Vision-language-action policies and teleop data advanced generalist manipulation—still far from perfect home robots.
Projects like RT-X, Open X-Embodiment, and humanoid startups (Figure, Tesla Optimus, Agility) sought to transfer data scale to motor control.
Warehouse and plant demos impressed; generalization to messy homes remains hard. Sim-to-real and safety are bottlenecks.
Foundation robotics links AI history to twentieth-century physical automation.
Automotive and logistics pilots tested biped/humanoid robots for repetitive tasks, with ROI still under evaluation.
Around September 8, 2026, Arm unveiled Total Design for Physical AI with 80+ companies (AWS, Hugging Face, NXP, Siemens, Unitree, QNX, Liquid AI, and others) and a Robotics Capability Framework RL0–RL5 (reactive → self-improving). It links capabilities to latency, power, and safety; a starting point, not formal certification yet.
Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design targets up to 700 TOPS sparse / 350 dense, 18 Oryon cores, 64GB LPDDR5x ECC, up to 12 GMSL2 cameras, ROS2, EtherCAT/CAN-FD, and -40–70°C. Unveiled at Computex (June 2026); global commercial availability is scheduled for September 2026 versus NVIDIA Jetson Thor. Pricing was undisclosed as of early September—shipping confirmation verification in progress.