
The Robot Report tracks startups throughout the year, and our second annual Startup Radar spotlights some of the most interesting new companies developing commercial robotics and related technologies. From industrial automation and drones to humanoid robots, 2026 has been a year of innovation in the face of persistent labor shortages and geopolitical challenges. To qualify, organizations must be no more than five years old and must be working on enabling technologies, new full systems, or novel
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LiberAI introduces Liber-0, a world action model pretrained on more than 2.2 million hours of human experience to support zero-shot robot manipulation. In an evaluation of 60 tasks proposed by GPT-6, it achieved 36.0% overall success without robot demonstrations collected specifically for those target tasks. The model combines large-scale human video, glove-recorded hand motion and embodiment alignment to transfer human manipulation experience to robots. Liber-0 achieves 36.0% overall success in

Digit 5 includes redesigned legs and new batteries for commercial use. Source: Agility Robotics Agility Robotics has cleared a major hurdle in its planned initial public offering (IPO). Shareholders of Churchill Capital Corp XI approved the special purpose acquisition company’s (SPAC) proposed business combination with the humanoid developer, moving Agility closer to becoming a publicly-traded company. More than 84% of votes cast at a special shareholder meeting on Nov. 2 supported the dea

Tutor trains its Sonny robot on real-world manipulation tasks. Credit: Eugene Demaitre Real-world data, human “tutors,” and simulation are all part of the recipe for training AI models to enable next-generation robots to tackle a widening variety of tasks. Tutor Intelligence Inc. today said it has raised $75 million in Series B funding as it works toward general-purpose robotics. “It’s not only that Tutor’s models let robots do jobs that robots have never been able to do before,” sta

Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, is apparently pushing the tech company’s development of household robots—and the first to debut may be a home robot designed to autonomously roam around while supporting FaceTime calls and switching lights on whenever a person enters the room. People who worked on Apple’s robotic projects told The Information that the AI-driven home robot, code-named J595, could be named HomeView Ultra in line with Apple’s new HomeView stationary smart display. The company is report
VicOne identified an initial set of 28 zero-day findings in less than two days using AI-assisted research across software and tools supporting the Physical AI ecosystem. These include projects developed or maintained by Google, NVIDIA, and Meta, among others. Based on initial validation, all 28 findings are classified as zero-day vulnerabilities. The count may change following vendor and vulnerability-authority review, and some findings do not yet have CVE tracking numbers. Many of these tools

GlobalLogic developed the UV disinfection robot with Haystack Robotics. | Source: GlobalLogic In hospitals, hygiene is critical. But the cleaning process, which is time-intensive and difficult to scale, remains manual work. This often means the process is also inconsistent. Healthcare facilities are under pressure to care for more patients with fewer resources. These challenges are why the Silicon & Embedded division at GlobalLogic helped Haystack Robotics engineer a mobile robot to handle d