Robotics

Ocado’s Porter AMR can automate pallet and cage handling and full-case fulfillment tasks, including picking, cross-dock, putaway and inventory moves. | Source: Ocado Ocado Intelligent Automation (OIA), part of Ocado Group, introduced Porter AMR at ProMat 2025 this week. Porter is a pallet-moving autonomous mobile robot (AMR) that navigates warehouses to automate several warehouse workflows such as cross-docking, bulk-item picking, putaway, and pallet movement. “Porter from OIA automates low-value, manual tasks and fosters a more

Apollo is the culmination of nearly a decade of development, drawing on Apptronik’s extensive work on 15 previous robots, including NASA’s Valkyrie robot. | Source: Apptronik Apptronik Tuesday announced it added an extra $53 million to its oversubscribed Series A funding round, bringing the total funding from the round to $403 million. The company said the round reflects strong market demand and investor confidence in Apptronik’s leadership, unique design, and technology. The Series A funding

Array uses a LocusBot designed to pick from and to bins from warehouse shelving. Source: Locus Robotics CHICAGO — Locus Robotics is known for its goods-to-person automation, in which mobile robots assist human pickers. At ProMat yesterday, the company gave a sneak peek of Locus Array, a system using artificial intelligence and robots for high-density storage and throughput. “We’ve been working on this for the past several years,” said Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics.

Mech can lift up to 130 lbs (around 59 kg) – 65 lbs (29 kg) per arm – and place boxes as high as 8 feet (2.4 m) in the air. | Source: Dexterity Dexterity Inc. Monday announced the launch of Mech, an industrial mobile manipulator. Made up of two arms mounted on a rover, Mech can navigate to workstations across warehouses or industrial sites and perform stressful, repetitive tasks. Redwood City, Calif.-based Dexterity engineered

The Pixmo mobile manipulator from Anyware Robotics uses a vacuum gripper and vision guidance to acquire boxes from the container. | Source: Anyware Robotics Anyware Robotics last week announced it has secured $12 million in seed funding. The funding fuels the expansion of Pixmo, the company’s multi-purpose mobile robot that automates container and truck unloading operations. Pixmo combines an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) base, a collaborative robot (cobot) arm, an array of 3D perception sensors,

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine have developed a powerful AI tool, built on the same transformer architecture used by large language models like ChatGPT, to process an entire night’s sleep. To date, it is one of the largest studies, analyzing 1,011,192 hours of sleep. Details on their findings were reported in the March 13online issue of the journal Sleep. The model, called patch foundational transformer for sleep (PFTSleep), analyzes brain waves, muscle activity,

We move thanks to coordination among many skeletal muscle fibers, all twitching and pulling in sync. While some muscles align in one direction, others form intricate patterns, helping parts of the body move in multiple ways. In recent years, scientists and engineers have looked to muscles as potential actuators for “biohybrid” robots — machines powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers. Such bio-bots could squirm and wiggle through spaces where traditional machines cannot. For the

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart developed a biohybrid micro swimmer covered with magnetic material, whose swimming ability is largely unaffected by the coating. The team from the Physical Intelligence Department at MPI-IS published their work in the journal Matter, which covers a wide range of materials science research. In nature, the ten-micron small, single-cell microalgae are fantastic swimmers, propelled by their two whip-like flagella at