Hands are the theme of the morning, with Boston Dynamics rethinking Atlas's grip for the factory floor while sensing suppliers line up to give humanoids a better sense of touch. Elsewhere, bio-inspiration is having a moment—maple seeds, deep-sea fish—and the business of keeping unwanted drones out of the sky keeps attracting capital.

In today’s roundup

• Boston Dynamics drops pinkie on new humanoid hand — The Robot Report
  Engineers taping their own fingers together to feel what they lose is a refreshingly hands-on way to justify a new humanoid hand design.
• Precision In Motion. Vishay Precision Group, Inc. (VPG) to Showcase Custom Sensing Capabilities for Humanoid Robotics at RoboBusiness 2026 — The Robot Report
  As humanoids leave the lab for shared spaces, suppliers like VPG betting on precise physical feedback signals where the real integration work lies.
• Atlas Robot’s New Hand May Outperform Human-Like Designs — IEEE Spectrum Robotics
  Atlas trades its superhuman three-fingered party tricks for a hand built to be manufactured at scale—a telling shift from demos toward deployment.
• Fortem lands $50 million as demand for counter-drone tech surges — DroneDJ
  Fortem's $50 million raise underscores how detecting and stopping unauthorized aircraft has become a serious and well-funded corner of airspace security.
• New robot falls like a maple seed then sails like a boat once it hits water — TechXplore Robotics
  A robot that autorotates down like a maple seed then sails off as a boat is a clever answer to monitoring hard-to-reach waters.
• Deep-sea ‘doomsday fish’ could inspire the next generation of stealth submarines — Interesting Engineering
  Cornell's look at the elusive deep-sea oarfish hints at quieter, stealthier designs for underwater monitoring robots.
• MindOn’s new Mind-1 model brings human-speed execution to robots — Interesting Engineering
  MindOn's Mind-1 targets human-speed execution for everyday tasks, a reminder that physical AI still has to close the gap between planning and doing.
• Robots approaching from behind are perceived as moving faster, experiments reveal — TechXplore Robotics
  Finding that robots approaching from behind feel faster than they are is useful perception insight for anyone designing machines to share human spaces safely.

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The Daily Grind · RobotCafe · robotcafe.com