Today in Robotics — Saturday, September 26, 2026
Tesla's Optimus dominates today's docket, with the company reportedly nearing 1,000 humanoids a week even as the bots fumble tasks and workers bristle at training their own replacements. Elsewhere, the unglamorous side of scale takes center stage—robotaxi servicing, warehouse fulfillment, and Amazon's factory bets—alongside a palm-sized hopping frog and Intrinsic's open-source pitch.
- 01 Tesla close to making 1,000 Optimus humanoids a week, but robots struggle with tasks
Tesla's ramp toward 1,000 Optimus units a week is a manufacturing milestone, but the admission that the robots still struggle with tasks is the honest part.
Read at source ↗ - 02 From 14 cities to 15,000: What it will take to scale robotaxis?
Driving well isn't the bottleneck—this piece argues fast local vehicle servicing is the unglamorous problem standing between 14 robotaxi cities and 15,000.
Read at source ↗ - 03 Frog-inspired robot hops over obstacles, lands, and prepares to jump again using tiny motor
A palm-sized robot that hops a full stair, lands, and readies its next jump using a tiny motor shows how much mobility you can pack into little packages.
Read at source ↗ - 04 Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacements
There's an obvious tension when workers are asked to train the very humanoids meant to replace them, and it's playing out inside Tesla's 1,000-a-week push.
Read at source ↗ - 05 Amazon to invest $100M in new Indiana manufacturing facility
Amazon's $100M Indiana plant will build the products powering its own fulfillment and robotics network, a sign of how vertically integrated its automation has become.
Read at source ↗ - 06 Warren CAT deploys AutoStore system to handle parts fulfillment
Warren CAT's live AutoStore deployment, installed by Kardex, is a tidy example of goods-to-person automation quietly taking over daily parts picking and processing.
Read at source ↗ - 07 An open source approach to physical AI from Intrinsic
Google's Intrinsic open-sourcing ROS-compatible parts of its platform as Intrinsic Core could lower the barrier for developers building physical AI applications.
Read at source ↗ - 08 Drone pilots can now analyze crashes and count crowds with SkyeBrowse app
SkyeBrowse's new AI workflows for crash analysis and crowd counting show how drone imagery is shifting from capture to interpretation for first responders.
Read at source ↗
The RobotCafe digest — five minutes, the whole field.