In 2025, China operated about 309,000 plant‑protection drones, delivering roughly 203 million hectare‑treatments, a dramatic rise from 2024’s 178 million. The United States, with a far smaller fleet, logged only about 6.64 million hectare‑treatments. The disparity—roughly thirty‑fold—highlights China’s advanced drone service ecosystem, encompassing maintenance, renewal, and operating standards. Despite similar cultivated land areas, Chinese drones perform far more treatments per hectare, underscoring a mature, high‑volume industry.

India’s Ikran Aerospace demonstrated its Siren‑A1 combat UAV to the army in Jalandhar, showcasing a 40‑kg rotorcraft capable of carrying 10 kg of modular weapons or sensors. The platform can mount AK‑47/AK‑203 rifles, grenade dispensers, mortar launchers and night‑vision cameras, with AI‑driven target recognition and remote firing via indigenous software. Flight time ranges from 15 to 30 minutes, covering 2–5 km at a 3,000‑metre ceiling, allowing short‑range tactical support and reconnaissance. Led by retired Captain Vidul Kelshikar, the system [...]

Boston Dynamics, a 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 robots at scale and remains unprofitable, delaying a potential U.S. market debut. Hyundai’s robotics ambitions spurred a record‑high rally in its shares earlier this year, but the lack of a clear timetable or valuation target for a Boston Dynamics [...]

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 [...]