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Nvidia discloses $21B stake in SpaceX
Filing comes after Elon Musk announced exclusive arrangement to kit out its data centers.
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Intermittent swimming promotes the energy efficiency of fish-like robot movements
Image credits: Xiangxiao Liu, Francois A. Longchamp, and Louis GeverBiorobotics Laboratory, EPFL Improving energy performance can effectively extend the time a robot can operate and reduce battery load, enabling lighter, more flexible, and more durable robotic systems. Nature has evolved optimal energy-saving locomotion strategies through billions of years of natural selection, providing unparalleled blueprints for […]
Robotics Research News -- ScienceDaily
Scientists turn DNA into a memory device that uses 100x less power
Researchers combined synthetic DNA with a semiconductor to create an ultra-low-power memory device capable of storing and processing information in the same place. The bio-hybrid technology could eventually help make AI systems and next-generation computers far more energy efficient.
Biz & IT - Ars Technica
Vulnerability giving attackers full control of Macs is under active exploitation
Screen-sharing bug lets remote hackers log in without a password.
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Lift Happens
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHHumanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOULEnjoy today’s videos! Speaking from experience, I can tell you that the best part of any DARPA challenge is when things go horribly wrong. And after you enjoy all the crashes (followed by all of the battery fires), get caught up with the DARPA Lift Challenge with video recaps of the final few days. [ DARPA Lift Challenge ]Drone delivery: coming soon to a moving vehicle (or perhaps even through an open window) near you.[ HKUST Aerial Robotics Group ]This tiny little robot called STEMbot (as in stem, not STEM) can climb up and around plant stems to check for pests. It’s not very fast, but it sure is adorable.[ STEMbot ]Monumental’s robots delivered the brickwork for a semi-detached home, laying around 20,000 bricks in a new community.[ Monumental ]Meet the world’s most “truss’t-worthy” robot.[ Modlab University of Pennsylvania ]Stanford BDML and Honeybee Robotics propose a payload to test gecko-inspired adhesives in spaaace![ NASA ]How can a legged robot organize its own walking while maintaining a desired direction? In this work, we present a Differential Adaptive Steering (DAST) mechanism for directional adaptation in legged robots under decentralized adaptive control.[ BRAIN VISTEC ]I do not care even a little bit if a robot fails (safely, of course), as long as it recovers from that failure.[ Sanctuary AI ]Even for a robot that doesn’t drink champagne, those are some pretty light pours.[ Kawasaki Robotics ]If we as a society would just accept that the appropriate place to store clothing is in a pile on the floor, robots would have a much easier time of it.[ LimX Dynamics ]To be fair, this is also the speed at which I fold shirts.[ Sharpa ]Our DR02 humanoid robot takes on the stairs with stable, controlled movement—steady steps, steady progress.[ DEEP Robotics ]Two words: structural minifridge. Or is it mini fridge...? Whatever, THREE words.[ AgileX ]
Robohub
What does it take for a robot to hold a conversation with a room, not just a person?
By Umar Farooq That was one of the questions at the heart of my last week (20th-24th July) at the Imperial Robotics Summer School, hosted at Imperial College, London; a week that sharpened my thinking and pushed me to look at robotics problems from angles I don’t usually get to in my day-to-day work. The […]
Robohub
Robotics roadmaps from around the world
What’s a robotics roadmap, and why should we care? Machines with pre-defined capabilities will soon be old-school. Future machines are expected to learn and adapt to unpredictability and to interact with the physical world with the ableness of our own bodies. Welcome to Industry 4.0 (1). The reliance of modern societies on robots, from manufacturing […]
IEEE Spectrum
Robot Recycler Salvages Parts from Broken Machines
Objects constructed by robots are ubiquitous. If you’ve used a car, household appliance, or smartphone today, you’ve used an object constructed at least in part by robots. The more products that manufacturers want to produce (and consumers want to consume) at lower costs, the more industrial robots will be needed.There are over 4 million industrial robots in use worldwide, according to the International Federation of Robotics. And researchers predict that number to grow to over 16 million by 2030, as manufacturing rapidly increases. But what’s going to happen when they start breaking down? A new system, designed by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany, can predict the defect in a broken robot and disassemble it, while protecting valuable parts from damage. To continue robotic development sustainably, the industry should prepare for the dismantling, recycling, and rebuilding of our robotic systems.The system consists of a predictive algorithm that guesses how a robot is broken, along with robotic manipulators that actually take the broken robot apart. At every stage of the process, the system checks to see if the results align with its predictions, and updates its methods if necessary. For example, in the video below, the system begins by unscrewing a broken component. To simulate a stuck screw, the researcher replaces the screw. When the system observes the screw still in place, it switches to milling away material to remove the part. Building a robot with new parts is easy, says Jan Baumgärtner, one of the designers of the system. Each step is clearly outlined, and there are no expected deviations. But taking apart something that’s broken is unpredictable. “We can imagine 100 ways that something can go wrong.” And if you start taking something apart without knowing how it broke, you might have to undo part of your work when you find the problem. For example, if you have to unscrew 100 screws holding two parts together, but the last screw is stuck, you’ll have wasted time unscrewing all those screws when you should have used a different method to remove the part in the first place.How to Take Apart a RobotKIT’s robotic disassembly system relies on a CAD model of the broken robot and of each part, so it can see the parts should behave and understand if anything is out of the ordinary. It also uses a mathematical model to predict the damage done to a broken part.When you give the system a broken device and a CAD model, it first guesses how each part of the broken device should move. The axes each part can move along are called degrees of freedom (for example, a screw should rotate, but not move side to side). The disassembler nudges each part to see if it moves as expected. Based on how the part actually moves, it then uses the mathematical model to predict what went wrong with the part: a corroded part might move less than you think it should, a loose screw may move more, and a deformed part might have different degrees of freedom than expected.At the beginning of disassembly, the system formulates a plan. It guesses what might be wrong with the device it’s taking apart, and then can change its guess based on observing each piece it takes apart. For example, if there was a screw loose in the part, that might be hard to guess from an initial photograph of the broken part. But when the system moves the screw, it will notice that it can move in more ways than a screw should move, and take that loose screw into account when deconstructing the device. You can also tell the disassembly system which parts are most important to salvage intact from a broken device, and it can adjust its strategy to preserve those specific parts.The Automated Circular EconomyBaumgärtner’s motivation behind the design of the robotic disassembler is to help create a circular economy, where old devices are repurposed to make new ones, reducing waste. “The big future is saving our planet,” he says.Baumgärtner envisions scaling up this one system, comprised of a few robotic arms, to have many robotic disassembler arms, each with different tools. These arms will specialize in a different part of the disassembly process, so that an entire factory could use different robotic limbs to disassemble a wide range of products. Think of an industrial robot factory that creates cars, but instead is specialized to take them apart. Or, as he puts it, “as a giant robot with 100 arms.”Ultimately, if this system works as intended, it would be a fully automated way of extracting a broken part from a system, replacing it, and rebuilding the device. Then the circular economy would really shine, as people replaced broken parts in old devices instead of buying new ones all the time. “That’s why we need to think about scaling this,” he says. “Because it means it becomes so cheap that it’s cheaper to repair this [electronic device] than to produce it. That’s the goal.”This research was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026 in Vienna.
Robohub
A ‘5-in-1’ seed-sized surgical robot
Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a tiny seed-sized robot that can navigate across soft and uneven surfaces to perform five surgical functions wirelessly, paving the way for developing robots to make surgeries and medical treatments more precise. The miniature robot, measuring just 4.4 mm in length and controlled by weak […]
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Drones Go Heavy in DARPA Lift Challenge
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHHumanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOULEnjoy today’s videos! The DARPA Lift Challenge is taking place through this weekend. There are a couple of very brief overview videos from the past couple of days, which are only really interesting because they give you a quick look at some utterly bizarre heavy-lift drone designs. If you like what you see, DARPA has recorded livestreams of the entire event so far. We’ve posted one of those at the end of this section, and if you want to be impressed by some super weird drones, check out this and this. [ DARPA Lift Challenge ]When NASA’s SkyFall helicopters take to the Martian skies, one of their tasks will be to hunt for frozen water—a critical resource for future astronauts—using ground-penetrating radar. For that radar to work, the rotorcraft will carry a flexible, fabric-based antenna that extends below the aircraft without interfering with landings or breaking at touchdown.[ NASA ]Why would you even want a five-fingered humanoid hand when you could have something so much better?[ Flexiv ]We’ve improved how GEN-1 learns to adapt to new actuators and new robots at the lowest level, with up to 10-20x gains on internal benchmarks. This significantly boosts performance on high-precision tasks like disassembling parts from a NIST board.[ Generalist ]This is certainly one of the best looking humanoid robots out there.[ Generative Bionics ]A little on the technical side, but the concept here is important, I think: being able to control an assistive robot through touch.[ Tac-Nav ]We present SonicFly, a passive aeroacoustic perception framework that enables one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to estimate and follow another using only the leader’s intrinsic flight sound.[ General Robotics Lab ]Okay but... Get a job?[ ROBOTIS ]
Robohub
AI agents create virtual playgrounds to help robots get crucial training data
A new system developed at MIT uses three agents to piece together the objects, walls, and overall look of a 3D scene. Its realistic recreations of indoor spaces help robots practice skills and try out different ways of doing tasks before they’re powered on. Image: Tim Malieckal/MIT CSAIL using assets from the researchers. By Alex […]
Robotics Research News -- ScienceDaily
Claude Fable 5 AI finds a tiny formula that topples an 87-year-old math conjecture
A mathematician working at Anthropic says he used the AI model Claude Fable 5 to uncover a remarkably simple counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, a famous problem that has resisted mathematicians for more than a century. The result shows that the conjecture is false in three dimensions and above, although the original two-dimensional version remains unsolved.
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