A Sharpa North robot uses a camera at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. A Sharpa North robot uses a camera at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. ESTLast modified on Fri 9 Jan 2026 10.00 EST This year will be filled with robots that can fold your laundry, pick up objects and climb stairs, fridges that you can command to open by voice, laptops with screens that can follow you around the room on motorised hinges and the reimagining of the BlackBerry phone. Those are the predictions from the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas that took place this week. The sprawling event aims to showcase cutting-edge technology developed by startups and big brands. Many of these fancy developments will be available to actually buy, moving from outlandish concepts to production devices, although some are still limited to costly prototypes.

Abstract--DexFruit is a robotic manipulation framework that enables gentle, autonomous handling of fragile fruit and precise evaluation of damage. Soft fruits have long faced an issue of produce loss in both the harvesting and post-harvesting processes due to their extreme fragility and susceptibility to bruising, making them one of the hardest produce type to manipulate with automation. In this work, we demonstrate by using optical tactile sensing, autonomous manipulation of fruit with minimal damage can be achieved. We show that our tactile informed diffusion policies outperform baselines in both reduced bruising and pick-and-place success rate across three fruits: strawberries, tomatoes, and blackberries. In addition, we introduce FruitSplat, a novel technique to represent and quantify visual damage in a high-resolution 3D representation via 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Existing metrics for measuring damage lack quantitative rigor or require expensive equipment. Furthermore, this representation is modular and general, compatible with any relevant 2D model. Overall, we demonstrate a 92% grasping policy success rate, up to a 15% reduction in visual bruising, and up to a 31% improvement in grasp success rate on challenging fruit compared to our baselines across our three tested fruits. We rigorously evaluate this result with over 630 trials. Please checkout our website, which contains our code and datasets at https://dex-fruit.github.io/. To address these impending issues, the agricultural industry has taken many strides into increased applications of machinery and automation [4, 5].

As global demand for fruits and vegetables continues to rise, the agricultural industry faces challenges in securing adequate labor. Robotic harvesting devices offer a promising solution to solve this issue. However, harvesting delicate fruits, notably blackberries, poses unique challenges due to their fragility. This study introduces and evaluates a prototype robotic gripper specifically designed for blackberry harvesting. The gripper features an innovative fabric tube mechanism employing motorized twisting action to gently envelop the fruit, ensuring uniform pressure application and minimizing damage. Three types of tubes were developed, varying in elasticity and compressibility using foam padding, spandex, and food-safe cotton cheesecloth. Performance testing focused on assessing each gripper's ability to detach and release blackberries, with emphasis on quantifying damage rates. Results indicate the proposed gripper achieved an 82% success rate in detaching blackberries and a 95% success rate in releasing them, showcasing the promised potential for robotic harvesting applications.

While Barbenheimer was undoubtedly the biggest movie story of 2023, the year in film was one jam-packed with dozens of truly great movies--not all of which managed to generate the nonstop headlines or mainstream traction that an iconic doll and the "father of the atomic bomb" did. It was a stellar year for first-time directors as well, as evidenced by films like Emily, The Unknown Country, and A Thousand and One. If you've seen Barbie, Oppenheimer, and many of the year's higher-profile movies, here are 15 that you maybe haven't seen that are definitely worth your time. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.

Search query variation poses a challenge in e-commerce search, as equivalent search intents can be expressed through different queries with surface-level differences. This paper introduces a framework to recognize and leverage query equivalence to enhance searcher and business outcomes. The proposed approach addresses three key problems: mapping queries to vector representations of search intent, identifying nearest neighbor queries expressing equivalent or similar intent, and optimizing for user or business objectives. The framework utilizes both surface similarity and behavioral similarity to determine query equivalence. Surface similarity involves canonicalizing queries based on word inflection, word order, compounding, and noise words. Behavioral similarity leverages historical search behavior to generate vector representations of query intent. An offline process is used to train a sentence similarity model, while an online nearest neighbor approach supports processing of unseen queries. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, outperforming popular sentence transformer models and achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.85 for query similarity. The results highlight the potential of leveraging historical behavior data and training models to recognize and utilize query equivalence in e-commerce search, leading to improved user experiences and business outcomes. Further advancements and benchmark datasets are encouraged to facilitate the development of solutions for this critical problem in the e-commerce domain.

Growing global demand for food, coupled with continuing labor shortages, motivates the need for automated agricultural harvesting. While some specialty crops (e.g., apples, peaches, blueberries) can be harvested via existing harvesting modalities, fruits such as blackberries and raspberries require delicate handling to mitigate fruit damage that could significantly impact marketability. This motivates the development of soft robotic solutions that enable efficient, delicate harvesting. This paper presents the design, fabrication, and feasibility testing of a tendon-driven soft gripping system focused on blackberries, which are a fragile fruit susceptible to post-harvest damage. The gripper is both low-cost and small form factor, allowing for the integration of a micro-servo for tendon retraction, a near-infrared (NIR) based blackberry ripeness sensor utilizing the reflectance modality for identifying fully ripe blackberries, and an endoscopic camera for visual servoing with a UR-5. The gripper was used to harvest 139 berries with manual positioning in two separate field tests. Field testing found an average retention force of 2.06 N and 6.08 N for ripe and unripe blackberries, respectively. Sensor tests identified an average reflectance of 16.78 and 21.70 for ripe and unripe blackberries, respectively, indicating a clear distinction between the two ripeness levels. Finally, the soft robotic gripper was integrated onto a UR5 robot arm and successfully harvested fifteen artificial blackberries in a lab setting using visual servoing.

Leveraging the QNX Neutrino Realtime Operating System (RTOS) and QNX Hypervisor, this leading-edge system provides an engaging and immersive driving experience, underpinned by a safe, secure and reliable software foundation. The China-built EV is also being exported to Europe, where it will be used by Renault Group's subscription-based Mobilize business unit as the go-to vehicle for people working in mobility services – taxis, ride-hailing, private vehicle hires and more. Taking intelligence, safety and enjoyment to the next level, the Yi's futuristic-looking digital cockpit features a dual-linked screen design with full LCD instrumentation and spacious central console, providing a variety of functions including In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI), Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), Voice and Gesture Recognition, along with a Head-Up Display (HUD). The cockpit also boasts augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and hologram functions, as well as controls for ambient lights and intelligent seats, providing users with a comprehensive ecosystem of in-vehicle services that allow for a significant degree of personalization for both drivers and passengers alike. "With cutting edge technology from BlackBerry and BICV, the Renault Jiangling Yi's intuitive in-car experience is a joy for drivers and passengers alike and will no doubt earn a high reputation among Chinese consumers," said Chen Liwei, Director of Intelligent Connectivity at Renault Jiangling Group.

At BlackBerry's analyst summit this week, a great deal of time was spent on the company's secure QNX operating system, its IVY platform for software management on cars, and other tools and utilities designed for the next generation of personal transportation. This conversation can't happen soon enough. A growing concern of mine is that automobile companies don't yet seem to fully understand the risk they are taking with platforms that aren't secure enough for products tied to human transportation and safety. Having someone hack your phone or PC is bad, but having someone hack your car could be deadly. So when the industry is talking about putting apps in cars, safety and security should be a far higher priority for many of the automotive OEMs than it seems to be.

While malicious or criminal attacks can be combatted by state-of-the-art cybersecurity software, and while you can prepare for IT failures with a diligent backup strategy, human error is still in need of a remedy. Humans are naturally prone to making mistakes. Such errors are increasingly impactful in the workplace, but human error in the realm of cybersecurity can have particularly devastating and long-lasting effects. As the digital world becomes more complex, it becomes much tougher to navigate – and thus, more unfair to blame humans for the errors they make. Employees should be given as much help and support as possible.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 02, 2021--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Stellar Cyber, the leading next-generation security operations platform, announced today that it has partnered with BlackBerry to accelerate adoption of AI-powered security solutions for enterprises and managed security service providers (MSSPs). Both companies are pioneers in using AI and machine learning to eliminate signatures and manual scripts from security solutions, and they are going to market together as a catalyst for AI-based security adoption worldwide by offering an integrated solution that combines BlackBerry's prevention-first AI-driven Unified Endpoint Security offerings with Stellar Cyber's security operations platform. BlackBerry has redefined what an endpoint protection solution can and should do for organizations by utilizing an AI-driven, prevention-first approach. Stellar Cyber pioneered adding AI to the security operations environments, helping to eliminate manual rule creation and management. By joining together in the marketplace, they offer enterprises and MSSPs higher efficiency, a lower rate of false positives, and significantly better protection against today's multi-layered cyberattacks.