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ETH Zurich's Hand That Walks on Its Fingers, and the Shaft No Arm Reaches
ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab trained an 818 g five-finger hand to walk on its fingertips and then work. What that could mean for shafts and ceiling voids.
A Timber Joint With 0.25 mm of Air: Robot-Milled, AR-Guided, Built to Come Apart
UQ researchers mill mortise-tenon timber joints to 0.25 mm and guide assembly in AR. No screws, nails or glue, so components can be taken apart and reused.
The Crane That Lets Gravity Choose: EPFL's CRCL Puts Robots on Site as Colleagues
EPFL's CRCL and SXL scan, drill and crane-place demolition rubble into structural walls and train robot teams to build arches. Free show in Lausanne.
Robots Can Do 74% of Physical Tasks. On a Building Site, Architects Draw the Room
Anthropic's robot-exposure index finds robots can do 74% of US physical tasks but are cost-competitive on 0.3%. Why detailing sets a site's robot-readiness.
Who Held the Controller? A Cage-Fight Humanoid and the BIM Model Robots Will Read
REK's remote-controlled humanoid kicked an influencer across a cage. A site robot asks who held the controller, and why your IFC doors set robot routes.
The teleop tax, paid down: 12 minutes of an installer's hands
A McGill sim buys a prefab window installer's tacit skill in 12-15 minutes of supervision at the contact-failure boundary — the teleop tax, paid down.
The hand that reports back: why 1X put its motors in the forearm
1X's NEO hand runs a 5:1–15:1 tendon drive so every grasp reports force back — and why that makes your as-built IFC the coordinate frame robots will ask for.
The robot that beat Usain Bolt still can't plug in a cable
Tiangong ran 100m in 8.86s at Beijing's 2026 robot games — then robots caught fire. Why stop distance and manual override matter more than sprint records on site.
The 2,000-franc hand that pops instead of breaking: ETH's ORCA and the repairable robot
ETH Zurich's open-source ORCA hand delivers 17-DoF dexterity for under 2,000 CHF, with poppable joints you reprint instead of replace. Why repairable wins.
Rehearsal without concrete: MIT's SceneSmith and the sim gap my fleet still pays for
MIT CSAIL's SceneSmith generates robot training worlds from text with GPT-5.2 agents. From the site floor: why your IFC model is the map robots actually need.
