Robots need policies that can adapt to their sensors, environments, and tasks while running on onboard computing hardware. World models offer a foundation for...
Robots need policies that can adapt to their sensors, environments, and tasks while running on onboard computing hardware. World models offer a foundation for learning physical interactions, but their size can make on-device deployment difficult. This changes with the new NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Edge. Cosmos 3 Edge is a 4B omni-model (with a 2B NVIDIA Nemotron-based reasoner) in the Cosmos 3 family.
X Square Robot is showcasing its full portfolio of embodied AI technologies at the World Robot Conference 2026 in Beijing, presenting applications ranging from logistics automation and dexterous manipulation to household robotics and AI training-data collection. The Shenzhen-based company is exhibiting at booth C107 during WRC, which runs from August 19 to 23, bringing together […]
Faraday Future Intelligent Electric, a California-based global embodied AI ecosystem company, has announced its support for an orderly exit by AIxC Holdings, of which FF is the majority and controlling shareholder, from its digital asset treasury strategy. AIxC intends to focus on physical AI and robot sharing and rental, operations, and commercialization. The two companies […]
Hexagon Robotics and Schaeffler, a motion technology company, has announced the next milestone in their strategic collaboration as AEON enters Schaeffler’s Humanoid Gym in Germany, marking the next step towards the planned deployment of at least 1,000 AEON humanoids in the coming years. The Humanoid Gym provides a Train-Validate-Deploy model in a dedicated industrial environment. Schaeffler […]
Scientists have developed a hybrid robotic skin that combines electrical impedance tomography with pneumatic pressure sensing in an effort to improve force detection across large areas of a humanoid robot, as highlighted by RoboSkin. Described in a preprint published in May 2026, the system uses electrical impedance tomography (EIT) to determine where contact occurs, while four […]
Saminda Wattuhewa, senior lecturer and course leader in cyber security, University of Portsmouth A construction site is one of the worst places to rely on GPS. Concrete floors stack overhead, steel frames scatter the signal, and basements block it outright. Yet this is exactly the environment where autonomous robots are increasingly expected to work precisely […]
The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) and the Mahoning County Career & Technical Center (MCCTC) will offer no-cost robotics and automation training across Ohio through a $499,000 workforce grant that will help the state’s residents build skills for increasingly technology-driven careers. Awarded through Ohio’s Individual Microcredential Assistance Program (IMAP), the grant will support approximately 3,000 […]
Rodriguez has introduced a collaborative linear transfer system that can move a cobot between multiple workstations and extend its operating range to as much as 10 metres. The company is offering Thomson’s Movotrak Cobot Transfer Unit (CTU), which it describes as “a movable seventh axis” designed to allow a single cobot to perform tasks at […]
Brightpick, a provider of AI-powered warehouse automation, is significantly expanding its partnership with Dr. Max Group, Europe’s largest pharmacy chain. Following successful operations and progressive scaling at Dr. Max’s Prague distribution center, Brightpick will deploy an additional 44 Autopicker autonomous mobile robots across other facilities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The total number of […]
FORT Robotics, a safety platform developing a “trust layer” for physical AI, and Newbury Street II Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company, have entered into a definitive business combination agreement that will result in the combined company becoming a publicly traded company. Upon closing of the business combination, the combined company will be named […]
Soft robots that provide patients with tailored support during rehabilitation, gain a sense of touch to safely handle delicate objects, and switch between soft and rigid states depending on the task: these are among the ambitions of RESSORT, a new European research project led by Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Funded by the European Union’s Horizon […]
Microspines are one of many ways to enable robots to latch onto surfaces like walls and ceilings. Now roboticists in Canada are using the mini spikes to get drones to land on a more challenging, remote surface: icebergs.
Like a spider, the Ice Dart can land on and latch onto steep, slippery surfaces such as icebergs and glaciers—an increasingly useful capability as activity in the Arctic increases. The drone can grip onto icy slopes of nearly 60 degrees, which is way beyond what most humans could manage without special equipment.
In a recent study, researchers explained how they developed the Ice Dart drone with a special landing gear that absorbs the impact of a hard landing while holding the drone in place with tiny spines that penetrate and grip the ice.
Published in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics, the study describes how the Ice Dart was able to land on icebergs and a glacier in southeast Iceland. Tests took place amid persistent winds and temperatures of 0 to 10 °C along the ruggedly breathtaking Fjallsjökull (pronounced “FYATLS-yuh-kuutl”) glacier, which empties into a lagoon filled with icebergs. The drone was able to successfully perch at speeds of up to 3 meters per second and slopes of up to 58 degrees, with a success rate of 100 percent even in wind speeds of 30 km/h.
The researchers were motivated by a desire to allow drones to land almost anywhere in the world, since the availability of safe landing sites is one of the primary limitations on where and how drones can operate. The researchers already have a history of developing drones that can land on fast-moving trucks as well as trailers, boats, and steep roofs.
Ice Perching
“The ability to land rather than hover can fundamentally change how drones are used in the field,” says Alexis Lussier Desbiens, a professor of engineering at Université de Sherbrooke, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, who coauthored the study. “Once a drone has landed, energy consumption drops dramatically, allowing much longer observation periods with a small aircraft. The drone also becomes completely silent and can even reduce or eliminate its thermal and RF signature by shutting down major onboard systems.”
Landing on icebergs specifically allows drones to monitor them for days or months, producing more detailed observation than a quick aerial surveillance mission. This could simplify iceberg tracking compared to methods such as helicopter deployment, dropped instruments, or dart-like tracking devices, and provide another data layer to satellite and ship-based iceberg detection, according to the researchers. It could also provide a means of monitoring icebergs that are otherwise untrackable.
With its carbon-fiber construction, the Ice Dart drone weighs just 2.65 kg and has four legs arranged in an X shape, attached to its body with a pivot joint. Used in the group’s previous drone research, this landing gear disperses energy to reduce impact and overcomes multiple engineering challenges. The friction shock absorbers consist of 38 disks that generate friction torque as the legs move up and down upon impact. This lowers the UAV’s center of mass and helps spread out the kinetic energy of landing, but the real trick comes in the form of two retractable spines on each foot—one for uphill and one for downhill grip. The larger spine engages on the more heavily loaded downhill feet, and the smaller, thinner spine engages more easily on the uphill feet, even under very low loads on steep slopes. The spines only penetrate the ice as the suspension compresses, generating grip and protecting them from high-impact forces.
“The inspiration for the retractable spines in the feet came from looking at a cat’s claws and their ability to deploy only when needed,” says Isaac Tunney, a Université de Sherbrooke postdoc in mechanical and robotics engineering who was lead author of the paper. “I wanted to create feet that would naturally and passively engage their spines in the ice at the right moment, regardless of the drone’s orientation, the surface geometry, or the ice conditions.”
Arctic Surveillance
William D. Harcourt is a researcher at the University of Aberdeen, in Aberdeen, Scotland, focused on Arctic glaciers, snow, and sea ice, as well as the use of remote sensing and machine learning techniques. Harcourt was not involved in the study, but he sees several potentially interesting applications of the technology.
“Near the front of tidewater glaciers, these systems could enable measurement of stress and strain and help us understand calving processes,” Harcourt says. “Drones can be used as a mobile GPS, literally acting as a receiver on the ice, but the system would need to solve tilting issues as 3D change measurements usually required the antenna to be horizontal. However, if these problems can be solved, it could be used to track iceberg movements.”
The researchers want to continue developing the Ice Dart technology for real-world applications, including autonomous landing site selection and an emergency takeoff capability to be used if an iceberg rolls over or breaks apart. This August, the drone will be deployed during a Canadian Arctic mission to land on icebergs, collect data, and help validate ship-based iceberg-detection systems.
As robots become more intelligent, autonomous and connected, much of the attention naturally falls on increasingly powerful AI models. But underneath those models is an increasingly complex collection of sensors, processors, control systems and security hardware that must operate reliably – often within strict limits on power consumption, size and heat. Lattice Semiconductor is one […]
Serve Robotics is expanding its autonomous delivery network through a new partnership with Grubhub, while its Diligent Robotics subsidiary begins rolling out the next generation of its Moxi hospital robot across the United States. The Grubhub agreement adds a third major delivery platform to Serve’s network alongside Uber Eats and DoorDash, increasing the number of […]
Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies that seems to be entirely focused on making that happen. Persona AI’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economically viable for robots right now, and they’ve found one that was also the job of one of the very first industrial robots ever sold: welding.
As of our first conversation in 2024, Persona had committed to building an economically viable humanoid, but they hadn’t yet figured out where their focus was going to be. “We were all over the place,” Radford says. “Warehousing, automotive, we probably even mentioned the home.” These are the same environments with the same sorts of potential applications that basically every other humanoid robotics company is attempting to make economically viable, and despite an ever more exhaustive number of demonstrations, so far none have succeeded at any sort of useful scale.
The challenge for Persona, and really for every robotics company, is that it’s not enough that you have a robot that is simply capable of doing a task. It’s also not enough that your robot can do that task in a way that is efficient, reliable, and safe. What’s required is that your robot can make money for both you and your customer. Most humanoid companies seek to achieve this by targeting baseline “unskilled” human labor.
Persona did not see economic viability in the unskilled labor approach, Radford says. “We started forming this thesis around skilled trades and tool usage.” Persona is targeting much more expensive skilled labor with its robots, and the reason why this is feasible is because their entry point focuses on the kind of skills that robots are especially good at. “I like to call it ‘last-mover advantage.’ We’ve seen everything that everybody’s doing, and we’ve decided that there’s a different way.”
The first task that Persona’s humanoid is focusing on is welding—using a handheld tool to connect one piece of metal to another. “Tool use is pretty difficult,” Pratt says. “And we want to use the same tools that humans do, which makes it more difficult.” That difficulty is offset somewhat by the fact that Persona’s humanoid will first focus on making long, linear welds that are relatively uncomplicated. “This is not the hardest style of weld,” Radford says, “but in shipbuilding you need a lot of them—hundreds of kilometers of linear welds per ship.”
Currently, Persona has two public partnerships: one with HD Hyundai, which is the world’s largest shipbuilder, and the other with POSCO, one of the largest steel producers in the world, both in Korea. Persona declined to get into detail, but Radford says that broadly speaking, the company is interested in customers who can support ‘hundreds’ of robots per location.
Shipyard welding is an enticing application for Persona because there is a deficit of skilled (and highly paid) workers, it’s taxing physical labor, and it’s a comparatively easy skill for a humanoid to learn.
The welding process is skilled in a very robot-friendly way. Because you can only weld as fast as metal melts, the top speed for the task is an easily manageable centimeter per second. And making a high quality weld involves millimeter-scale repeated motions, which robots excel at, especially over long periods of time—whereas humans tend to get tired or bored. Pratt expects that for these uncomplicated welds, performing on par with humans—if not eventually better—will be achievable soon.
Shipyards make a compelling case for a humanoid with legs, as opposed to a more stable wheeled base. “These open-air shipyards are a couple hundred meters long, with horizontal and vertical spars that you have to step over all the time,” Radford says. “You’ve got to work on the ground, overhead, and through portholes.” Persona considered other form factors, like four legs (or even more), but determined a two-legged robot would be the least disruptive to existing shipyard rhythms.
The Economic Viability of Humanoids
Deploying their robots in shipyards specifically brings additional advantages for Persona. The safety concerns that come with bipedal robots—such as potentially falling over on a human worker—are lessened because a shipyard environment is staffed with workers who are trained to work around potentially dangerous industrial equipment. The company is also less sensitive to competitive pricing because no other company is pursuing the use case. “We’re now in an industry where the value added by our robot can be high enough that we don’t have to cut corners on quality and features in order to reduce the price,” Pratt says. “With a robot for the home, for example, there would be a lot of competition and a ton of price pressure.”
The added value for shipbuilders, Radford explains, doesn’t come from replacing humans with robots. “Our current partnerships are running at a significant backlog, and they’re labor-constrained. So we want to help our customers’ top line, not necessarily their bottom line.” In other words, rather than trying to argue that their robots will lower shipbuilding costs, Persona is instead arguing that their robots will allow more ships to be built. “Even if our robot was more expensive than a human, that would still be valuable to these companies, because it could unlock additional revenue,” Radford says. And when the additional skilled labor does not exist, Persona’s robots could be the next-best option for shipbuilders who need to scale.
Shipyards are environments where legs are necessary for a robot to be useful.CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images
Persona’s Multipurpose Future
In the current commercial humanoid climate, where the emphasis seems to be on developing a “general purpose” robot (whatever that means) that will somehow justify itself through some undefined scale in some equally undefined and perpetually receding future, Persona stands out with their focus on a seemingly viable, near-term, and very specific business case. It hasn’t been easy, though. “It hurts us a little bit,” Radford says. “We’ve been told that we’re not thinking big enough.”
But a tool-using heavy industrial humanoid has plenty of future applications, many of which can be expanded from the welding skill even within shipyards. “Shipbuilding is a great beachhead,” Pratt says. “There are tons of adjacent markets, like grinding, painting, and other kinds of fabrication.” Persona’s ambition, Radford adds, is to be “the largest repository of industrial skills.”
It’s going to take time to get there. That time will be needed to collect tens of thousands of hours of expert demonstration data, create high-fidelity simulations, and conduct real-world testing. And however promising Persona’s approach may seem, the company still has to prove that its idea for an economically viable robotics company can be realized. It’s the same challenge that every humanoid robot company is facing. “A lot of the technical problems are the same no matter whether you’re in a house or a shipyard,” Pratt says. “Everybody’s got a great team and smart people, and we’re all knocking these problems out together.”
Industrial networks used to have a fairly contained job: connect a few controllers, operator stations and plant systems, then keep them running for years. That model is changing quickly. A production floor may now include collaborative robots, machine-vision cameras, automated guided vehicles, connected tooling, industrial PCs and cloud-connected analytics platforms – all producing and consuming […]
Gravis Robotics has raised $200 million in a Series A investment from SoftBank to scale its autonomous heavy machinery technology across construction sites globally. The company says growing demand for energy networks, data centers, housing, transit and climate-resilient infrastructure is placing increasing pressure on the construction industry. Labor shortages are adding to the challenge, while […]
South Korean electronics giant LG is developing a next-generation bipedal humanoid robot built using Nvidia Isaac GR00T, Nvidia’s open reasoning humanoid foundation model, for a public unveiling in the first quarter of next year. LG and Nvidia signed a memorandum of understanding on August 13 at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, with chairman and […]
Unitree Robotics’ initial public offering has reportedly been oversubscribed more than 5,000 times as investors scramble for shares in one of China’s best-known humanoid robot manufacturers. The Hangzhou-based company priced its IPO at 150.8 yuan ($22.4) per share, raising approximately $900 million and giving Unitree a valuation of around $9 billion, according to CNBC. Demand […]
Northrop Grumman has launched a sophisticated robotic spacecraft designed to service satellites in orbit, potentially allowing expensive space assets to be repaired, upgraded, moved and kept operational long after their original fuel supplies have been depleted. The company’s Mission Robotic Vehicle, or MRV, launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 […]
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Robots need policies that can adapt to their sensors, environments, and tasks while running on onboard computing hardware. World models offer a foundation for...