in Paphos, Cyprus. The winners and nominees in the three categories (best paper, best student paper, best blue sky paper) are as follows: Best Paper Award Winner Developing Guidelines for Human-LLM Agent Teams: A Multi-Stakeholder Lens , Mireia Yurrita, Davide Dell’Anna, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Catholijn M Jonker, and Pinar Yolum Nominees UNCAP: Uncertainty-Guided Neurosymbolic Planning Using Natural Language Communication for Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles , Neel P. Bhatt, Po-han Li, Kushagra Gupta, Rohan Siva, Daniel Milan, Alexander Todd Hogue, Sandeep P. Chinchali, David Fridovich-Keil, Zhangyang Wang, and Ufuk Topcu Ratio-Based Signaling for Source-Victim Separation in Swarm Fault Detection , Longyin Cui The Impossibility of Strategyproof Rank Aggregation , Manuel Eberl and Patrick Lederer Gene...

Participants in the challenge tested and debugged robots working on different tasks. | Source: AGIBOT AGIBOT Innovation Technology Co. last week hosted the AGIBOT World Challenge 2026 alongside ICRA 2026 in Vienna. The company brought together 526 research and enterprise teams from 27 countries to compete across two embodied AI tracks: “Reasoning to Action” and “World Model.” Shanghai-based AGIBOT said the competition highlighted a key shift in how embodied  AI is evaluated . The company said it showed that the industry is moving beyond simulation scores toward closed-loop testing on real robots, real tasks, and standardized benchmarks. The competition adopted a benchmark-driven format that combined online automated evaluation with an offline real-robot final in Vienna. With AGIBOT’s EWMBench and Genie Sim Benchmark, the consistent framework enabled automated testing, standardized metrics, and reproducible results. During the offline final, finalist teams ...