Robotics & Physical AI | Tech AI Latest

Agility Robotics and GXO expand Digit humanoids to North Carolina and Tennessee sites

Tech AI Latest — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

GXO Logistics and Agility Robotics announced on 26 October 2026 that Digit humanoid robots will expand to GXO e-commerce sites in Statesville and Lebanon, in North Carolina and Tennessee. Deployments are expected to start in early 2027 with Digit 4 and move to Digit 5 once it is commercially available. At GXO's Flowery Branch, Georgia site, Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes. Robot numbers and contract terms are not stated.

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ETH Zurich builds lab-grown muscle robot that jumps a third of its body length

Tech AI Latest — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab reported in Nature Communications a biohybrid robot powered by lab-grown mouse muscle tissue on a 3D-printed hydrogel scaffold. The 1.5 cm actuator lifts about 5 mm off the dish in one contraction, about a third of its body length, and a walking version reaches 6.2 mm/s. The team designed muscle and scaffold together in simulation. ETH announced the work on 22 October 2026.

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NVIDIA adds Agile ONE SN reference humanoid and Isaac Lab 3.0 to its robotics platform

Tech AI Latest — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:20:00 GMT

NVIDIA expanded its Isaac robotics platform at GTC Berlin on 21 October 2026. Agile Robots will build the Agile ONE SN reference humanoid on Isaac GR00T and Jetson Thor, due in early 2027, with Stanford and ETH Zurich interested. NVIDIA also made Isaac Lab 3.0 generally available, released the open-source Isaac OS runtime, and put more than 2,000 simulation-ready assets and a human activity dataset on Hugging Face.

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NVIDIA expands Cosmos world models with Data Factory blueprints and training framework

Tech AI Latest — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

NVIDIA expanded its Cosmos world model platform on 21 October 2026 with Cosmos Data Factory, five cloud blueprints for generating and curating training data, and a Cosmos Framework for fine-tuning and deploying robot and driving models such as GR00T, Alpamayo and Pi0.5. Updated Cosmos 3 NIM microservices give up to 2x faster inference, NVIDIA says. Porsche, ANYbotics, MicroAGI and ADNOC are named as users. Licence terms are not stated.

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Waymo starts driving in Madrid ahead of a planned 2027 robotaxi launch in Spain

Tech AI Latest — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Waymo announced on 20 October 2026 that it is preparing a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Spain, starting in the Region of Madrid, and aims to welcome its first riders in 2027. Electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles were due on Madrid streets within days, first driven manually and then validated with trained specialists behind the wheel. Waymo says it has completed more than 20 million trips. Permits, partners and fleet size are not stated.

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Google DeepMind shows Gemini 4 Argon for robotics with 87% on the ERQA benchmark

Tech AI Latest — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:01:00 GMT

Google DeepMind published robotics results for Gemini 4 Argon on 13 October 2026. The post says the model scores 87% on the ERQA embodied reasoning benchmark using pure reasoning, builds MuJoCo simulations from robot logs, human video and hand sketches, and raised a two-arm robot's real-world success from 56% to 75% after practising in a simulated twin. Argon is available in the Gemini API paid tier and to Google AI Ultra subscribers.

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Physical Intelligence opens Pi API beta to fine-tune and host its robot models

Tech AI Latest — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Physical Intelligence announced a beta of its Pi API on 13 October 2026. Robot makers can upload their own data, launch fine-tuning on infrastructure the company manages, and run the resulting models through a hosted gateway. Partners named include Actor, which runs an autonomous wheel loader, and Almond, whose team iterated with the API for four days. Prices, latency figures and the model version behind the API are not stated.

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Boston Dynamics unveils GR3 hand for Atlas with 13 degrees of freedom and tactile skin

Tech AI Latest — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:10:00 GMT

Boston Dynamics presented GR3 on 1 October 2026, a new hand for its Atlas humanoid robot. It has four fingers and 13 degrees of freedom, up from 7 on the previous GR2 hand, with a four-degree-of-freedom opposable thumb and dense pressure sensors across the fingertips and palm. The company says the hand can carry a loaded minifridge of more than 100 lb and was designed for simulation-based training. No ship date is given.

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Figure reports Helix 2.5 humanoid model reaches 56% zero-shot success in 30 new homes

Tech AI Latest — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Figure published results for Helix 2.5 on 17 September 2026, its humanoid robot model pretrained from scratch on Index, a dataset of human behaviour. Tested zero-shot in 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen, the model completed tidying, towel folding and bed making 56% of the time, against 9% for the same model trained without Index pretraining. Figure also reports a scaling law that predicted test loss before training.

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Waymo opens robotaxi rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, reaching 14 cities

Tech AI Latest — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Waymo announced on 1 September 2026 that it has started welcoming its first public riders in Denver, San Diego and Tampa. With these launches, Waymo says it offers fully autonomous rides in 14 cities. Tens of thousands of people in each city had signed up or shown interest, and access will widen over time through the Waymo app. Service area sizes, fleet numbers and prices are not stated.

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