New robots, new capabilities. Tracking what's coming for the workforce.
Robotics The ARM Institute booked close to $90M from a Department of War modernization challenge, covering 10 projects at 12 military manufacturing sites. The named automation targets are energetics production, drone readiness and line bottlenecks. The people running those lines got named too.
Robotics Robot.com booked a seven-year commercial agreement with Sodexo, putting sidewalk delivery robots across North American college campuses. Sodexo runs about 400,000 employees globally and 120,000 U.S. full-timers, and Robot.com's CEO named it as a company that cannot fill its open roles.
Robotics Figure has raised a little under $2B in equity across its history. On September 3 it signed a compute deal worth $3.5B, expandable past $6B, from a cloud provider that is also becoming its shareholder. The bill for training a robot now exceeds the bill for building the company.
Robotics Tesla launched Cybercab in Austin on September 3: two seats, no steering wheel, no pedals, no physical way for anyone inside to take over. Texas's automated-vehicle registry hit 420 cars statewide the same day, while Tesla's own July disclosures showed paid robotaxi miles going in reverse, not up.
Robotics Lumos Robotics launched the MOS 2 on September 1. The load-bearing number is not the payload. It is the 1,000 failure-free hours the previous model logged on a live PLC line at Mitsubishi Electric's Changshu plant, after which Mitsubishi led the funding round.