Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Radha Basu, EVP and head of iMerit (left), and Rohit Kapoor, CEO of EXL (right). Credit: Mark Liflander, EXL The actions of physical AI, including robots, are only as good as the human expertise and data used to build the AI models that train them. ExlService Holdings Inc. this month completed its acquisition of iMerit Technology, a leader in AI model training, evaluation, and reinforcement learning. Founded in 1999, EXL offers services and solutions to industries including insurance, healthcare , banking and capital markets, retail, communications and media, and energy and infrastructure. The New York-based company has about 68,000 employees worldwide. Founded in 2012, iMerit provides data annotation for robotics, autonomous mobility, healthcare AI , and other high-tech industries. The San Jose, Calif.-based company said its subject-matter experts and proprietary Ango Hub platform enable customers “to collaborate on complex multimodal data to generate highly curated and val...

NeuraGrasp can grasp a wide range of items, from small containers to porous polybags and cloth items. | Source: Locus Robotics Locus Robotics Corp. has successfully tackled many robotic challenges in real working environments. Its autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs, have navigated countless miles in a variety of facilities, and they have aided in more than 6 billion picks. Now, its targeting manipulation. The company entered the robotic picking space in March 2025 when it unveiled Array , a mobile manipulator equipped with a custom-developed, vision-guided picking arm. Over a year later, Locus acquired Nexera Robotics, which is known for its NeuraGrasp gripping technology. According to Roy Belak, the senior vice president of robotic grasping at Locus and former CEO of Nexera , by the time it came in contact with Locus, Nexera had already spent years refining its unique, soft end effectors. It had already gone through at least six different product generations, he said. “Just a...

Action from the 11 vs 11 humanoid match at RoboCup 2026. Photo credit: RoboCup Federation. RoboCup 2026 saw history made, as two teams of 11 humanoids took to the soccer field, the first time a full complement of robots has competed. The game saw B-Human (Bremen, Germany) take on HTWK Robots (Leipzig, Germany), with both sides using machines designed by Booster Robotics. You can watch highlights of the match below: Back in 1997 , RoboCup’s founders set the lofty goal of developing a team of autonomous robots that could beat the human World Cup champions by 2050. There has been significant progress since those early days, and this match saw another step towards that ambition. “This match shows how far humanoid robotics has come,” said Ubbo Visser, President of the RoboCup Federation. “We have seen increased teamwork and advanced skills over the years already, but the new humanoid hardware paired with the new level of intelligence provided by AI puts humanoid robot soccer o...

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Teradyne Robotics has had enough compliments for one year. Teradyne Robotics, the parent company of cobot arm maker Universal Robots , has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against a German subsidiary of Chinese robotics company JAKA. The case alleges that JAKA infringed patents covering both hardware and software used in Universal Robots’ collaborative robots . The lawsuit is Teradyne Robotics’ second major case involving a Chinese robotics company in Europe this year. In February 2026, the company sued Elite Robots’ German subsidiary over alleged copyright infringement. In April, the Regional Court of Hamburg issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting Elite Robots Germany from offering the disputed software and products containing it in Germany. The case is still ongoing. The JAKA case is different. “This is a patent case where the other one was about copyright,” David Brandt, vice president of rese...

Science and Technology Centers focus on building sustained partnerships across universities, industry, and government and accelerating the use of new ideas and technologies for scientific discovery. | Sources: NSF, left to right: Indiana University, Bloomington; Michigan State University College of Engineering; Brian Scassellati and Kayla Matheus, Yale University The U.S. National Science Foundation yesterday said it is investing $90 million over five years to support three new Science and Technology Centers, or NSF STCs. The NSF will allocate $6 million annually for an initial five-year period to each of the three centers. After the first five years, the centers will have the opportunity to compete for up to five additional years of support. The foundation  said the centers will advance American leadership in science and technology, strengthen the nation’s STEM workforce, and accelerate innovation in a variety of fields, including AI and robotics. “Maintaining the United...

Carbon AI is trained on 150 million labeled plants, enabling farmers to start laser weeding any field or crop in minutes. | Credit: Carbon Robotics Carbon Robotics is bringing the era of foundation models to the farm. The company has replaced its collection of crop‑specific AI vision models with a single “large plant model” that understands plant structure across regions and species, allowing farmers to instantly tune Carbon’s laser weeder to their own definition of crops and weeds. Unlike traditional vision systems that require time‑consuming retraining whenever a new crop, weed, or geography is introduced, Carbon said its large plant model is pre‑trained on millions of images of baby plants collected worldwide and then personalized in the field. Using an iPad app, farmers can simply review thumbnails from their own fields and tag a small number as “crop” or “weed.” With the tool and the new foundation model, Carbon Robotics said farmers can customize their use of the its autonom...

Gatik automates regional transformation for a range of customers, including PepsiCo, Kroger, Tyson Foods, and Georgia-Pacific. | Source: Gatik Gatik AI Inc. yesterday said it has raised $200 million in Series D funding. The company said it plans to use the investment to accelerate driverless commercial freight across Fortune 50 retail, consumer packaged goods, and grocery supply chains. Mountain View, Calif.-based Gatik said its AI -first autonomous vehicle ( AV ) technology is purpose-built for use across highways and surface streets. Its autonomous trucks use dynamic routes to help customers respond to changing demand, distribution center activity, and pickup and drop-off needs across commercial networks. “This round, led by some of the world’s leading financial institutions, is a clear validation of Gatik’s commercial leadership in autonomous freight,” stated Gautam Narang, co-founder and CEO of Gatik. “We have built Gatik with real revenue, deep customer demand, and AI-driven a...