MIT
What changed, and what is the evidence.
Physical AIControlDeploymentsHumanoidsSensingModelsActuationComputeHandsDataFundingVisionEnd EffectorsGpuHandsInferenceEnergyFactoryFleetBatteryDigitPolicyQuadrupedsRuntimeTariffWorld Models
🗞️ Pulse first · 3 news posts
Coverage
- 🗓️ 2026-10-22 · ✍️ RoboterminalEka's Robot Picks 1,500 Things an Hour. Its Gripper Is Rated for About 139 Days of That.
- 🗓️ 2026-10-21 · ✍️ RoboterminalSchaeffler Will Buy Thousands of Humanoids From Its Actuator Customers. Its €400 Million Order Book Doesn't Count Those Deals.
- 🗓️ 2026-10-19 · ✍️ RoboterminalFifteen Humanoids Are Loading Car Parts at 98%. The Number That Decides Their Future Is 15 Seconds.
Related topics
Timeline
What changed, and what is the evidence.
Oct 22, 2026 · Funding · posted
| Headline |
|---|
DeepSeek did not raise roughly $15 billion, about 100 billion yuan from CATL and Tencent, to build a better chatbot. That round is one of the largest in Chinese tech history, Bloomberg is calling it a direct challenge to the leading US… |
Can robots grasp objects without vision? In a study by MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab and collaborators, Flexiv’s Rizon 4 supported blind grasping research, achieving 96% success on YCB and 95% on GraspXL in simulation. 🦾 #Flexiv #Robotics… |
🚨 BREAKING: @EkaRobotics just raised $150M in Series A funding at a $1.45 billion valuation, led by a16z and F-Prime Capital. The founding team is exceptional. @pulkitology is an MIT professor. Tuomas Haarnoja is a former DeepMind… |
We believe solving dexterous manipulation is one of the largest opportunities in robotics. That’s why we're thrilled to lead Eka Robotics’ Series A. Much of the world's physical economy still depends on people using their hands, and that… |
Powered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through watery maze https://t.co/rwfg40BS0E |
They say robotics moved west, but Boston didn’t get the memo. 🦞 The Massachusetts ecosystem is one of the world's leading hubs for robotics, combining top research, companies, and deep-tech investment. At its core are Massachusetts… |
This is the real deal! Trained in simulation. Deployed in reality. No post-training, just... pre-training. A humanoid robot executing soccer skills like dribbling at 2.3 m/s, passing, turning, and scoring on outdoor fields amid people,… |
A new planning system ensures that a robot’s flight path remains clear, which could aid in disaster response or search-and-rescue missions. “In the hardest possible environment,” Kota Kondo says, “we established a mathematical guarantee of… |
Jensen Huang flew to London this week and didn't fund a chip order. He funded five very specific bets: molecule prediction, infrastructure timelines, algorithm discovery, disease biology, and quantum error correction. The deployment sits… |
SPROUT is a flexible search-and-rescue robot developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the University of Notre Dame. Its inflatable body squeezes through narrow gaps in rubble. Cameras and sensors help rescuers explore collapsed buildings… |
I think the most important thing in robotics right now, is a problem i can't tackle without a ton of gpus. The second most important problem is more traceable than ever https://t.co/mHthmN6ujS |
Revenge of the GPU poor roboticists (MIT) |
This new ingestible paper #battery developed by MIT scientists could power medical devices inside the body before safely breaking down. https://t.co/27rZofHgac https://t.co/4JmDwa6znM |
Researchers at MIT developed Draft, a tool that lets engineers design and customize robots by adjusting parameters such as limb length, body size, and motor power. It uses real-world hardware data and reinforcement learning to estimate… |
Reinforcement learning is often seen as key to achieving scalable, highly reliable real-world robot performance, yet it requires good reward functions that can supervise the wide range of tasks that need to be performed. The obvious thing… |
A humanoid robot that can catch a moving cup Most robots freeze the second something starts moving. Cup on a belt, shifting grasp, anything not stuck in place --and they miss. Long-WAM from NVIDIA (with MIT, HKU, UCSD) went after that. On… |
Top stories in robotics today: - Minerva builds a bomb-disposal humanoid - Agilink teaches a robot hand embroidery - Every step charges this tiny robot - MIT gives drones a mathematical survival instinct https://t.co/GRREDYfDPh |
Some jobs shouldn't have a human in them at all! ⚠️ I visited @mnv_humanoids in Stuttgart, who are building humanoids for hazardous industrial and public safety work. Yesterday they came out of stealth with a ~$10M pre-seed round led by… |
Mecka AI just raised a $60M Series B led by Sequoia. NVIDIA, Microsoft M12, Qualcomm, and Samsung also participated, along with angels including Tony Xu, Frank Slootman, and former Tesla Optimus lead Milan Kovac. Total funding now exceeds… |
"Hey Alexa... uh, I mean Atlas, hand me the drill." Boston Dynamics has a new CEO: Rohit Prasad, the man who built Alexa. And it's a notable break from BD's past. BD's first two CEOs were hardcore roboticists who helped pioneer the field.… |
Spot ADAM in the headlines! 🤖 Amid growing tech competition with China, @CNNBusiness spotlighted our robot bartender, ADAM, as a prime example of domestic innovation and U.S.-native robotics. Richtech Robotics is proud to represent the… |
Full episode dropping soon! Geeking out with @Philip_MIT @thomas_weng on SOLE-R1: Video-Language Reasoning as the Sole Reward for On-Robot RL https://t.co/Cirfab51a8 Co-hosted by @micoolcho @DJiafei https://t.co/kZWazilgIi |
Late 2026 is packed with robotics events across Japan, the US, and Europe. United States • Ann Arbor Physical AI Workshop • Long Horizon Physical AI Summit • RoboBusiness 2026 • RobOpsCon 2026 • Minds in Motion @ MIT • F50 Physical AI… |
Top stories in robotics today: - DoorDash builds its own delivery drone - Dyna’s robot handles the entire laundry stack - ETH teaches disembodied robot hand to crawl - MIT puts living muscle into a paper-thin robot https://t.co/0nLTqcBxrl |
(ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ: ғʟᴀsʜɪɴɢ ʟɪɢʜᴛs) MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin swimming robot powered by living skeletal muscle cells. Controlled using blue light, the muscle-powered robot can propel itself through water, offering a new approach to… |
The SeaPerch underwater robot, a “do-it-yourself” maker project, is a popular educational tool for middle and high school students. Developed by MIT Sea Grant, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) teaches hand fabrication processes,… |
Engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can swim underwater, and flap out of the water to continue flying through air, much like a diving bird. The robot can help scientists study the mechanics that… |
IROS 2026 lists 183 exhibitors in its official directory including companies and organizations. 1. 42de GmbH 2. Abaka AI 3. Aether AI 4. AGIBOT 5. AgileX Robotics 6. Agility 7. Amazon 8. Analog Devices Inc 9. Apex Sensing LLC 10. Applied… |
SLAM dunk your robotics knowledge! ⛹🏼♂️ Robots are getting smarter and more capable, hence SLAM is often considered one of the "holy grail" of robotics, enabling machines to map unknown environments while tracking their own position… |
What is #physicalAI? Our CTO Pras Velagapudi joined @MIT_CSAIL to dive deep into physical intelligence. Worth a watch: https://t.co/ykzUoF1XyV |
My read on Xiaomi shipping MiMo-V2.6-Pro this week: the real story isn't the benchmark score. It's who is now capable of putting up that score. Xiaomi, a phone and appliance company, published MiMo-V2.6-Pro and Flash on Hugging Face… |
Another Chinese lab just gave away a trillion parameter model for free, and the market barely blinked because it's the fourth time this year. Xiaomi open sourced MiMo-V2.6 today: two natively omnimodal models, Pro and Flash, both MIT… |
Ori-TENG is a design and fabrication framework for 3D printed origami tessellations that function as triboelectric sensors and energy harvesters Video Credit: MIT CSAIL Engineering Group #engineering #technology https://t.co/rB1vVDOiXr |
Apple shipped something small this cycle that I think matters more than another point release of a frontier model: macOS 27 now includes an fm command in the terminal, putting Apple's on-device model one shell command away from every… |
A robot that throws a baseball at 113 km/h 🥎 AthenaZero, from the @rai_inst, on the cover of Science Robotics this month. Effective mass at the wrist: 3.97 kg. The paper measures a Franka at 29.21 kg and a UR5e at 34.72 kg on the same… |
Open source just shipped a 744B agentic model. Shanghai AI Lab released Atria Dawn Preview on September 11 with no blog post, no pricing announcement, and no press release. Just a Hugging Face commit and an FP8 checkpoint the next day. The… |
Computer use just got a practical OSS primitive. CUA-S1-FORMS from trycua: MIT license, 90.75% accuracy, 38ms local latency, 8.84x faster than GLINER 2.5. Small, specialized, on-device. One job done well. https://t.co/UtGz4VtRgf |
No training for every tool. No task-specific policy. Just one policy learning how to manipulate unfamiliar tools. 🤯🤖 Researchers have developed SimToolReal, a sim-to-real reinforcement learning framework for zero-shot dexterous tool… |
MIT and EPFL engineers built a puffin-inspired robot that can fly and swim underwater. It uses flapping wings to move through both environments without extra propulsion. The robot could study icebergs, monitor whales, and collect water… |
STEALTH 🥷: 5 founders building in stealth, recently flagged by the stealth discovery pipeline coming soon to @frontrunvc: 👇 1. @vipul_1011 = research scientist at @scale_AI, FAIR at @AIatMeta, red-teamed DALL-E 2 at @OpenAI, PhD… |
Robot boats that build a bridge out of themselves 🚤 FloatForm, from MIT CSAIL and the MIT Senseable City Lab, published in Nature. Each unit is a 21 cm square boat, roughly the size of a dinner plate, and they self-assemble into… |
Linkerbot is the leading dexterous robot hand producer valued at $3bn. They own ~80% of market share globally according to their CEO. Clients include industrial firms such as Samsung, Siemens & research institutions such as MIT, Stanford,… |
A student at MIT's Materials Genome Camp pours a molten alloy into a mold with shape-memory wires to make “Frankensteel,” a material that can heal itself after damage. The shape-memory wires pull the surfaces of a crack together, helping… |
10 founders building in stealth 🥷 👇 1. @achowdhery = PaLM and Gemini lead at DeepMind, now CEO of a stealth AI startup 2. @skcd42 = shipped Grok Code Fast 1 at xAI, co-founded CodeStory (YC S23) 3. @scv119 = scaled training infra at… |
98% of GPT-6 Astra's benchmark performance. 1.4% of the cost. That's what OpenDesign found when they benchmarked DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on everyday design tasks. Every other model in the comparison scored lower AND cost more. The model… |
DeepSeek just shipped deepseek-harness under MIT and the architecture is striking. Every component of the agent loop is a swappable plugin: model, tools, sandbox, UI, and the agent loop itself. Want Claude instead of DeepSeek? Swap the… |
The thing that got buried in the Navier-Stokes story is not the math. It is what the compute profile looks like. 10,000 coordinating AI agents. 88 hours. Cost estimated in the millions of dollars. A model OpenAI describes as a… |
New paper from Google DeepMind, MIT, Stanford: "Design Docs Are All You Need". Using structured design docs to drive AI-native ML performance modeling. The result: design docs outperform ad-hoc prompting for complex engineering tasks.… |
A robot that swims underwater, then flies straight out of it! 🦢 Water is 1,000 times denser than air. Moving through one or the other normally means two completely different machines. Around 100 bird species disagree. Loons, gulls,… |
NVIDIA released PersonaPlex 7B on September 5, 2026. Full-duplex voice model. Listens and speaks at the same time, not in turns. Built on the Moshi and Helium architectures. Switch latency is 70 milliseconds. MIT license plus NVIDIA Open… |
Top stories in robotics today: - Uber and Wayve bring robotaxis to London - Altman says OpenAI ‘will definitely’ build a humanoid - MIT’s AI shows what self-driving cars are thinking - Skild wants to teach robots with a single video… |
OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model Moo Jin Kim∗,1 Karl Pertsch∗,1,2 Siddharth Karamcheti∗,1,3 Ted Xiao4 Ashwin Balakrishna3 Suraj Nair3 Rafael Rafailov1 Ethan Foster1 Grace Lam Pannag Sanketi4 Quan Vuong5,† Thomas Kollar3… |
SubscribeSign in Discover more from a16z Jobs New jobs every day. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. Already have an account? Sign in Open… |
Post Log in Sign up Post Brad Porter on X: "The best case for wheels I've heard came from the guy who has taught legged locomotion at MIT for 20 years. AMR safety cases assume you slow proportional to distance and come to rest. A balancing… |