SUMMARY
Consolidation and scale framed the week. Cognex agreed to buy RealSense for about $500 million and Qualcomm moved for MoveIt maker PickNik as perception and robot software became acquisition targets. The IFR counted a record 5 million factory robots and about 7,000 humanoids sold in 2025. AGIBOT put more than 300 robots into a Zhuhai theme park, Boston Dynamics opened an Atlas training centre at Hyundai, and Tekever raised $580 million at a $6.4 billion valuation.
TOP STORIES
Sep 24 — Five Million Robots now Operate in Factories Globally
IFR data count a record 5 million industrial robots in operation, up 9% in 2025. Installations rose 11% to over 600,000; China installed 354,000, or 59% of the world total. | International Federation of Robotics
Sep 24 — AGIBOT and Chimelong Launch Large-Scale Embodied AI Theme Park with More Than 300 Robots
More than 300 AGIBOT robots now work across seven scenarios at Zhuhai's Chimelong Spaceship Park, from shows and tours to retail and hotels. AGIBOT delivered its 20,000th production robot there. | AGIBOT
Sep 23 — Qualcomm to Acquire PickNik to Advance the Future of Open Robotics and Physical AI
Qualcomm will buy PickNik, maker of the MoveIt motion-planning framework, for an undisclosed sum. MoveIt stays open source and will be integrated with Qualcomm's Dragonwing platform and Arduino VENTUNO Q. | Qualcomm
The roughly $500 million cash deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter, adds RealSense's depth cameras. RealSense expects $80–90 million revenue in 2026, up more than 50%. | Cognex
MARKET & FINANCIALS
Sep 24 — Amazon to Create 300 High-Paying Jobs at New Advanced Manufacturing Facility in Greenwood, Indiana
Amazon will invest over $100 million in a 585,000-square-foot plant using robotic welding and automated powder coating. It opens in 2028 with 300 jobs averaging close to $100,000. | Amazon
Sep 24 — U.S. Navy Establishes Robotic and Autonomous Systems Warfighting Development Center
The new center under U.S. Fleet Forces Command, at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia, covers air, surface and undersea robotic systems. Rear Adm. Melvin Smith commands. | U.S. Navy
Sep 24 — Japanese humanoid robotics startup O-ID raises $1.2 million to move modular robot into production
The Tokyo startup's pre-seed round, led by TAWANI Ventures with Hustle Fund and Techstars, takes its modular humanoid from prototype to production. It has a Sumitomo Electric letter of intent. | Robotics & Automation News
Sep 24 — Meet Feather, the startup building the 'Android of robotics' for developers
Feather raised a $7.6 million pre-seed led by Gradient Ventures for its roughly $30,000 developer robot, already cooking in restaurants and cleaning labs. Revenue has passed $1 million. | TechCrunch
The Portuguese drone maker announced a first close. Funds will go to international expansion, industrial capacity and acquisitions; its UK CORVUS contract is worth up to £400 million. | TEKEVER
Sep 23 — Chinese maker of robot-vacuum sensors launches Hong Kong IPO, undeterred by US ban
BYD-backed Camsense seeks HK$680 million (US$86.7 million) at HK$58.85 a share, trading from September 30, after the FCC's Covered List added foreign-made robot vacuums in July. | South China Morning Post
Sep 23 — XPENG Holds Its First Robotics Supply Chain Partner Conference
Held in Guangzhou on September 22, the meeting covered joint modules, actuators and structural parts. XPENG targets IRON humanoid mass production by end-2026, deploying first in its stores and campuses. | XPENG
Sep 23 — Zoox grounds Atlanta test fleet after workers report toxic gas exposure symptoms
An OSHA letter says up to 40 workers may have been exposed. Zoox detected only carbon dioxide, is adding gas monitors, and says Las Vegas and San Francisco rides continue. | TechCrunch
Sep 21 — Will Europe become next proving ground for Hyundai's Atlas robot?
Hyundai's Nosovice plant in the Czech Republic, its only EU factory, is in talks with Boston Dynamics on Atlas. The site already runs 566 robots; no timeline has been set. | The Korea Herald
Sep 21 — Simbe Surpasses 3,000 Units, Marking the Largest Autonomous Shelf Intelligence Fleet in Retail
Simbe now has more than 3,000 shelf-scanning robots under contract across 75-plus retail banners in nearly a dozen countries. | Robotics Tomorrow
PRODUCT LAUNCHES & BREAKTHROUGHS
Skydio's first fixed-wing drone reaches 100 mph with a 30-mile radius and robotic takeoff and landing. MegaDock houses up to five aircraft; F10 ships to customers in 2027. | Skydio
Sep 24 — Lowe's Becomes First Home Improvement Retailer to Offer Drone Delivery
A Matthews, North Carolina store pilot uses Wing drones, ordered via DoorDash, to deliver tools, paint and batteries under about 2.5 pounds in as little as 20 minutes. | Lowe's
The industrial-scale friction stir welding cell, built on a KR FORTEC ultra MT robot that both welds and mills, adds a digital twin and process-data capture. | KUKA
Sep 24 — Nexterity wants to automate the hard, dangerous part of pipefitting
Nexterity's remote-controlled, battery-powered robot tightens four flange bolts at once on 2- to 8-inch pipe, which covers about 80% of industrial piping. | TechCrunch
Sep 24 — Korean quadruped robot's marathon triumph featured in Nature
A Nature paper details KAIST's RAIBO2 running a full 42.195-km marathon on one charge in 4 hours 19 minutes, at a cost of transport of 0.25 against a human's 0.37. | The Korea Times
Sep 23 — Microscopic robots inspired by fireflies, cilia, sync to reshape surroundings
Hair-width robots from Itai Cohen's Cornell lab sense temperature and, using artificial cilia, collectively pump liquid between hot and cold regions, according to a Nature Electronics paper. | Cornell Chronicle
Sep 23 — Tiny robot developed at the UW can precisely control its jump height
The one-gram, motor-driven DirectHop lands within about a centimetre of its target height and rights itself 90% of the time. Sawyer Fuller's team presents it at IROS on September 30. | University of Washington
Sep 22 — Introducing Intrinsic Core™: An open source approach to Physical AI
Released under Apache 2.0 at ROSCon 2026, the stack bundles hardware-agnostic real-time control, pose estimation, motion and grasp planning, plus a CNC machine-tending reference design. | Intrinsic
Sep 22 — NVIDIA Isaac ROS 5.0 Advances Agentic, Open Source Robotics Development
Launched at ROSCon, the release supports ROS Lyrical on Jetson from Orin Nano to Thor, adds AI-agent skills for setup and manipulation, and speeds FoundationPose perception 5.5x. | NVIDIA
The AX6 is Epson Robots' first cobot: a power- and force-limiting six-axis arm with carbon-fibre construction rated for ISO 5 cleanrooms, programmed through no-code AX Portal or Python. | Epson
Sep 22 — China's Hygon moves beyond data centres with embedded processors for robotics, edge AI
Launched in Shenzhen, the x86-compatible Hygon 1000 series offers four-core, eight-thread embedded chips for robots and factory controllers that run computing and graphics locally. | South China Morning Post
At Hyundai's Georgia Metaplant, Atlas trains on parts sequencing now and component assembly by 2030. The centre expands roughly tenfold into a new building in 2027. | Boston Dynamics
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