Today leans hard into touch and trust: a founder's candid take on Digit 5, tactile-sensing startups, and artificial skin all argue that robots need to feel before they can work. We've also got the unglamorous plumbing of AI compute, safety red-teaming, and a paper-thin robot powered by actual muscle.

In today’s roundup

• The Robot I Didn’t Expect to Build — IEEE Spectrum Robotics
  Agility's cofounder reflects on Digit 5, pitched as the first humanoid that can safely and economically do genuinely useful work.
• Unleash AI Innovation: The Power of NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition Fueled by PNY-Supplied GPUs — The Robot Report
  As robots lean harder on AI vision and control, this looks at the compute and humble interconnects quietly doing the heavy lifting.
• Daimon Robotics building the infrastructure layer for tactile intelligence — The Robot Report
  Daimon ties together tactile sensing, real-world data, simulation, and AI models to make robot manipulation more reliable in the physical world.
• Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars before they hit the real world — TechCrunch Robotics
  This Michigan spinout stress-tests robots and self-driving cars in simulation before deployment—and it's reportedly already profitable while doing it.
• Robotic arm mimics human touch with artificial skin that detects contact — Interesting Engineering
  HKUST researchers give a robotic arm artificial skin that senses contact, another step toward machines that register touch like we do.
• beRobox unveils PALTZ palletizer with 3D Dynamic Safety at PACK EXPO 2026 — Automated Warehouse
  beRobox pairs Sonair's ultrasonic sensing with its own engineering so palletizing arms can detect dynamically and work fast without compromising safety.
• China builds second specialized mothership for underwater drones, satellite images show — Interesting Engineering
  Satellite imagery reveals a second Chinese vessel built to handle uncrewed underwater vehicles, signaling expanding ambitions below the waterline.
• Powered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through watery maze — Robohub
  MIT's muscle-powered aquabot navigates a watery maze, pointing toward small, efficient biohybrid robots that blend living tissue with engineering.

Read this roundup on RobotCafe →

The Daily Grind · RobotCafe · robotcafe.com