Meet Roger, the bomb-squad humanoid
Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Fresh out of stealth with ~$10M from General Catalyst, Hugging Face, and others, Minerva Humanoids wants its VR-piloted robot to tackle bomb disposal, hazmat calls, and dangerous work on offshore rigs — with human specialists calling the shots from a safe distance.
Also: Agilink’s robot hand takes up a 2,500-year-old craft, and a microbot turns the metal beneath its feet into a power source.
In today’s robotics rundown:
Minerva builds a bomb-disposal humanoid
Agilink teaches a robot hand embroidery
Every step charges this tiny robot
MIT gives drones a mathematical survival instinct
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
MINERVA HUMANOIDS
Image source: Minerva Humanoids
The Rundown: San Francisco–based robotics startup Minerva Humanoids left stealth this week with ~$10M in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst — and Roger, a VR-piloted humanoid built for bomb disposal, hazmat calls, and offshore rigs.
The details:
A specialist wears a VR headset, sees through Roger’s eyes, and handles fine manipulation; an in-house AI runs balance, navigation, and fall recovery.
Minerva says its humanoid went from idea to walking prototype in five months; software comes mostly from the U.S., with prototypes built in Germany.
CEO Sandor Felber worked on Tesla’s Optimus and humanoid research at MIT; CTO Maurice Rahme spent 6 years at Boston Dynamics as a tech lead.
Paid pilots in energy and explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) start this fall, after a demo at NATO’s EOD Centre of Excellence in Slovakia.
Why it matters: Many bomb-disposal robots are tracked vehicles with a single manipulator arm, and Minerva argues that tasks requiring two-handed dexterity can still force a technician in a bomb suit to approach a device in person. Minerva wants specialists doing that type of dangerous work through Roger from a safe distance.
AGILINK
Image source: Agilink
The Rundown: AgiBot spin-off Agilink brought in Suzhou embroidery master Fu Xianghong to train its OmniHand 3 Ultra, and the hand can now split silk thread, thread a needle, stretch fabric on a hoop, and stitch — the basics of a 2,500-year-old craft.
The details:
One finger separates the 16 silk strands while the others hold tension, and the fingertips stay in contact as the thread twists.
The hand combines 21 active degrees of freedom and a fully direct-drive design, with no tendons or transmissions.
Training paired human teleoperation data with reinforcement learning; Agilink says the hand independently completed a continuous twist-and-pickup maneuver.
The company says it has shipped 15K+ dexterous hands since spinning out of AgiBot in January and passed a $1B valuation in June.
Why it matters: LinkerBot’s L30 Pro mimics human anatomy, while Boston Dynamics dropped Atlas’s pinky after engineers spent a day with their ring and pinky fingers bound to test the trade-off. Agilink's silk demo highlights the shared challenge: giving robots the touch and control to turn impressive dexterity into reliable, useful work.
ROBOTICS RESEARCH
Image source: Science China Press
The Rundown: Researchers at China’s Fudan University built a paper-thin foot membrane that lets a crawling microrobot generate electricity from the metal it walks on, with no onboard battery required.
The details:
The membrane generates electricity when it touches reactive surfaces such as aluminum or zinc, using oxygen and air moisture to complete the reaction.
In lab tests, the system powered a microrobot through more than 10K steps, with the membrane delivering peak power density of 133 mW per square cm.
The membrane also detects surface materials and roughness, helping the robot identify paths where it can harvest more energy.
The system requires compatible surfaces and manual top-ups of its potassium hydroxide electrolyte, leaving maintenance as a hurdle to wider use.
Why it matters: Powering a 1.7g microrobot for two hours would require a battery accounting for 94% of its total weight, according to the researchers. If electrolyte upkeep can be automated, inspection robots could draw power from compatible metal surfaces in pipes, data centers, and industrial equipment.
MIT
Image source: Melanie Gonick, MIT
The Rundown: MIT researchers just built SANDO, a trajectory planner with a mathematical guarantee that a drone won’t hit anything, even in unmapped spaces full of obstacles moving in ways it can’t predict.
The details:
SANDO builds shifting 3D flight corridors around everywhere an obstacle could reach within a given time, using its maximum speed to keep the drone clear.
Streamlining the optimization made that calculation up to 7.4x faster in the researchers’ tests, and the team has released its code on GitHub.
A drone completed 12 flights among moving obstacles without collisions, handling perception, localization, and planning entirely onboard.
The proof covers each planning window and depends on assumptions about obstacle speeds, dimensions, and sensing and tracking accuracy.
Why it matters: A drone that can predict where danger might move next is a much better scout for collapsed buildings or unstable tunnels. Getting it into the field means making that mathematical guarantee hold up on real sensors and flight controls, which are never perfect.
QUICK HITS
Boston Dynamics tapped Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s former AI chief behind Alexa and Nova, as CEO to bring advanced AI to its robots and scale sales.
Robotics startup Mecka raised a $60M Series B on Oct. 7 to expand human-demonstration data collection for robot training, research, and commercial deployments.
Multiply Labs nabbed $75M in funding to automate manufacturing of cell and gene therapies with physical AI, easing bottlenecks in getting medicines to patients.
China’s Deep Robotics dropped a clip of its DR02 humanoid giving traffic reminders and interacting with pedestrians in multiple languages in rainy Hangzhou.
Waymo expanded its first debt raise to $5B to fuel the global rollout of its robotaxi business, Bloomberg reported.
REK’s “Deathmatch” event in San Francisco on October 9 will feature humanoids fighting with arm-mounted swords, adding weapons to its robot combat lineup.
Researchers built a frog-inspired robot that uses elastic rods to store and release energy, letting it hop across slippery terrain and swim with paddle attachments.
Kawasaki unveiled a four-legged robot prototype that climbs ship hulls, bringing its ambitions for AI-powered welding to one of manufacturing’s toughest workplaces.
University of Stuttgart is developing autonomous cranes and robot swarms to assemble timber buildings, aiming to speed up construction and reduce waste.
Read our last AI newsletter: AI’s next frontier is the human cell
Read our last Tech newsletter: A breakout moment for AI medicine
Read our last Robotics newsletter: California crashes robot fight club
Today’s AI tool guide: Give Claude’s routine work to Haiku 5.5
RSVP to next workshop on Oct. 21: Getting real work out of Microsoft Copilot
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See you soon,
Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — The Rundown’s editorial team