Boston Dynamics, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group, is unlikely to pursue an initial public offering next year, according to a senior Hyundai executive who declined to be named. The company has yet to deploy its flagship Atlas humanoid robot at scale and remains unprofitable, delaying a market debut despite investor enthusiasm that lifted Hyundai shares to record highs earlier this year. Hyundai acquired a controlling stake in 2021 and plans to build a [...]

The article explains that as the production of humanoid robots accelerates, their end‑of‑life poses complex recycling challenges. Each unit contains 10,000–15,000 parts across four systems—actuation, skeleton, nervous system, and semiconductors—requiring specialized decommissioning. Key risks include data breaches from retained memory, hazardous battery and hydraulic energy, material fatigue in reused components, and the dangerous extraction of 3.5–4 kg of rare‑earth magnets. The piece calls for design‑for‑recycling collaboration between OEMs and recyclers to mitigate these issues. [...]

On September 17, 2026, Figure AI announced that its Helix 2.5 neural network successfully completed 56% of 420 household tasks in 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen before, using a single pretrained checkpoint from the Index dataset. The same architecture trained from random weights achieved only 9%. The experiment involved three tasks—living‑room tidying, towel folding, and bed making—without any data collection or fine‑tuning on the new environments. The results demonstrate a sixfold improvement attributable solely to [...]

VIT’s annual technology festival, graVITas’26, opened its second day with 227 events and an expected 40,000 participants. Students from mechanical, electronics, electrical, and communication engineering showcased projects in robo wars, drone racing, toycathon, big band theory, and map quest. Robo wars featured 15‑kg and 60‑kg categories, requiring teams to repair damaged robots within 20 minutes. Drone teams navigated obstacle courses over 200 m, with speed and precision determining winners. The fest also hosted a capital‑hunt startup pitch, attracting [...]

SK Holy Name in Sarawak has announced a 2027 goal to become a recognized School of Technology, aiming to develop at least five tech‑based products and broaden student engagement in robotics, innovation, and artificial intelligence. Headmaster Albert Bujon highlighted projects such as an Air Pollutant Index monitoring device and participation in regional robotics and AI contests. The initiative received a RM10,000 grant from Assemblyman Billy Sujang, supporting student competition entry. The plan aligns with the school’s National [...]

Samsung Electronics appointed Juan Carlos Niebles, former director of Stanford’s Vision and Learning Lab and adjunct computer‑science professor, as head of its North America AI Center at Samsung Research, reporting at the executive‑vice‑president level. Niebles brings experience from the Stanford‑Toyota AI center and a stint leading AI research at Salesforce, with over 100 publications in computer vision, multimodal learning and robot control. The hire underscores Samsung’s shift toward “physical AI,” targeting humanoid robots, manufacturing automation and wearable devices, and [...]

Neptune Medical Inc. received FDA clearance for its Triton 1 robotic endoscopy system, designed to enhance colonoscopy precision and control. The system, capable of full-colon navigation, aims to improve screening, surveillance, and therapeutic procedures such as EMRs and ESDs. In a first‑in‑human CARE 1 study, Triton achieved 100 % cecal intubation, a 54.2 % adenoma detection rate, and reduced endoscopist workload by 67 %. The clearance follows a $97 million Series D round and positions Triton as a potential game‑changer in colorectal cancer care. [...]