Today in Robotics — Friday, September 4, 2026
Money and metal both move today: Lyte lands a hefty round to sharpen how robots perceive the world, while Tesla's Cybercab meets federal scrutiny before it's fully found the pavement. We've also got sidewalk delivery expanding on campus, a two-part Roomba concept from Berlin, open-source humanoid research, and a warehouse counting tool that plays like a game.
- 01 Lyte raises $165M to help robots better sense their surroundings
A second raise this year, totaling $165M, signals investors still see perception as the bottleneck between robots and reliable real-world work.
Read at source ↗ - 02 Robot.com partners with Sodexo to roll out more sidewalk delivery robots
Teaming with food-services giant Sodexo, Robot.com doubles down on college campuses as the proving ground for scaling sidewalk delivery.
Read at source ↗ - 03 Less than 24 hours to apply for your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Side Event
A last-call reminder for founders wanting to host a Side Event at Disrupt 2026, with applications closing tonight at midnight PT.
Read at source ↗ - 04 Tesla Cybercab is barely on the road and it’s already under investigation
NHTSA is probing whether Tesla's Cybercab can legally skip the traditional features regulators still require, a fresh test for driverless vehicle rules.
Read at source ↗ - 05 iRobot unveils the Roomba Duo
iRobot's IFA concept pairs a heavy-duty floor washer with a slim Roomba, hinting at how the vacuum pioneer wants to tackle mixed cleaning jobs.
Read at source ↗ - 06 Establishing a Dynamic Multimodal HRI Dataset for Engagement Analysis with a Humanoid Robot
A new multimodal dataset for measuring user engagement could give humanoid designers better tools to know when interactions are actually working.
Read at source ↗ - 07 BRIDGE: An Open-Source Humanoid Platform via Morphology-Control Co-Design for Physical AI
BRIDGE co-designs morphology and control in an open-source humanoid platform, aiming to unblock development that usually stalls on hardware constraints.
Read at source ↗ - 08 Barcode or RFID? Xemelgo turns cycle counting into a video game
Xemelgo's experience center gamifies the barcode-versus-RFID decision, a clever way to help warehouses pick the right inventory tech before committing.
Read at source ↗
The RobotCafe digest — five minutes, the whole field.