NASA is paying Katalyst Space Technologies $30 million to rescue the Swift space telescope, which is losing altitude due to increased atmospheric drag from solar activity. Katalyst's autonomous spacecraft 'Link' — roughly fridge-sized with a 12-metre solar wingspan and three robotic arms — will launch on a Pegasus rocket, chase down the 1.4-tonne observatory (which has no docking port), grab it, and boost its orbit from ~360km to ~600km. The mission is a first for the US and could validate an emerging industry of orbital satellite servicing, refueling, and debris removal. If successful, Swift could resume science operations by September, and a larger follow-up robot may eventually service Hubble around 2028.
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Proception, a robotics startup founded by ex-Tesla Optimus engineer Jay Li, has settled a year-long trade secret lawsuit with Tesla and raised an $11M seed round led by First Round Capital. The company is now shipping its first dexterous robotic hands — featuring 22 degrees of freedom and a sensor-laden glove for scalable training data collection — to researchers and robotics companies. Tesla had sued Li in June 2025, alleging he downloaded confidential files before leaving to found Proception. The dexterous hand market is heating up globally, with competitors like China's Linkerbot dominating market share and European and Chinese startups raising hundreds of millions. Proception is betting that humanoid robot makers will outsource hand manufacturing rather than build in-house, positioning itself as a key supplier in the emerging humanoid robot supply chain.
A weekly curated collection of robotics videos from IEEE Spectrum, featuring highlights such as a disembodied robotic hand crawling on three fingers from Tangent Robotics, MIT CSAIL's SoftMimic approach for safer human-robot interaction, Agility Robotics' Digit navigating obstacles, an aggressive firefighting robot from DEEP Robotics, Unitree R1 humanoid performance, event cameras handling motion, and research on using AI-driven robots to understand whale communication. Upcoming robotics events including RSS 2026, IROS 2026, and Actuate 2026 are also listed.
MIT CSAIL researchers developed 'Masked Inverse Reinforcement Learning' (Masked IRL), a system that uses two LLMs to help robots interpret vague human instructions and identify which environmental details matter for task execution. The first LLM elaborates on ambiguous prompts based on kinesthetic demonstration data, while the second scores environmental elements as relevant or irrelevant, masking unnecessary details. This approach requires nearly five times less demonstration data than comparable methods and outperformed baselines by up to 15% in correctly identifying unstated user preferences. A real robotic arm trained on 50 demonstrations successfully navigated around obstacles like laptops while completing tasks such as moving cups and wiping tables.
Aseon Labs, a Redwood City startup from Y Combinator's 2026 spring cohort, has raised $10M in seed funding to build parking space-sized automated pods that clean, inspect, and charge robotaxis in-city. The core problem they address is 'deadhead miles' — empty trips robotaxis make to distant depots — which hurt fleet utilization and profitability. Their pods use robotic arms, cameras, and vision-language-action AI models to handle routine maintenance autonomously, while flagging complex issues for human handling at central depots. The units are designed as temporary structures to avoid lengthy permitting and can be relocated if a site underperforms. No robotaxi contracts have been signed yet, but the company plans to build five prototypes and grow its team with the new funding.
Aseon Labs has raised $10M in seed funding to build parking-space-sized automated pods that charge, clean, and inspect robotaxis in place. The Y Combinator-backed startup aims to solve the deadhead miles problem — robotaxis driving empty to distant depots for servicing — by deploying modular pods across city parking lots and gas stations. Using robotic arms, computer vision, and vision-language-action models, the pods can handle most routine maintenance autonomously. The company estimates its solution could cut reset costs by 50%, reduce downtime by 65%, and add over $50K in annual revenue per vehicle. Aseon Labs is pre-product with five prototypes as its immediate goal, targeting a market that Goldman Sachs projects will reach $415B by 2035.
Tombot has closed a $7 million Series A3 round to scale manufacturing of Jennie, its autonomous robotic Labrador puppy designed as a companion for people with dementia, cognitive impairment, anxiety, loneliness, autism, and PTSD. Investors include healthcare and aging-services backers such as Caduceus Capital Partners and the Lutheran Foundation for Long Term Living. The company reports over 23,000 pre-orders and waitlist sign-ups ahead of a planned Fall 2026 commercial launch — its first shipments to paying customers. Jennie mimics the behavior of an 8-to-10-week-old puppy and is pitched as delivering companionship benefits without the care burden of a live animal.
General Intuition has raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation to scale AI agents trained on hundreds of millions of hours of video game footage. The key differentiator is action-labeled gameplay data — records of button presses and timing — rather than video alone, which the company argues enables richer causal understanding. The same model powering a Fortnite-playing agent also drives a quadrupedal robot that required only 8 minutes of real-world fine-tuning. The round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and Google DeepMind researchers. General Intuition plans to sell its agentic model as a foundation for gaming, simulation, and robotics use cases via an API, while also launching Nerve, a jobs marketplace letting gamers earn income through data labeling and robot teleoperation.

The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office used a drone equipped with a high-powered magnet to disarm a suspect by retrieving a knife from their hand inside a residence. The incident, shared on Instagram with the Mission: Impossible theme, is noted as a small but significant step toward robotic law enforcement capabilities.