SoftBank Robotics America has signed a strategic partnership with Matternet, a drone delivery company, to accelerate the deployment of autonomous aerial last-mile delivery in the U.S. and other key markets. The deal combines SoftBank Robotics America’s role as a physical AI integrator with Matternet’s FAA-certified drone platform, targeting enterprise operators in healthcare, commerce, and industrial logistics.

Last-mile delivery continues to face structural pressure from labor shortages, rising costs, and urban congestion. Autonomous aerial delivery is emerging as a cost-competitive alternative to traditional ground-based methods, particularly at scale.

What Each Company Brings

Matternet has spent more than a decade building commercial drone delivery infrastructure. The company is the first in the industry to achieve both FAA Type Certification and Production Certification, and its technology has enabled tens of thousands of commercial flights in urban and suburban environments across the U.S. and Europe. Its M2 drone and software platform are already deployed through partnerships with UPS and Ameriflight.

SoftBank Robotics America operates as an integrator – its role is to take proven autonomous technologies and embed them into real-world operational environments at scale. The company works across senior living, hospitality, aviation, facilities management, and commercial cleaning, and has built a track record of translating robotics pilots into production deployments.

Brady Watkins, President and GM of SoftBank Robotics America, said:

“The challenge is not the technology, but rather operationalizing the technology such that it produces consistent measurable outcomes.”

Healthcare as the Initial Focus

The partnership’s initial emphasis is on healthcare, where delivery speed and reliability directly affect patient outcomes. Medical supplies, lab samples, and pharmaceuticals represent a natural fit for autonomous aerial delivery – time-sensitive, high-value, and moving between fixed points such as hospitals, labs, and pharmacies.

Katya Akudovich, Vice President of New Ventures at SoftBank Robotics America, said:

“By combining Matternet’s technology with our global commercialization capability and experience, we are creating a powerful partnership to bring the benefits of autonomous drone delivery into day-to-day operations for vertical markets such as healthcare where speed and reliability are mission critical.”

Scaling the Infrastructure

Andreas Raptopoulos, founder and CEO of Matternet, framed the partnership as part of a broader shift toward autonomous logistics networks. He said:

“Our partnership with SoftBank Robotics America will accelerate deployment of our technology and help build the autonomous delivery infrastructure for healthcare, commerce, and industry.”

The partnership does not introduce new drone hardware. Instead, it focuses on the integration layer – the processes, support structures, and operational frameworks needed to move autonomous drone delivery from isolated pilots to consistent, large-scale networks. That focus on operationalization rather than invention reflects where the autonomous delivery industry is broadly: the technology is sufficiently mature, but deployment at enterprise scale remains the central challenge. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the agreement.

Accenture has invested in General Robotics, a startup building a unified AI intelligence platform for industrial robots, through its Accenture Ventures arm. The two companies will also partner to help manufacturers, logistics operators, and other asset-intensive industries deploy autonomous robotic systems at scale. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The deal reflects a wider strategic push by Accenture to move beyond software consulting and into the physical infrastructure of AI-driven automation.

The Problem GRID Is Designed to Solve

Most factories operate robots from multiple manufacturers, each running its own software stack, programming language, and integration requirements. Scaling automation across a multi-vendor fleet is expensive and slow, and the cost has historically limited full deployment to only the largest industrial operators.

General Robotics addresses this with GRID, a platform that sits above the hardware layer and connects robots from more than 40 manufacturers – including FANUC, Flexiv, Ghost Robotics, and Galaxea – under a single orchestration framework. Rather than programming each machine individually, GRID offers modular, reusable AI skills deployable across different hardware through cloud-based orchestration, simulation-based training, and full data sovereignty for enterprise customers.

“While robotics hardware and AI models advance at a rapid pace, real-world impact is constrained by the lack of a unified intelligence infrastructure,” said Ashish Kapoor, CEO and co-founder of General Robotics. Kapoor previously served as general manager of autonomous systems and robotics research at Microsoft, where he created AirSim, a widely used open-source simulator for training autonomous vehicles and drones.

Accenture’s Physical AI Strategy

The investment extends an infrastructure position Accenture has been building for over a year. The company launched its Physical AI Orchestrator in October 2025, a system that uses NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and the NVIDIA Mega Blueprint to coordinate robotic and autonomous systems in industrial settings. GRID integrates NVIDIA Isaac Sim, allowing manufacturers to train robotic AI skills in digital twins before deploying them on physical hardware – a capability that aligns directly with Accenture’s existing toolchain.

Where Accenture’s Physical AI Orchestrator handles coordination at the facility level, GRID handles robot-level AI – the skills, perception, and decision-making that individual machines need to perform complex tasks autonomously. Together, the two layers form a more complete stack for enterprise robotics deployment.

Prior investments in Sanctuary AI and a partnership with Schaeffler for industrial humanoid robots in automotive manufacturing point to a consistent thesis: Accenture is positioning itself as the primary integrator for physical AI at the enterprise level.

Scale and Market Context

“Piloting robotic systems takes too long, is expensive, and often not scalable and repeatable across a network of facilities,” said Prasad Satyavolu, Accenture’s global lead for manufacturing and operations. The stated goal of the partnership is to compress that deployment cycle by delivering an enterprise-grade robotics intelligence and orchestration layer that clients can apply across multiple facilities.

The physical AI market is projected to grow from roughly $1.5 billion in 2026 to more than $15 billion by 2032. A Deloitte survey found that 58% of global business leaders are already using some form of physical AI, though scaled deployment remains concentrated in automotive, electronics, and logistics. General Robotics remains an early-stage company without publicly reported revenue figures, and the broader challenge – persuading manufacturers to adopt an independent orchestration layer over proprietary vendor platforms – will require demonstrated performance on working factory floors, not just in simulation.

Grab unveiled an AI-powered delivery robot called Carri at GrabX 2026, the company’s annual product event held in Jakarta this month. The announcement is part of a broader push by the Singapore-based super app to embed physical automation into a platform that has long depended entirely on gig workers.

Anthony Tan, Grab’s CEO and co-founder, said the company is building an Intelligence Layer – AI infrastructure fueled by real-world, real-time signals – that sits underneath every feature and innovation in the app. That layer now extends into hardware.

Carri and the Indoor Delivery Problem

Tan said delivery partners currently lose around 10% of their earning time navigating large malls or waiting for customers to come down from office buildings. Carri is designed to absorb that idle time by handling restaurant retrieval and handoff, freeing drivers to stay on the road.

The robot is built for both indoor and outdoor environments, equipped with LIDAR sensors and cameras to navigate crowds and avoid obstacles. It features secure storage compartments that open only for the specific user assigned to a given order.

Carri is still in the development and testing phase, and the pricing or cost model for deployment has not yet been determined. Tan framed the move as a natural extension of the platform’s AI capabilities into the physical world. “We are moving into hardware to improve the messy physical parts of the job that software alone cannot fix,” he said.

13 New Features Across Three User Groups

GrabX 2026 introduced 13 AI-powered features designed around three core pillars: local life, effortless travel, and business empowerment.

For consumers, Grab introduced Group Ride for shared fares, GrabMore for multi-merchant orders under a single delivery fee, and a Grab AI Assistant that handles food, shopping, and bookings. GrabMaps and a Cash Loan product round out the consumer-facing additions.

For travelers, Grab unveiled GrabStays for hotel bookings, Discover by Grab for AI-curated dining recommendations, and GrabPay for Travel to enable cross-border QR payments across Southeast Asia.

For merchants and drivers, Grab announced a Virtual Store Manager using CCTV hardware for AI-powered monitoring, a Cloud Printer to automate order handling, and Tap to Pay to turn smartphones into contactless payment terminals. A Driver AI Assistant provides hands-free route and earnings guidance.

Monetization and the Road Ahead

Tan said Grab is also planning to extend its intelligence layer into autonomous vehicles and CCTV cameras, signaling that hardware will become a structural component of the business rather than a peripheral experiment.

On the revenue side, merchant hardware tools including cloud printers and virtual store management are set to move from free trials to a subscription model. A recent Barclays analysis estimated that widespread use of robots and drones in food delivery could reduce per-order costs to as little as $1 – a threshold that, if reached, would reshape the unit economics of every major delivery platform in the region.

A mobile irrigation robot developed by researchers at the University of California, Riverside is challenging one of agriculture’s most persistent assumptions: that crops in the same field require the same amount of water.

By mapping soil moisture at the level of individual trees, the system reveals significant variation even between neighboring plants, suggesting that conventional irrigation methods may be systematically inefficient.

The findings point to a broader shift in agricultural robotics, where mobile sensing systems are replacing static infrastructure to deliver more granular, data-driven decisions.

From Field Averages to Tree-Level Precision

Traditional irrigation relies on fixed sensors and uniform watering schedules, operating on the assumption that conditions are relatively consistent across a field. The robot developed at UCR takes a different approach, scanning soil conditions continuously as it moves through orchards.

In field trials across citrus groves in California, the system detected sharp differences in water availability between adjacent trees, despite identical irrigation inputs. These variations were linked to differences in soil composition, where finer soils retained water more effectively than sandier patches.

The robot measures electrical conductivity in the soil – a proxy for moisture – and combines those readings with calibration data from a limited number of ground sensors. The result is a detailed moisture map that identifies both under-watered and over-watered areas.

This level of resolution allows irrigation to be adjusted at a much finer scale, turning what has traditionally been a field-wide estimate into a localized decision.

Reducing Waste and Managing Risk

The implications extend beyond water conservation. Overwatering can damage crops by depriving roots of oxygen and increasing susceptibility to disease, while also washing fertilizers deeper into the soil, where they can no longer be absorbed.

By identifying these imbalances, the system enables growers to maintain soil moisture within a narrower, optimal range. In testing, the model achieved high accuracy with relatively few calibration points, suggesting that widespread deployment may not require dense sensor networks.

This efficiency is significant in an industry where the cost of installing and maintaining sensors can limit adoption of precision agriculture technologies.

The approach also aligns with broader pressures facing agriculture, particularly in water-constrained regions. As drought conditions intensify, growers are increasingly forced to either reduce production or find ways to use water more efficiently.

Robotics Expands Beyond Automation

Unlike many agricultural robots focused on harvesting or crop monitoring, this system highlights a different role for robotics: acting as a mobile data layer that enhances decision-making rather than directly performing physical tasks.

The platform used in the study is capable of autonomous navigation, although it was manually operated during trials. Future versions are expected to operate independently, covering larger areas and integrating more closely with irrigation systems.

Several challenges remain before commercial deployment, including adapting the system to different crops, soil types, and environmental conditions. The relationship between surface measurements and deeper soil moisture also requires further refinement.

The development reflects a broader trend in robotics toward combining mobility with sensing and AI-driven analysis. By moving through environments rather than relying on fixed points, robots can capture variability that static systems miss.

In agriculture, where small differences in soil conditions can have large impacts on yield and resource use, that shift may prove particularly consequential.

If validated at scale, tree-level irrigation mapping could redefine how farms manage water – not as a uniform input, but as a variable resource tailored to each plant.