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manipulation

Eka Robotics raises $150M to scale its vision-force-action model for robots

Eka Robotics announced a $150 million Series A to scale its vision-force-action model and customer deployments. The company says it trains the model with simulation and large-scale reinforcement learning to help robots generalize dexterous manipulation across objects and conditions. Eka reports roughly 1,500 operations per hour on out-of-training-distribution object picking, and says its robots can also screw in light bulbs and insert wires.

The Robot ReportOct 24, 2026Details

manipulation

Yunji and Alibaba’s Taobao Flash Shopping plan indoor delivery robots

Yunji Technology and Alibaba’s Taobao Flash Shopping have agreed to develop and deploy delivery robots in apartments, hotels and other controlled-access buildings. The planned service would handle the indoor leg after a human courier brings an order to the building: robots would collect items, use elevators, deliver to rooms and notify customers. The partners also plan system integration, including multi-robot scheduling and links to elevator and access-control systems; the article does not report deployment results.

Robot NewspaperOct 23, 2026Details

manipulation

This Disembodied Hand Is All the Robot You Need

ETH Zurich researchers turned an off-the-shelf robotic hand into a self-contained mobile manipulator, adding an 80-gram backpack with a battery, IMU, and Raspberry Pi Zero. Reinforcement learning trained it to crawl and perform separate skills including righting itself, pressing keys, and pushing objects. In tests, it crossed 14 surfaces at an average 9 cm/s and pushed a 41-gram cube to targets up to 40 cm away in 15 consecutive trials.

IEEE SpectrumOct 8, 2026Details

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