Robohub
Non-profit platform sharing robotics news and expert perspectives from research, startups, industry, and education
Global Robotics Technology Roadmap
Professor Henrik I. Christensen released a global robotics technology roadmap outlining the sector’s trajectory from 2025 to 2035. The report notes the market expanding from $53.2 billion in 2024 to an estimated $178.7 billion by 2033, with Asia supplying 74% of installations and the U.S. leading AI‑driven autonomy. It highlights Vision‑Language‑Action models, soft‑robotics materials, and a rapidly expanding humanoid segment projected to reach $6.5 billion by 2030. The EU AI Act is identified as a key regulatory variable reshaping design worldwide.
Robot Talk Episode 158 – Autonomous Robot Deliveries, with Ahti Heinla
Starship Technologies, led by co‑founder and CEO Ahti Heinla, has scaled its AI‑powered delivery robot fleet to over 2,700 units. The company reports more than 10 million fully autonomous deliveries across streets and sidewalks, handling varied weather and pedestrian traffic. Heinla,...
Light-Activated Gel Could Impact Wearables, Soft Robotics, and More
MIT engineers have created a soft, stretchable gel that becomes dramatically more conductive when illuminated, achieving a 400‑fold increase in ion flow. The material incorporates photo‑ion generator (PIG) particles into polyurethane rubber using a swelling technique, marking the first light‑controlled...
Handle with Care: Soft Robot Gripper Picks Ripe Fruit without Bruising
Researchers at Cornell’s Organic Robotics Lab have created a soft robot gripper equipped with stretchable fiber‑optic sensors that can assess strawberry ripeness by touch and harvest the fruit without bruising. The gripper combines curvature and pressure sensors with a planetary‑gear...
Robot Talk Episode 157 – Generating New Robot Designs, with Josie Hughes
In Robot Talk episode 157, host Claire interviews EPFL Assistant Professor Josie Hughes about leveraging artificial intelligence to generate new robot manipulator designs. Hughes, who founded the CREATE Lab in 2021, explains how AI‑driven generative design can explore unconventional geometries...
Table Tennis Robot Defeats some of World’s Best Players – Why This Has Major Implications for Robotics
Sony AI’s table‑tennis robot Ace defeated three of five elite players in live matches, proving AI can compete in fast, unpredictable physical tasks. The system combines event‑based vision, nine high‑speed cameras, and a six‑joint arm to track balls traveling over...
Developing Active and Flexible Microrobots
Leiden researchers Daniela Kraft and Mengshi Wei have engineered microscopic, flexible chain‑like robots that propel themselves without sensors, software, or external controllers. The robots, printed with a Nanoscribe 3D‑printer, consist of 5 µm segments linked by 0.5 µm joints and move at...
How to Teach the Same Skill to Different Robots
Researchers at EPFL’s LASA lab introduced a control framework called Kinematic Intelligence that translates a single human‑demonstrated task into a robot‑agnostic movement strategy. The system mathematically abstracts the motion and then tailors it to the joint limits of any robot,...
Ultralightweight Sonar Plus AI Lets Tiny Drones Navigate Like Bats
Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have created an ultralight ultrasound‑based perception system that lets tiny drones navigate using bat‑like echolocation. By pairing a bio‑inspired acoustic shield with a neural network called Saranga, the drones can filter out propeller noise and...
AI System Learns to Keep Warehouse Robot Traffic Running Smoothly
Researchers at MIT and robotics firm Symbotic unveiled a hybrid AI system that directs autonomous warehouse robots using deep reinforcement learning paired with a fast planning algorithm. The method predicts congestion and re‑prioritizes robots before bottlenecks form, delivering roughly a...
Robot Talk Episode 151 – Robots to Study the Ocean, with Simona Aracri
Claire interviews Simona Aracri of Italy's National Research Council about cutting‑edge ocean‑robotics. Aracri’s work blends innovative sensors with autonomous platforms to expand observational oceanography. She has logged over six months aboard research vessels in the Mediterranean, Pacific and North Sea,...
Generative AI Improves a Wireless Vision System that Sees Through Obstructions
MIT researchers have combined generative AI with millimeter‑wave radar to reconstruct hidden 3D objects and entire indoor scenes. The new Wave‑Former model fills missing surfaces in partial mmWave scans, improving shape accuracy by roughly 20 %. A companion system, RISE, uses...
Back to School: Robots Learn From Factory Workers
Czech startup RoboTwin has introduced a handheld, no‑code system that lets factory workers teach industrial robots new tasks by simply demonstrating the motion. The device captures movements in about a minute and converts them into robot programs, opening automation to...
Resource-Sharing Boosts Robotic Resilience
Researchers at EPFL’s Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory introduced a hyper‑redundancy framework that lets modular robots share power, sensing and communication resources across all units. In the Mori3 origami robot, this local resource‑sharing revived a completely dead module, allowing the four‑module system...
A Multi-Armed Robot for Assisting with Agricultural Tasks
Researchers at West Virginia University introduced a force‑aware manipulation system for agricultural robots, enabling one arm to safely move plant branches and expose hidden flowers or fruit for a second arm. The method combines an RRT*‑based planner with a geometric...