A Sichuan company has developed a cooking robot that can produce wok hei, the smoky aroma prized in Chinese stir-fry. It relies on sensors, machine vision, and a database of more than 10,000 recipes to mimic a chef’s judgment.
The Mondo Beni is a small bipedal robot that records video while tracking users, but its obstacle avoidance is terrible. The reviewer found it fun but fundamentally flawed, with mediocre camera quality and a high price, making it hard to recommend unless Mondo fixes the obstacle avoidance.
IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday roundup features Goose, a small home robot, plus Skydio's F10 fixed-wing drone and a swarm of tiny robots. Other highlights include a $6,500 dexterous hand, Boston Dynamics' Stretch durability testing, underwater collaborative arms from ULOHA, Astribot demonstrations, and a record-breaking Unitree humanoid performance at WorldSkills Shanghai 2026.
Researchers developed a solar-powered seeding robot that integrates precision seed metering with sustainable energy. Tests show spacing accuracy of 98.08% to 98.80%, with optimal performance at low speeds and wider spacing.
Researchers are testing robotic rabbits in the Florida Everglades to attract invasive Burmese pythons. The solar-powered decoys mimic rabbit heat, scent, and movement and cost about $4,000 each.
AgiBot subsidiary Critical Point's dexterous hand OmniHand won seven golds at the World Humanoid Robot Games. CEO Qiao Tianjie says dexterous hands are key for robots to use human tools, but reliability, algorithms and commercialization remain major challenges.
General Robotics is betting on modular intelligence rather than a single robot brain, as discussed by CTO Sai Vemprala on The Robot Report Podcast. The episode also covered news including Agility Robotics exploring wheeled robots and Boston Dynamics opening a new training center.
In Robot Talk Episode 163, host Claire speaks with Aaron Edsinger, CEO and co-founder of Hello Robot. They discuss how Stretch robots are designed to help people with mobility challenges live more independently, and Edsinger shares insights from his career building collaborative robotics companies and leading robotics efforts at Google.
ETH Zurich researchers have built an 818-gram cableless robot hand that can use its five fingers as legs to crawl, recover from falls, and interact with objects. The project combines a humanoid hand with reinforcement learning to explore a design principle of reducing hardware and letting existing parts perform more functions.
At the REK robot combat event in San Francisco on September 20, China's EngineAI T800 humanoid robot knocked down influencer boxer Frankie LaPenna with a single kick. The bout was not autonomous: an operator in a VR headset drove the robot remotely while the machine handled balance and posture correction.
Knowin released GLOW, a generative learning architecture for general embodied intelligence, aiming to let robots learn tasks from a single demonstration. The technical report details a unified multimodal autoregressive model and reports leading results on RoboDojo, LIBERO-Pro, and Embodied Arena.