More than five million industrial robots are now operating in factories worldwide, according to the International Federation of Robotics' newly released World Robotics 2026 report . Factories installed more than 600,000 industrial robots during 2025, an increase of 11% on the previous year. The global operational stock grew by 9%. China continued to pull away from the rest of the world. Its factories installed 354,000 robots, accounting for 59% of the global total.

Last month, I went to York to build a robot. I came back with a robot, a tiny trophy-shaped sense of achievement, and somehow a few new friends. From 25th-27th August, I joined the UK RAS STEPS MicroMaze Robot Hackathon at the Institute for Safe Autonomy, University of York. The brief sounded simple: build a small autonomous robot, then make it survive increasingly difficult mazes. Until you actually have to build one.

This year, RoboCup will be held in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event will see teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. It's an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format . Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a primary focus on humanoid robots. A workshop focused on sharing projects, experiences, and innovations in educational robotics.

Giving robot companions animal-like or anime-style faces and voices could maximise their emotional appeal to users, according to new research which could help guide the growing field of social robotics. Social robots can provide companionship and comfort to their owners by mimicking human or petlike behaviours. Although the robots are a fast-growing sector of the tech industry, surprisingly little academic research has explored how their designs can be optimised to make the robots as expressive and emotionally engaging as possible. In a new paper set to be presented at a conference this week, researchers from the University of Glasgow show how they have been working to close that research gap. With the help of a group of volunteers, they used augmented reality technology to test dozens of different combinations of faces and voices overlaid on the body of an existing social robot called a Qoobo, which has a soft, cushion-like body and a swinging tail.

Claire chatted to Michelle Lu from Vsim Technology about using simulation and artificial intelligence to teach robots new skills. Michelle Lu is co-founder and CEO of Vsim Technology . She was previously a Director of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, where she and her co-founder created the world's first end-to-end GPU-accelerated reinforcement learning (RL) framework, Isaac Gym, which set the template for how modern GPU-accelerated simulation-based RL is performed in robotics. In 2022, Michelle and her co-founder left NVIDIA to create Vsim, driven to solve the limitations that plague simulation-based robotics AI: efficiency, scalability and the sim-to-real gap. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

"Robotics and automation" is a pairing heard often around these parts. It puts the "RA" in IEEE RAS, after all. The familiar combination shows up in conference titles, funding calls, and program descriptions. But what is actually meant by the two words? Is robotics a subdomain of automation?

Propeller-powered underwater vehicles have long helped scientists explore and monitor aquatic environments. But they're limited by their own mechanics: spinning blades can snag on vegetation, stir up sediment, and startle the wildlife they're often sent to study, making them poorly suited to shallow creeks, dense weeds, or close encounters with fish. That's one reason roboticists have spent years building machines that swim like fish instead, bending their bodies rather than spinning a propeller. The catch is that most fish-inspired robots are built for one size and one job, so scaling them up or down usually means starting from scratch. A team of engineers at EPFL and New York University (NYU) says it has found a way to solve that problem.

Chinese robots have quickly entered global public consciousness in recent years, appearing as background robo-dancers in pop concerts and as humanoid marathon and sprint runners outpacing elite athletes ( 1). Domestically, robots are deployed as traffic guides and restaurant service staff, while swarms of drones entertain audiences in urban light shows or deliver takeout to high-rises ( 2, 3). These public debuts serve to both normalize automation in everyday civilian life ( 4) while projecting international soft power. Behind the public spectacle lies a bold agenda for global economic dominance. In its geopolitical contest with the United States, Beijing sees robotics as the core engine to project power and dictate the future of global supply chains ( 5).

Lights blink on as I enter the Rover Operations Center at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, at 7:30 a.m. I'm the first to arrive, even though I already feel late. Sometime during the night on Earth, the Curiosity rover finished its day exploring on Mars and beamed its latest collection of images and measurements to a Mars orbiter zooming by overhead. The orbiter relayed the data to Earth, where it now waits on servers here and at partner institutions around the globe. Once our rover operations shift kicks off at 8:15 a.m., a few dozen engineers and scientists will have just three hours to check the health of the rover, analyze the new science data and agree on the next set of rover activities.

Imagine a robot designed to install solar panels with much greater speed and precision than a human. The robot is made from expensive materials and powered by a heavy battery that must be recharged every few hours. If the costs of building and operating the robot outweigh the benefits of the clean energy it helps produce, can it really be considered sustainable? In a 2025 article published in, Aude Billard, head of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Lab in EPFL's School of Engineering and Academic director of the Robotics Center, gives precisely this example to illustrate the tension between robotic performance and sustainability. Roboticists, she argues, can no longer ignore the fact that robots use energy-intensive power systems and electronic components made from finite resources.