Microsoft Research systematically measured mobile manipulation robot workloads and found that offloading physical AI inference from onboard GPUs to edge or cloud GPUs can improve task success, support larger models and extend battery life.
NVIDIA released Isaac ROS 5.0 at ROSCon in Toronto, Canada. The collection of ROS-based GPU-accelerated packages adds agentic workflows and platform support to help developers build, customise and deploy robot applications faster.
NVIDIA explains that deploying physical AI at scale requires safety covering hardware, software, AI behaviour and operating environments, and introduces its full-stack safety system NVIDIA Halos.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics ER 2 as a high-level brain for robots, supporting video understanding, multi-step task orchestration and multi-robot collaboration, while delegating action execution to lower-level VLA models.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, a next-generation robot intelligence layer achieving whole-body control of a complete humanoid robot for the first time, with fine manipulation using both hands and grippers.
NVIDIA introduced Cosmos-H-Dreams, a real-time action-conditioned generative simulator for surgical robots. It runs through FlashDreams on one RTX PRO 6000 GPU and supports closed-loop interaction by humans and policies.
Hugging Face released Grabette, an open-source system recording manipulation demonstrations with a handheld gripper and two cameras, producing robot-ready datasets without robots or teleoperation equipment. The handheld hardware costs about €490 in materials, with the accompanying motorised Gripette gripper around €120. Hardware CAD, Raspberry Pi collection software and browser-based processing are all open-source.
Mistral AI released its first embodied navigation model, Robostral Navigate. The 8B model uses one ordinary RGB camera without LiDAR or depth sensors, achieving 76.6% success in unseen R2R-CE validation environments, 9.7 percentage points above the best single-camera approach and 4.5 points above the best depth- or multi-camera system.
Hugging Face released LeRobot v0.6.0, introducing world model policies VLA-JEPA, FastWAM and LingBot-VA, new VLAs GR00T N1.7, MolmoAct2, EO-1, EVO1 and Multitask DiT, and a unified reward model API with Robometer and TOPReward for the robotics learning loop.
Google DeepMind launched a three-month Robotics accelerator for 15 early-stage European robotics start-ups, providing technical guidance and access to its AI stack and Gemini robotics models. Covering logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, climate and navigation, it starts in London this week.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, an upgraded reasoning-first robotics model with stronger spatial reasoning and multi-view understanding. New instrument reading capabilities cover circular pressure gauges, level indicators and digital readouts.