Today in Robotics — Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Today spans the whole robotics gamut, from a phone-trainable home humanoid for harried parents to biohybrid aquabots powered by living muscle cells. We've also got a state-of-the-union on factory automation, a warehouse startup betting on real deployments over lab demos, and humanoids picking up a racket.
- 01 Meet Flourish One, the Raspberry Pi-powered humanoid built for busy parents
A $3,555 Raspberry Pi-powered home humanoid promising phone-trained, cloud-personalized chore automation is an ambitious bet on whether households will pay for helping hands.
Read at source ↗ - 02 State of Robots in Manufacturing
A useful survey of where factory automation actually stands, weighing incremental technology gains against the much-hyped potential of humanoids and AI on the line.
Read at source ↗ - 03 Insta360 cameras can now turn your videos into explorable 3D worlds
Turning ordinary video into explorable 3D worlds hints at cheaper scene capture that could feed robot mapping and simulation, not just travel memories.
Read at source ↗ - 04 Powered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through a watery maze
MIT shows a single layer of muscle cells can propel a paper-thin swimmer, pointing toward small, efficient biohybrid robots designed around biology's own actuators.
Read at source ↗ - 05 Venus flytrap-inspired 'robot hand' material senses objects and grasps them under light
KAIST's flytrap-inspired material merges sensing skin and grasping muscle into one light-activated system, blurring the line between a robot's perception and its actuation.
Read at source ↗ - 06 Humanoid Badminton: Learning Dynamic Racket Skills from Limited Human Motion Data
Teaching humanoids badminton from limited human motion data is a punishing test of split-second decisions and whole-body coordination that few control systems can survive.
Read at source ↗ - 07 Destro AI raises seed funding for robot-agnostic warehouse workflow platform
Destro AI's seed round backs a robot-agnostic warehouse platform, betting that production deployments rather than flashy demos are what actually wins customers.
Read at source ↗ - 08 Powered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through watery maze
MIT's own account of the muscle-powered aquabot lays out a design approach for building small, efficient biohybrid robots that navigate a watery maze.
Read at source ↗
The RobotCafe digest — five minutes, the whole field.