At the World Robotics Conference in Beijing, Oak Deer Robotics unveiled a suite of automated kitchen tools including a multimodal AI cooking model called CookingMuse and a humanoid food-cart chef named RobotCook, demonstrating stir-fried tofu and pork with peppers using a 300-degree robotic wok. Separately, Hikrobots showed humanoid robots performing basic fast-food prep, while a robot-run noodle shop opened for trial operation elsewhere in Beijing.
futurism.com
· 2026-08-28
Meta is testing robots from vendors including Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB to perform physical data center tasks such as power-cycling servers and swapping networking cables. Internal workers say one robotic arm being evaluated could eventually replace up to 80 percent of certain workers' tasks, while a simpler device already in use can remotely press power buttons to restart machines.
wired.com
· 2026-08-28
Hugging Face has released Microduck, a roughly 10-inch bipedal robot shaped like a duck that costs $400. It packs 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor and two inertial measurement units, plus an articulated beak for picking up objects, and ships with built-in behaviors like walking, sitting, crouching and skating that can be triggered via gamepad. It's the company's second robot after Reachy Mini, and its software stack is open-source, letting developers teach it new skills through reinforcement learning and simulation.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-08-27
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics have announced the Microduck, a $399 waddling robot duck that follows their earlier Reachy Mini collaboration. The device features a camera eye, grabbing beak, wheeled feet, motion and depth sensors, and can be controlled via gamepad or laser pointer while also serving as a platform for AI and robotics experimentation. It's available for preorder now with delivery expected by year's end.
cnet.com
· 2026-08-27
Salem Robotics, founded by veterans of UT Austin robotics research and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is building software that lets existing mobile robots perform hazardous industrial inspections such as radioactive contamination smears and leak detection checks. The system focuses on precise, constrained manipulation—keeping a probe normal to a surface or within a tight offset from a pipe—while accounting for kinematics, joint limits, and collisions. The company demonstrated its software running on real robot hardware in a launch video.
news.ycombinator.com
· 2026-08-27
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics released Microduck, a 25-centimeter open-source robot shaped like a duck that costs $399 and can walk, grip objects up to 800 grams, right itself after falling, and even roller skate. The robot uses a camera, lidar, and dual IMUs to sense its surroundings, and its behaviors are trained in simulation before being deployed and fine-tuned on the physical device.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-08-27
Pollen Robotics, owned by Hugging Face, has opened pre-orders for Microduck, a 25cm, sub-800g bipedal robot priced at $399. Unlike the stationary Reachy Mini, Microduck is built for mobility, packing 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR, two IMUs and an articulated beak so it can walk, sit, crouch, recover from falls and even roller-skate.
engadget.com
· 2026-08-27
Apple is expanding its $50 million Supplier Employee Development Fund by launching a new Apple Education Center in Vietnam, run in partnership with Hanoi University of Science and Technology. The center will offer technical training in smart manufacturing, robotics and automation, plus leadership and soft-skills courses, mirroring a similar program Apple rolled out in India earlier this year.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-08-27
Pollen Robotics, the robotics arm of Hugging Face, will open pre-orders for a small open-source robot called Microduck on August 27, 2026. The device is priced at $399 before taxes and shipping, with deliveries expected before Christmas 2026.
pollen-robotics.com
· 2026-08-27
Pollen Robotics, the robotics arm behind Hugging Face's Reachy Mini, has revealed the Microduck, a small one-eyed biped robot under 10 inches tall. It costs $399, comes in four colors, and is expected to ship before Christmas 2026, with demos showing it rolling on skates, kicking balls, and picking up small objects.
theverge.com
· 2026-08-27
At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (August 22-26), robots competing in a 100-meter sprint and standing high jump beat human world records set by Usain Bolt and others, marking a jump from last year's event where they trailed human performance. Some sprinting robots couldn't stop in time, crashing into barriers, falling, and in a few cases breaking apart with sparks or catching fire, while separate tasks like hanging laundry showed robots still moving far slower than humans.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-08-25
Coco Robotics, founded in 2020 by two UCLA engineers, built small autonomous delivery vehicles to replace full-size cars for short restaurant delivery trips. The company says it now completes about 1,000 deliveries a day in Los Angeles and has surpassed 500,000 total deliveries across more than a million miles, with a Shake Shack regional manager singling out the robots as a standout courier.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-08-25
GoKawiil