Phynetic AI Weeklyby Phynetic
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hardware

Arms, actuators, sensors, compute and the boards that hold them together.

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18 Sep

D-Robotics Closes $400M in Series C Funding to Boom the Robotics Industry (2 minute read)

D-Robotics has closed a US$400 million Series C, with strategic investment from an unnamed global internet company and follow-on from existing shareholders. The round funds its Sunrise chip portfolio and a software platform. The company says cumulative Sunrise shipments passed 8 million units in the first half of 2026, and that its S600 embodied AI chip, launched in November 2025, has been adopted by more than 20 customers in six months.

— en.d-robotics.ccindustry-fundinghardwarehumanoids
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18 Sep

Learning Safe Humanoid Navigation from Reduced Order Models (paper · 15 minute read)

A single-stage RL navigation pipeline struggles on multi-story terrain, so the authors split the problem: a policy on reduced order dynamics with full 3D LiDAR observations learns multi-story navigation, then kickstarts a full-order policy with a frozen locomotion policy in the loop. A Poisson safety filter recovers safety around out-of-distribution obstacles. On a Unitree G1, RoM-Nav performs mapless multi-floor navigation over 10m of vertical displacement and over 100m of path length.

— cs.RO updates on arXiv.orghumanoidslocomotionhardware
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15 Sep

Agility Robotics says its new Digit 5 robot can work next to people without safety fences (1 minute read)

Agility Robotics' Digit 5 lifts up to 22.7 kg, 40 percent more than its predecessor, and its battery charges in 9 minutes for 90 minutes of runtime, which the company says allows more than 20 hours of work per day. The humanoid spots people and, according to the company, stops or steps aside. Agility points to orders worth more than $300 million, with first deliveries starting in early 2027.

— the-decoder.comhardwarehumanoids
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15 Sep

BlackPanther2 quadruped runs at 13.2 m/s on a treadmill and 11.65 m/s outdoors, authors report (paper · 15 minute read)

A refined actuator model that captures high-speed voltage coupling and magnetic saturation reduces the sim-to-real gap for fast quadruped running, while a reinforcement learning framework with a two-stage curriculum and adaptive command scheduling keeps training stable. On the 36.5 kg BlackPanther2, the authors report speeds of 13.2 m/s on a treadmill and 11.65 m/s outdoors, which they describe as a world record for quadrupedal robot locomotion.

— cs.RO updates on arXiv.orglocomotionhardwaresimulation
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14 Sep

China scales up embodied AI's reach (2 minute read)

Agibot says its 15,000th robot rolled off its production line in June. Eight of its G2 robots ran around the clock for six days alongside a mass-production line at a Longcheer Technology tablet factory in Nanchang, China Daily reports. Galbot's S1 has entered CATL battery production lines and can carry a combined 50 kilograms with its two arms for up to eight hours, according to CATL.

— China Dailyhardware
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8 Sep

Iron Walks Off the Line, XPENG Starts Building Humanoids in Guangzhou (3 minute read)

XPENG's Iron humanoid was finished on a new Guangzhou line and walked off the factory floor under its own power on 7 September, with no remote pilot. The company says more than 80% of the line's fundamental steps are automated, adapted from its electric-vehicle plants to the tighter tolerances humanoids need. Chairman He Xiaopeng said there was no prior playbook when they started developing the lines, and called the result a small first step.

— TechEBlog -humanoidshardware
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7 Sep

This Robot Will Draw Your Blood Now (5 minute read)

Aletta sweeps the inner elbow with near-infrared light to find a vein, maps its depth with ultrasound, uses Doppler to rule out the artery, then inserts the needle and tips each collection tube exactly nine times. Built by the Dutch firm Vitestro, it is the first autonomous blood-draw device authorised in the United States. The FDA cleared it on 19 August; Vitestro's pitch is doing by algorithm what a phlebotomist does by feel, with no human touching the patient.

— IEEE Spectrumhardwarepolicy-safety
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7 Sep

NEURA Robotics and SECO Join Forces to Scale Physical AI from Europe (5 minute read)

NEURA Robotics and SECO will jointly design and manufacture the compute modules for NEURA's cognitive robots, including the 4NE1 humanoid, with series production in Europe. The modules carry Qualcomm Dragonwing processors and form part of NEURA's distributed Brain-plus-Nervous-System architecture. The two will also work together on industrial data and automation for semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.

— Neura Roboticshardwareindustry-fundinghumanoids
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5 Sep

Cyborg Roaches Can Stab You With Needles (4 minute read)

The University of Queensland's Biorobotics Lab has built 'Paraborgs', cockroaches carrying electronics and a spring-loaded needle, to reach people trapped under rubble. Lab director T. Thang Vo-Doan calls cyborg insects a shortcut around some of the hardest problems in robotics: an insect-sized machine that moves through rubble, recovers from falls and carries its own power. An insect already has that mobility, so the lab adds electronics to a live one.

— IEEE Spectrumhardwarelocomotion
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4 Sep

Lyte raises $165M to help robots better sense their surroundings (2 minute read)

Lyte AI raised $165 million in Series C at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation, for processors, multimodal sensors and software it says it owns from the transistor up. Chief executive Alexander Shpunt argues that physical AI has a sensing problem before it has a model problem. Lyte is in production and shipping to inspection, logistics and manufacturing customers, and will use the round to put LyteVision into more robots and more environments.

— The Robot Reportindustry-fundinghardware
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3 Sep

BRIDGE: An Open-Source Humanoid Platform via Morphology-Control Co-Design for Physical AI (paper · 15 minute read)

Bridge is an 88 cm open-source humanoid whose body and controller were optimised together rather than one after the other, released with its control policy. The paper introduces a metric that scores a design on both kinematic retargeting fidelity to human motion and dynamic tracking performance, and reports better numbers than Bumi, K1 and Toddlerbot on all of them.

— arXivhumanoidsopen-source-toolshardware
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3 Sep

Figure and Nscale sign for up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform (1 minute read)

Figure is committing $3.5 billion, with intent to scale past $6 billion, to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform from the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas. Nscale is also investing in Figure, which says it is now bound by the data and compute needed to train Helix. It follows Index, Figure's effort to assemble the most diverse humanoid training dataset yet, which the company says is generating 35 minutes of data every second.

— Figure newsindustry-fundinghardwarehumanoids
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1 Sep

One Print, Many Moves: a monolithic origami-inspired folding actuator (paper · 15 minute read)

MONORIGAMI programmes stiffness anisotropy into the material itself, using thickness tiers patterned in an origami geometry so a soft actuator folds accurately along the intended crease and resists deformation elsewhere. The whole actuator prints in a single material in one pass, with no assembly and no added reinforcement. Each actuator is a scalable motion primitive, and linking and orienting several of them mechanically programs multi-degree-of-freedom trajectories, demonstrated on three printed systems built from the same module.

— arXivhardware
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28 Aug

NC State's soft 'ring leaper' keeps jumping while infrared light shines on it (3 minute read)

North Carolina State University researchers have built a teardrop-shaped liquid crystal elastomer robot that twists under infrared light, stores the energy and snaps itself into a jump, resetting on its own so it keeps leaping while the light stays on. The angle of a stiff V-shaped tail decides whether it crawls, jumps forward or leaps upward; the work is published in PNAS.

— news.ncsu.edulocomotionhardware
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28 Aug

Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing (4 minute read)

A pair of $160,000 pizza robots at Moto Pizza in Seattle went dead in May when their supplier Picnic shut down and technical support disappeared. The BBC traces a wider pattern of failure across the robotic pizza business, from the dough feeder through the sauce and cheese modules. Zume, Pazzi and Basil Street had all come and gone before Picnic, leaving a trail the BBC describes as overcooked promises and melting fortunes.

— bbc.comindustry-fundinghardware
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27 Aug

Hugging Face is selling a cute $399 open source duck robot, Microduck (2 minute read)

Hugging Face unveiled the Microduck, a $399 open-source robot that ships before Christmas. The 25-centimetre duck waddles, picks things up with its beak, rights itself after a fall and roller skates, following the Reachy Mini in a hardware line the company started by acquiring Pollen Robotics. It perceives with a camera, lidar and two inertial measurement units.

— Robotics News | TechCrunchopen-source-toolshardware
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24 Aug

These tiny drones are powered by sound (2 minute read)

EPFL's MICROBS Lab built hollow acoustic resonators tuned to specific frequencies, so sound powers the flier rather than pushing it around. The work draws on Helmholtz resonance — the effect behind blowing across a bottle — and is published in Science Advances. Lab head Selman Sakar frames the result as transforming a simple, cleverly designed mechanical piece into robotic matter.

— Robohubhardware
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24 Aug

NEURA Acquires ADLATUS Robotics, Bringing Physical AI to Professional Cleaning (5 minute read)

NEURA Mobile Robots has acquired 100% of ADLATUS Robotics of Ulm, bringing hundreds of installed autonomous cleaning machines and proprietary navigation software into the group. It follows the Bosch Rexroth ACTIVE Shuttle deal as NEURA consolidates different robots onto one Physical AI infrastructure. ADLATUS has spent years building autonomous cleaning and sweeping robots for industry, logistics, healthcare and public spaces, and NEURA will add sensing and fold it into the Neuraverse.

— Neura Roboticsindustry-fundinghardware
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20 Aug

Keeping the Franka Emika Panda alive: a ROS 2 stack with a reliable position interface (paper · 15 minute read)

The Franka Emika Panda's external position interface has been unreliable for years, and this paper traces the vibrations and protective stops to the timing of the external control loop and sampling jitter rather than to the robot. The open-source stack decouples real-time communication from the ROS 2 control loop and adds rate matching and position-domain reference generation. It is validated across motion planning, compliance control, position-controlled manipulation and haptic teleoperation, on two independent Panda platforms.

— arXivopen-source-toolshardwaremanipulation
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18 Aug

Drones With Claws Perch on Arctic Icebergs (3 minute read)

Researchers in Canada have built Ice Dart, a drone whose landing gear absorbs a hard landing and grips the surface with microspines, so it can perch on icebergs and glaciers. In tests at Iceland's Fjallsjökull glacier, reported in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics, it perched at up to 3 m/s on slopes of up to 58 degrees and succeeded every time, even in 30 km/h winds.

— IEEE Spectrumhardwarelocomotion
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14 Aug

Swarms of tiny robots remove microplastics from soil and water (3 minute read)

Researchers in the Czech Republic built microscopic robots from stacked MXene particles that removed microplastics from both soil and water in laboratory tests. Particles under five millimetres are especially hard to recover from soil because they lodge between minerals and organic matter. The MXene particles carry a large surface area and a surface chemistry that attracts plastic, and a nickel coating lets rotating magnetic fields drive them.

— phys.orghardware
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14 Aug

Accelerating Large-scale Bundle Adjustment for LiDAR Mapping via Parallel Computing (paper · 15 minute read)

The first fully parallel framework for LiDAR bundle adjustment, built for maps larger than a GPU's memory: asynchronous data loading, bottom-up voxelisation to extract planar features, and a parallel increment solver. On large public datasets it runs up to ten times faster while matching the mapping accuracy of existing methods. The code is on GitHub.

— arXivhardwaredatasets-benchmarksopen-source-tools
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13 Aug

Northrop’s robot space mechanic is a new way to keep satellites at work longer (3 minute read)

Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle has undocked from an Optus communications satellite after more than a year holding it in position. Four replacement spacecraft launched in July, among them a Mission Robotic Vehicle carrying two robotic arms. The Mission Robotic Vehicle's two arms were developed by DARPA; the other three craft are Mission Extension Pods, smaller modular units.

— Robotics News | TechCrunchhardwaremanipulation
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12 Aug

NVIDIA JetPack 7.2.1 Adds Agentic Video Skills and T3000 Emulation (4 minute read)

NVIDIA JetPack 7.2.1 adds PyNvVideoCodec 2.2 on Jetson Thor, bringing the hardware video encoder and decoder that JetPack 7.1 opened to C and C++ developers to Python for the first time. NVIDIA calls video a core data path in Jetson applications from robotics to industrial automation, where the engineering lies in choosing the interface, codec, pixel format and memory path, and proving the pipeline meets its latency and throughput goals.

— Robotics – NVIDIA Technical Bloghardware
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11 Aug

Agility's Digit V5 is built to work beside people without safety fencing (3 minute read)

Agility Robotics plans to deploy Digit V5 to its first customers in December, with safety systems meant to let the humanoid work beside people without the fencing that usually surrounds industrial robots. Its battery is designed for more than 20 hours of work a day, and an ISO-standard flange takes interchangeable grippers, with autonomous tool changes planned. Early deployments are meant to validate the safety claims before wider production.

— interestingengineering.comhumanoidshardwarepolicy-safety
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11 Aug

TLabel – A unified annotation format and converter for tactile robotics datasets (tool · 3 minute read)

TLabel is a cross-sensor annotation schema for tactile manipulation data, producing 14-dimensional semantic annotations that different sensor types can all emit. Each adapter declares which dimensions it can and cannot annotate, so results from different tactile sensors become comparable rather than sensor-specific. Compliance levels L1 to L4 let each sensor participate at whatever information density it can actually support.

— GitHubmanipulationhardwareopen-source-tools
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11 Aug

Robot Recycler Salvages Parts From Broken Machines (4 minute read)

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have built a system that predicts the defect in a broken product and disassembles it while protecting the valuable parts. With more than 4 million industrial robots in use worldwide and over 16 million forecast by 2030, the article argues the industry should prepare to dismantle, recycle and rebuild what it makes.

— IEEE Spectrummanipulationhardware
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10 Aug

A ‘5-in-1’ seed-sized surgical robot (4 minute read)

A team at Nanyang Technological University built a 4.4 mm magnetically controlled robot that performs five surgical functions — moving, cutting tissue, releasing drugs, gripping samples and generating heat — and switches between them in under a second. The work is published in Advanced Materials. Led by Associate Professor Lum Guo Zhan, the robot deploys a blade to cut tissue or emits heat to a target area, relevant to the heat-based cancer treatments under study.

— Robohubhardwaremanipulation
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10 Aug

Atlas swaps its own battery in under three minutes (3 minute read)

Boston Dynamics says the production Atlas can recognise when its battery is depleted, return to a station, swap the battery in under three minutes and resume its task. It runs about four hours between swaps, or two when lifting heavy loads, while a conventional recharge takes about 90 minutes, which is what makes swapping matter for factories running several shifts.

— interestingengineering.comhumanoidshardware
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8 Aug

Mitsubishi joins the humanoid robot race, at a 1k unit per month pace (2 minute read)

Mitsubishi plans to build up to 1,000 Highlanders humanoids a month at a former engine plant in Kyoto, with mass production possibly starting next year. The robots, co-developed with a University of Tokyo startup, will work in Mitsubishi's own factories first — including building themselves at the Kyoto site. Mitsubishi is better known as a leader in automation and controls than as a carmaker, and the memorandum of understanding with Highlanders was signed last month.

— electrek.cohumanoidshardware
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3 Aug

Sharpa's Wave hand served as verification hardware for Gemini Robotics 2 (2 minute read)

Sharpa's Wave dexterous hand, mounted on Apptronik's Apollo 2, served as verification hardware for Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2. The demonstration covered multi-finger tasks including tying trash bags, unscrewing light bulbs and sealing resealable bags. Gemini Robotics 2 extends control from the upper body to the whole humanoid, feet to fingertips, and in a recorded demo guided Apollo across a room to shelve a watering can while avoiding obstacles.

— Gasgoomanipulationhardwarehumanoids