Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

The biohybrid robot pushes off from the ground as soon as it is stimulated by an electrical impulse. Credit: Nature Communications (2026). By Emmet Cole In our monthly series, we showcase a selection of robotics stories from society, business, research and culture, as we track the field’s ongoing journey from specialized industrial machines to an increasingly visible social phenomenon. People perceive robots approaching from behind as faster A Toyohashi University of Technology team tested whether a robot’s approach direction changes how fast it seems to move . Across five experiments using a real mobile robot and virtual reality, 92% of participants showed the same bias: at the same physical speed, a robot approaching from behind seemed faster than one approaching from the front. In the first experiment, participants learned two reference speeds—0.5 and 1.0 metres per second—then judged a robot approaching at speeds between those values. Follow-up experiments suggested the effe...

Wireless chargers are being deployed in a number of indoor and outdoor applications for charging the mobile robots. | Credit: WiBotic As robot fleets scale, charging becomes an operational challenge. Understanding how to optimize charging for fleets of mobile robots is key to getting the best performance from the fleet throughout the day. Ben Waters, CEO of WiBotic With growing deployments, charging is becoming more than a question of how long a battery lasts or how quickly it can recharge. Charging strategy can affect fleet uptime, facility infrastructure, maintenance requirements, and even the size of the batteries that robot manufacturers need to carry. Ben Waters, CEO of WiBotic , recently joined The Robot Report Podcast to discuss how those considerations are changing as robot fleets scale. He also discussed opportunity charging, the tradeoffs around fast charging, WiBotic’s move toward higher-power systems, and how charging data could help operators identify power pro...

The new ISO 21423:2026 standard is intended to facilitate communications among different mobile robots. Source: mansyupasara AI, Adobe Stock As fleets of mobile robots grow, the need for interoperability among systems increases. The Association for Advancing Automation, or A3, yesterday published ISO 21423:2026, a new international standard for communications among industrial mobile robots, or IMRs, regardless of vendor or model. “Companies want to choose the robots that fit their applications and have those robots work together on the same floor,” stated Carole Franklin, director of standards development for robotics at A3. “Many leading industrial users of mobile robots have asked for an interoperability standard for years.” “Now, ISO 21423 gives manufacturers and users a common basis for communication across fleets, no matter where in the world their facility is located,” she added. “This standard can help companies expand automation with equipment from dif...

October 2026 was a whirlwind month for the robotics industry. Last month, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of RoboBusiness and announced that next year, the show will be rebranded to Robotics Summit & Expo West. In addition, prominent humanoid robot companies, such as Agility Robotics and Boston Dynamics, announced some major updates. 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 news. 10. AGCO to deploy Agility Digit humanoid in Kansas factory In October 2026, AGCO and Agility Robotics signed a commercial agreement to deploy Agility’s Digit humanoid in AGCO’s manufacturing facility. The U.S. pilot, expected to begin in 2027, will support AGCO’s efforts to create more flexible, intelligent factories, beginning at its site in Hesston, Kan. Read more . 9. Will ‘boring’ robots win in the real world? Why ro...

The Robot Report Podcast · What AgTech founders get wrong about ROI Connie Bowen, founding general partner of Farmhand Ventures. In Episode 268 of The Robot Report Podcast, our guest is Connie Bowen, the founding general partner of Farmhand Ventures, a venture fund with a focus on AgTech investments. Farmhand Ventures is an impact-first investment firm shaping the future of work in agriculture . It enables strategic programs and innovation to make farm work more attractive, productive, profitable, and resilient — improving the lives and livelihoods of farmers, farmworkers, and rural communities. A lifelong ag leader and engineer, Bowen has planted orchards, harvested hemp, and managed farm crews. That experience grounds her investment lens in the realities of the field. Over the past decade, Bowen has built a career connecting agricultural technology with practical farming needs, holding roles at The Yield Lab, AgLaunch, Chess Ag Full Harvest Partners, and Grape Arbor Ventures...

By Hermes Bloomfield-Gadêlha , University of Bristol People often take their muscles for granted. They pick up a bag, tighten a grip, climb a hill, hold a cup of coffee and the body quietly adjusts force, speed and position without the person ever thinking about it. Muscle turns chemical energy into movement . It is able to produce force smoothly and reliably, even though it is built from huge numbers of tiny molecular components. When the load changes, muscles don’t simply wobble or fail. They adapt. But the way that muscle works on a molecular level isn’t a settled issue. With colleagues, our team at the University of Bristol built a physical model using ordinary electric motors to try and simulate how muscles may perform its tasks. The results, published in the Royal Society journal Interface , show that the coordination we see in real muscle may simply emerge as a property of their setup. It’s not something you have to programme and police continuously. The findings could eve...

VicOne identified an initial set of 28 zero-day findings in less than two days using AI-assisted research across software and tools supporting the Physical AI ecosystem. These include projects developed or maintained by Google, NVIDIA, and Meta, among others. Based on initial validation, all 28 findings are classified as zero-day vulnerabilities. The count may change following vendor and vulnerability-authority review, and some findings do not yet have CVE tracking numbers. Many of these tools help teams train, simulate, test, and operate robots. Weaknesses in them could influence the models teams build, the test results they trust, and the instructions sent to robots. These findings create two demands for robotics teams: responding as AI helps uncover weaknesses faster , and assessing how each one could affect robot safety and operations . What AI changes about vulnerability discovery Vulnerability discovery involves examining code, tracing how systems communicate, and testing w...