Pins matching tag:Robotics

In 1961 General Motors installed the Unimate, the world's first industrial robot, at its New Jersey factory to lift and stack hot die-cast metal parts. Industry 4.0 opens its history of factory automation with this machine.

This robot needs only one hour to pump out 400 burgers made with fresh ground beef, salad, complete with a toasted bun. Tech blog Xconomy reported the prototype they saw demoed could save a fast-food restaurant up to $90,000 a year in training, salaries, and overhead costs.

Boston Dynamics revealed the product version of its fully electric Atlas humanoid at Hyundai's CES media day and began building it at its Boston headquarters immediately. Every 2026 Atlas is already committed, with fleets going to Hyundai's Robotics Metaplant Application Center and to Google DeepMind.

Four months after presenting Blue Jay as its newest warehouse system - a single workspace where several robotic arms pick, stow and consolidate about 75% of the item types Amazon stocks - Amazon said it was no longer using it in operations, keeping only the underlying technology.

The Shanghai company said it had built its 10,000th humanoid, having taken nearly two years over the first thousand and just three months over the last five thousand - a fourfold acceleration it presents as the industry crossing from pilots into large-scale commercial deployment.

Figure said its BotQ plant had gone from building one Figure 03 a day to one an hour in under 120 days - a 24x ramp that delivered more than 350 of its third-generation humanoids, with end-of-line first-pass yield above 80% and over 9,000 actuators built.

1X started full-scale production of its NEO home humanoid at a 58,000 sq ft plant in Hayward, California, making its own motors, batteries, structures and sensors in-house - capacity for 10,000 NEOs a year, after the first year's run sold out in five days.

At GTC Taipei, NVIDIA announced the first open humanoid reference design: a Unitree H2 Plus chassis with Sharpa Wave five-finger tactile hands for the body, and Jetson Thor compute plus the open Isaac GR00T stack for the brain, aimed at academic robotics labs.

Shares in China's best-known humanoid maker opened at 1,100 yuan on Shanghai's STAR Market, 629% above the 150.8-yuan offer price, valuing Unitree at about 445 billion yuan (US$66 billion). Some 9.8 million retail accounts had chased 9.7 million shares.

The second edition brought 2,056 robots from 666 teams to the National Speed Skating Oval for 51 events, from football and tug of war to firefighting drills. Tiangong Ultra took the humanoid 100 m to 8.86 seconds - faster than Usain Bolt's human record.

Tesla's third-generation Optimus humanoid was due to be revealed mid-2026, with production at Fremont starting late July or August; the reveal has slipped repeatedly from an original Q1 2026 target.

Tesla put its two-seat Cybercab, which has no steering wheel or pedals, into robotaxi service in Austin after an invitation-only launch at ACL Live on 3 September 2026, opening rides to the public the next evening.

At Tokyo's Physical AI Summit the AI Robot Association showed the first prototypes from its NEDO-backed contest to build a domestic general-purpose robot. ugo's entry, the wheeled dual-arm Nova, was developed in about six months and goes into mass production in 2027.

NVIDIA's GPU-accelerated ROS packages add AI agent skills, agent-ready documentation and ROS 2 Lyrical support, released at ROSCon in Toronto for a community of nearly 1.3 million ROS users.

Hyundai's CES 2026 robotics strategy commits Boston Dynamics' Atlas to parts-sequencing work at Metaplant America in Georgia by 2028, after the humanoids are trained at the group's Robot Metaplant Application Center; assembly tasks are to follow by 2030.