Physical AI

MIT engineers design paper-thin robot powered by muscle cells

Original titlePowered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through watery maze

Outlet: Robohub
Published: Oct 19, 2026
Importance: 2/5

Summary

MIT engineers created a paper-thin biohybrid robot powered by muscle cells that can swim through water mazes. The design offers a way to create small and efficient biohybrid robots.

Original excerpt

MIT engineers’ new aquabot offers a way to design small, efficient “biohybrid” robots.

#mit#robot#biohybrid

Read the original

See all →

Oct 31

Foundry Robotics raises $100 million Series A for autonomous assembly factories

Foundry Robotics announced an oversubscribed $100 million Series A funding round led by Marlinspike Partners. The round includes participation from early backers Khosla Ventures and Red Glass Ventures, alongside new investors SE Ventures, Wing VC, and Axiom Ventures.

Robotics & Automation News

Nov 2

Meta partners with Fourier on humanoid robot for household tasks

Meta and Chinese robotics startup Fourier jointly developed humanoid robot prototype Max, a 48-kilogram robot completed in three months. The companies are working on a successor model, targeting the household robotics market for housekeeping and daily tasks.

AI Times

Nov 4

NEO-VLA, an encoder-free vision-language-action framework for robotic manipulation

The authors propose NEO-VLA, an encoder-free vision-language-action framework where images are tokenized and evolve jointly with language throughout the backbone. They show that this approach outperforms encoder-based counterparts across diverse manipulation tasks and distribution shifts.

Hugging FaceTrending 27

Oct 27

PDRVLA integrates physical dynamics into robot vision-language-action models

PDRVLA, a vision-language-action model with a lightweight physical dynamics module, generates robot actions from visual input and language instructions. It learns from public data augmented with human-to-robot synthesis and embodied chain-of-thought annotation, achieving 99.3% success on LIBERO and up to 93.6% on RoboTwin 2.0.

Hugging Face +1 moreTrending 25