Today the theme is staying power—literally, as Agility leans on fast-charging cells to keep Digit 5 working marathon shifts, and figuratively, as humanoid research hunts for cheaper ways to learn from human motion. Meanwhile the drone beat turns tense, with counter-swarm systems, defense contracts, and real ships going down in the Black Sea.

In today’s roundup

• Agility chooses Nyobolt for ultra-fast charging for Digit 5 humanoid — The Robot Report
  Agility is betting fast-charging batteries from Nyobolt can push Digit 5 to 20-hour workdays, a key hurdle for making humanoids pencil out on the factory floor.
• TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Last day — TechCrunch Robotics
  It's the closing day of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, a last chance to rub shoulders with the broader tech crowd that increasingly funds and watches robotics.
• Contact-UAN: Unsupervised Actuator Networks as a Residual World Model for Humanoid Control — arXiv cs.RO
  This paper tackles a stubborn sim-to-real gap—policies that move right but get the forces wrong—by learning a residual actuator model to transfer contact interactions to hardware.
• ‘World-first’ counter-drone system targets swarms with an interception rate above 97% — Interesting Engineering
  Skapion claims a 97%-plus interception rate against drone swarms, a bold number worth watching as counter-UAS defense races to keep up with mass attacks.
• Rownd lands $10 million defense contract to advance autonomous drones — DroneDJ
  Rownd's $10 million defense contract and Wisconsin expansion underscore the growing appetite for low-cost autonomous drones built for military use.
• New DroneShield update sharpens drone detection and countermeasures — DroneDJ
  DroneShield's software-only update promises earlier threat detection and fewer false alarms—a reminder that counter-drone gains often come from code, not new hardware.
• $\lambda_0$: Scaling Open-World Egocentric Human Data for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation — arXiv cs.RO
  λ0 pursues scalable humanoid loco-manipulation by mining egocentric human video, sidestepping the steep cost of collecting robot demonstrations at scale.
• NATO may redeploy anti-drone defenses as attacks sink more Black Sea shipping — Ars Technica
  With suspected Russian drones sinking or damaging five ships near Bulgaria and Romania, NATO weighs redeploying defenses—a sober look at drone warfare's reach at sea.

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The Daily Grind · RobotCafe · robotcafe.com