AtkinsRéalis and the University of Oxford’s Oxford Robotics Institute have formed a partnership to commercialize autonomous inspection and manipulation robots for nuclear decommissioning and energy sector applications, building on deployments already active at Sellafield.
SusHi Tech Tokyo, Asia’s largest startup convention, opened Monday at Tokyo Big Sight with 770 exhibitions across AI, robotics, resilience, and entertainment, targeting 10,000 business negotiations over three days.
Japan Airlines will begin a trial deployment of Unitree humanoid robots for baggage and cargo handling on the tarmac at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport from May, targeting labor shortages driven by record inbound tourism and a shrinking domestic workforce.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have published a study in Science describing tiny robots made from knotted fibers that can jump nearly two meters, control their flight path mid-air, and drive seeds into soil – activated by heat rather than electronics.
Sony’s Ace robotic arm has become the first autonomous system demonstrated to be competitive with elite human table tennis players, according to a study published in Nature, tracking a ball with 10-millisecond latency and winning matches against top-ranked opponents.
At Hannover Messe 2026, German manufacturers and startups showcased AI-powered robots for industrial applications, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz backing wider AI adoption as Germany seeks to close the gap with China and the U.S. in physical AI.
Zoomlion has made the global debut of Robot Ops, an embodied intelligence operating system designed to standardize and accelerate robot deployment across industrial, construction, and logistics applications, at Hannover Messe 2026.
Agibot used its annual partner conference to declare 2026 the first year of large-scale commercial deployment for embodied AI, unveiling five new robotic platforms, eight AI models, and an open-source development architecture called AIMA.
NVIDIA and more than a dozen industrial partners used Hannover Messe 2026 to demonstrate AI-driven manufacturing systems already operating in live production environments, from humanoid robots in electronics factories to vision AI agents on automotive assembly lines.
NEURA Robotics and Amazon Web Services have announced a strategic collaboration to train, validate, and deploy cognitive robots at scale, with Amazon exploring deployment of NEURA systems in select fulfillment centers as a real-world data source for Physical AI development.
More than 3,000 exhibitors at Hannover Messe 2026 showcased physical, generative, and agentic AI systems moving from demonstration into production, with Siemens, Schneider Electric, NVIDIA, and Microsoft presenting deployments already delivering measurable results on factory floors.
UBTECH has appointed Terra Robotics as its exclusive distributor and strategic partner in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, with an initial batch of Walker series humanoid robots already deployed at ROSSMANN logistics centers.
China Southern Power Grid is training humanoid and quadruped robots to perform electrical inspections and basic maintenance tasks across its network, deploying them in the field as part of a broader push to automate physically demanding grid operations.
Chinese robotics startup X Square Robot has partnered with household service platform 58.com to deploy humanoid robots alongside professional cleaners in Shenzhen homes, in one of the first commercial pilots of embodied AI in domestic service environments.
A humanoid robot developed by Honor completed Beijing’s half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, finishing ahead of all 12,000 human competitors and below the standing human world record for the distance.