A rack‑and‑pinion system delivers the seventh axis for an articulated robot, offering scalable, low‑cost linear motion. Engineers compare it with ball screws and linear motors, noting that ball screws suffer from “whip” at long lengths, while linear motors consume more power and are expensive. Rack‑and‑pinion scales easily, provides high stiffness, and requires no continuous power, but requires lubrication, limiting use in clean‑room settings. The choice depends on travel distance, precision, cost, and environment. [...]

Agility Robotics announced its new Digit 5 humanoid robot, standing 5‑foot‑11 and weighing 284 pounds, designed to work beside human workers in factories and warehouses. The company reports over $300 million in multi‑year orders, largely from a single customer agreement, with first‑access slated for early 2027 and general availability later that year. Digit 5 replaces the previous model’s awkward knees with forward‑facing legs powered by cycloidal actuators, enabling it to squat, lift 50 pounds, and operate for more than 20 hours daily [...]

Japanese firm GMO Internet Group has launched Japan’s first “humanoid ambulance,” a specially equipped maintenance van that roams Tokyo delivering on‑site repairs to its own fleet of service robots. The vehicle carries diagnostic tools, spare parts, engineers and a backup humanoid that can replace a malfunctioning unit while the broken robot is taken to GMO’s Humanoid Lab in Shibuya. Only one ambulance is currently deployed and it serves robots operated by GMO AI & Robotics Trading, including [...]

Agility Robotics has released Digit 5, its fifth humanoid iteration, after a decade of development that began with the Cassie bipedal robot. The company, now with 400 employees and a factory capable of 10,000 units annually, has evolved from research prototypes to commercial deployments. Digit 5 features human‑like legs, extended battery life, and enhanced strength, designed for logistics and manufacturing environments. Earlier models, such as Digit 3, were sold to Ford and used for package delivery, while [...]

OLogic will present at RoboBusiness 2026 on egocentric robot learning, a method where robots acquire skills by observing human demonstrations captured via wearable cameras and teleoperation. The session, led by CEO Ted Larson, will cover the technical foundations, challenges, and future implications of this approach, which has attracted attention from NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Meta, and emerging robotics startups. By enabling robots to learn directly from human behavior, the technology promises faster, cheaper deployment across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, [...]

Researchers are exposing critical safety gaps in modern “Physical AI” robots that rely on multimodal sensors and AI-driven decision making. Studies such as BadVLA and GoBA demonstrate backdoor attacks that trigger malicious action trajectories when specific visual cues appear, achieving up to 97 % success without degrading normal performance. System‑level flaws compound the risk: the UniPwn Bluetooth exploit disclosed in September 2025 can hijack quadruped and humanoid robots, decrypt traffic, bypass authentication and inject commands, potentially spreading across fleets. [...]

Researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology have created UniSim‑SLAM, an AI‑driven spatial recognition system that builds precise three‑dimensional maps from camera images while tracking moving objects in real time. The method merges rapid two‑frame pose estimation with detailed sub‑map analysis, using Sim(3) factor‑graph optimization to align scale, rotation and position across both data streams. Benchmarked on the 7‑Scenes indoor dataset, UniSim‑SLAM achieved an average path error of 2.0 cm, cutting errors by up to 45.9 % [...]