Robotics & Automation News

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robotics software

Interview with Olo Robotics COO Eleanor Tang-Smith: Making robot programming accessible to everyone

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Robotics hardware has advanced rapidly in recent years. Autonomous mobile robots, quadrupeds, robotic arms, and even humanoid robots are becoming increasingly capable and commercially available. Yet for many organizations, one of the biggest barriers to adoption remains software.

Building robotic applications typically requires specialist expertise in platforms such as ROS 2 (Robot Operating System 2), the open-source framework that has become the de facto standard for modern robotics development.

While ROS 2 has helped accelerate robotics innovation across industries, it is still widely regarded as complex and difficult for newcomers to master. [Read more…] about Interview with Olo Robotics COO Eleanor Tang-Smith: Making robot programming accessible to everyone

Simulation tools in the ROS ecosystem: Testing and validating robots virtually

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Robots may operate in the physical world, but increasingly they are born, trained, tested, and refined in virtual ones.

Before a warehouse robot navigates its first aisle, before an autonomous vehicle drives its first mile, and before a humanoid robot takes its first step, there is a good chance it has already spent hundreds or even thousands of hours inside a simulator.

For robotics developers, simulation has become one of the most important tools in the development process. It allows engineers to test software, validate designs, train AI models, and identify failures before expensive hardware is ever powered on. [Read more…] about Simulation tools in the ROS ecosystem: Testing and validating robots virtually

Robotiq launches AI platform to automate robotic workcell integration

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Robotiq has introduced IQ, an AI-enabled platform designed to make robotic Workcell integration faster, more predictable, and easier to scale.

Enabling a much-needed shift from a manual, expert-dependent approach to automatic integration, IQ captures unstructured automation project data, coordinates engineering workflows, and helps partners generate validated workcell designs based on real customer inputs and historical deployment data from thousands of previous factory installations.

Samuel Bouchard, CEO of Robotiq, says: “Automation does not scale when integration remains manual. [Read more…] about Robotiq launches AI platform to automate robotic workcell integration

Software is ‘the biggest bottleneck to robotics innovation’, says BlackBerry QNX report

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QNX, a division of BlackBerry, has released a new research study, the Inside the Robot: Architecture Benchmark Report, examining how robotics development is changing as systems become more software‑driven, AI‑enabled, and increasingly deployed alongside humans at work and in daily life.

Based on a survey of 1,000 developers from around the world, the research reveals the most significant inhibitors to progress, the gap between system ambitions and current capabilities, and developers’ views on the industry’s future.

A new episode of QNX’s Code the Future podcast featuring Omdia chief analyst Lian Jye Su explores the themes and results in more detail. [Read more…] about Software is ‘the biggest bottleneck to robotics innovation’, says BlackBerry QNX report

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

OLO Robotics completes commercial launch with three international manufacturing and distribution partnerships

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OLO Robotics has completed its commercial launch, announcing new manufacturing and distribution partnerships with Deep Robotics, inMotion Robotic, and Fiction Lab as robot companies move to make their hardware accessible to mainstream software teams, not only specialist roboticists.

By integrating OLO’s ROS2-native platform with quadrupeds and mobile robots, these partners are positioning robots as part of the existing software stack rather than separate, bespoke projects.

OLO provides an accessibility layer on top of ROS2, bringing the full robotics development environment into the browser, including cloud simulation, AI-assisted coding, visualisation and sim-to-real deployment. [Read more…] about OLO Robotics completes commercial launch with three international manufacturing and distribution partnerships

Opinion: Why industrial AI must be trained on physics, not prompts

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By Massimiliano Moruzzi, founder and CEO of Xaba.ai

Walk into any modern manufacturing facility and you’ll see the same tension playing out on the floor: incredibly capable machines, hemmed in by the assumption that everything will go exactly as planned. For decades, that assumption held well enough, but today it’s becoming a liability.

Manufacturers are under mounting pressure to produce faster, absorb more variability, and cut downtime, all while a new wave of AI promises to deliver “intelligence” without the complexity of traditional programming.

The pitch sounds compelling, but most of this AI is built on the same foundation as your company’s chatbot, and you cannot run a factory on prompts. [Read more…] about Opinion: Why industrial AI must be trained on physics, not prompts

Interview with Intrinsic’s Stefan Nusser: Traditional automation is ‘too expensive and too inflexible’

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For years, industrial automation followed a relatively stable formula: high-volume production, long product lifecycles, and robotic systems designed to repeat the same process millions of times with minimal variation.

That model helped transform industries such as automotive manufacturing, where fixed production lines and highly specialized robots delivered extraordinary efficiency at scale.

But manufacturing is changing. Product cycles are shorter, customization is increasing, and factories are under pressure to adapt more quickly to shifting demand and supply chain volatility. In many facilities, the traditional economics of automation no longer work as neatly as they once did. [Read more…] about Interview with Intrinsic’s Stefan Nusser: Traditional automation is ‘too expensive and too inflexible’

Comau partners with Omron to accelerate advanced industrial automation across high-growth manufacturing

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Comau and Omron Robotics have signed a strategic collaboration agreement aimed at accelerating the adoption and deployment of advanced industrial automation solutions for manufacturers worldwide.

The collaboration will focus on high-growth sectors including electronics, semiconductors, medical manufacturing and light industrial intralogistics – markets that continue to see strong demand for flexible, easily deployable automation.

The partnership responds to rising customer needs for scalable and adaptable automation solutions that integrate seamlessly into both existing production lines and next-generation manufacturing environments. [Read more…] about Comau partners with Omron to accelerate advanced industrial automation across high-growth manufacturing

Foxglove launches unified data platform to accelerate physical AI development

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Foxglove has launched “Data Search and Curation”, a new set of capabilities that helps robotics teams replace fragmented, manual data workflows with a unified platform to find and curate the mission-critical events, anomalies, and system behavior that matter most across growing volumes of operational data.

The company also expanded the Foxglove Data Platform with Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS), a new self-hosted data lake deployment model allowing customers to maintain full control over data at rest while still providing the benefits of a fully managed database, and a new free Basic Seat tier to expand access to visualization across teams.

As robotics companies scale from prototype to production, the critical path is shifting from generating more data to finding the most essential data quickly enough to debug issues, investigate failures, review safety-critical events, and improve system performance. [Read more…] about Foxglove launches unified data platform to accelerate physical AI development