Robotics & Automation News

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open source robotics

Qualcomm to acquire PickNik to expand open-source robotics and physical AI capabilities

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Qualcomm Technologies has agreed to acquire robotics software company PickNik, the longtime steward of MoveIt, one of the most widely used open-source frameworks for robot manipulation.

The acquisition is intended to strengthen Qualcomm’s robotics software capabilities and make it easier for developers to move from AI models and prototypes to production robotics systems.

MoveIt, which is built on the Robot Operating System (ROS), provides capabilities including motion planning, manipulation, perception and kinematics. It is used across industrial automation, service robotics, mobile manipulation and emerging physical AI applications. [Read more…] about Qualcomm to acquire PickNik to expand open-source robotics and physical AI capabilities

Nvidia launches Isaac ROS 5.0 with AI agents for robotics development

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Nvidia has released Isaac ROS 5.0, introducing AI agent capabilities designed to help developers build, customize and deploy robotics applications more quickly using the open-source Robot Operating System ecosystem.

Released at ROSCon in Toronto, Canada, Isaac ROS 5.0 adds new agentic development workflows alongside expanded support for Nvidia’s Jetson computing platform and its physical AI models and libraries.

Isaac ROS is a collection of GPU-accelerated packages built on ROS, the open-source robotics framework maintained by Open Robotics. Nvidia says its software brings accelerated computing and production-ready libraries to a ROS community numbering almost 1.3 million users. [Read more…] about Nvidia launches Isaac ROS 5.0 with AI agents for robotics development

Intrinsic open sources core industrial robotics technology

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Intrinsic, Google’s industrial robotics and physical AI software company, has open sourced foundational parts of its robotics platform, giving developers access to technologies for robot control, motion planning, vision, simulation and hardware integration.

Announced at ROSCon 2026 in Toronto, Intrinsic Core is a set of ROS-compatible capabilities intended to provide developers with much of the underlying software infrastructure needed to build industrial robotics and physical AI applications.

Intrinsic says the technology is based on capabilities and services it uses in manufacturing deployments and is designed to reduce the amount of software and integration work robotics teams have to build from scratch. [Read more…] about Intrinsic open sources core industrial robotics technology

Robotiq launches open-source software tools for physical AI and robot manipulation

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Robotiq has launched three open-source software releases for its adaptive grippers: a C++ SDK, an official ROS 2 package, and updated Nvidia Isaac Sim assets. All three are maintained and optimized by Robotiq and available now on github.com/robotiq.

Robotiq adaptive grippers have run in ROS 2 and Isaac Sim for years, mainly driven by the community of robotic developers who wrote the drivers, built the simulation models, and maintained the grippers packages on their own time so the hardware would work inside the tools they already used. That work carried the ecosystem a long way, and a good deal of it is still visible in what shipped this month.

“What changed is the demand. A physical AI application asks far more of a gripper than a conventional one ever did,’’ said Vincent Duchaine, CTO AI at Robotiq. [Read more…] about Robotiq launches open-source software tools for physical AI and robot manipulation

Researchers unveil open-source robotic guide dog designed to assist blind and visually impaired people

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Researchers have introduced what they describe as the world’s first fully autonomous robotic guide dog, an AI-powered mobile robot designed to help blind and visually impaired people navigate both indoor and outdoor environments.

Named Milo, the robot has been developed as a lower-cost alternative to traditional guide dogs, which require extensive training and are often in short supply.

According to the developers, certified guide dogs in Canada can cost tens of thousands of dollars to train, and applicants may wait several years before receiving one. [Read more…] about Researchers unveil open-source robotic guide dog designed to assist blind and visually impaired people

Nvidia and Hugging Face expand LeRobot with new open robotics AI tools

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Nvidia and Hugging Face have expanded their collaboration to bring new AI models, robotics frameworks and development tools to the open-source LeRobot platform, aiming to make robot development more accessible for the wider robotics community.

The companies announced that Nvidia Isaac GR00T 1.7, an open vision-language-action (VLA) foundation model for humanoid robots, and the Nvidia Isaac Teleop framework are now integrated into LeRobot. Support for Nvidia Cosmos 3, a world foundation model for physical AI, is also planned.

Together, the additions are intended to provide developers with a standardized workflow for collecting data, training robot models, evaluating performance and deploying AI-powered robots. [Read more…] about Nvidia and Hugging Face expand LeRobot with new open robotics AI tools

Interview with Christina Gomez-Terry of Plus One Robotics: Why warehouse robotics succeeds or fails at scale

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Warehouse automation has entered a new phase. The question is no longer whether robotics can perform individual tasks such as parcel picking, depalletizing, sorting, or palletizing.

The technology has largely proven itself in pilot projects and controlled deployments. The bigger challenge facing the industry today is scale.

As logistics operators expand robotics systems across multiple facilities, they often discover that success depends less on peak performance and more on consistency, reliability, and operational resilience. [Read more…] about Interview with Christina Gomez-Terry of Plus One Robotics: Why warehouse robotics succeeds or fails at scale

Open source hardware for robotics: Democratizing robot building

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Most discussions about open-source robotics focus on software. The Robot Operating System (ROS) has become the best-known example, providing developers with a common framework for building and operating robots.

Yet software is only part of the story.

Over the past two decades, a growing ecosystem of open-source hardware platforms has dramatically lowered the barriers to robotics development. [Read more…] about Open source hardware for robotics: Democratizing robot building

The power of the open-source community in robotics: Collaboration and shared innovation

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For decades, robotics was viewed as a niche engineering discipline inhabited largely by researchers, academics, and highly specialized industrial automation companies.

Development was expensive, fragmented, and slow. Even simple mobile robots often required years of work and highly customized software stacks.

Today, robotics sits at the center of one of the largest technology investment waves in modern industrial history. [Read more…] about The power of the open-source community in robotics: Collaboration and shared innovation

Hello Robot unveils Stretch 4: A simply useful robot that puts people first

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Hello Robot, the team behind the Stretch mobile manipulation platform, have announced the release of Stretch 4.

Available now for $29,950, Stretch 4 is an open-source robotics platform designed for researchers, developers, and application engineers building the next wave of Physical AI applications for general purpose robotics.

“In the last few years, Physical AI has brought us videos of robots doing amazing stunts. But these videos are missing something critical – the people the robots are meant to benefit,” says Aaron Edsinger, co-founder and CEO of Hello Robot. [Read more…] about Hello Robot unveils Stretch 4: A simply useful robot that puts people first

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