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by Diana Wolf Torres
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- 1 weeks ago0 min
Getting Digit Out of the Cage: Why Agility Redesigned Digit’s Legs
Early in the “State of Humanoids” panel at RoboBusiness in Santa Clara, moderator Mike Oitzman, senior editor at The Robot Report, asked Agility Chief Technology Officer Pras Velagapudi about Digit 5’s new legs and why that kinematic change was so critical.Velagapudi answered with the goal behind the whole robot.“A major design factor going into our Digit 5 was we wanted to be able to go beyond working within caged environments, within fences, safety fences,” he said.That goal has a name: cooperative safety. Velagapudi described it as “the ability for both robots and humans to work through the same environment without needing to be essentially physically separated.”According to an article in the Robot Report, Agility contrasts Digit 5 with humanoids in testing that work inside roped-off areas, and says Digit 5 is designed to work close to people with no physical barriers.Perception, compute, motion“Now that requires safe perception, it requires safe compute, and it requires safe motion, right?” Velagapudi said.Safe perception comes first. “That’s being able to detect not just where everything in the environment is, but where specifically humans are,” he said.People change the math. “Humans have a very different sort of hazard level than if you’re next to a shelf or a box or something like that. You need to be much more careful around forces and motions around humans.”Safe compute is the second piece. “You need an infrastructure that can reliably make the computational decisions,” he said. “And so that’s where we paired up with NVIDIA and moved onto the new IGX Thor platform to be able to execute models that can make these decisions.”Safe motion ties the first two together. “You know where humans are, you know what decision you need to make,” Velagapudi said. “Now you need to make some constraints on the robot’s motion to make sure that you’re limiting the types of hazards you introduce.”Agility’s launch materials fill in the hardware. Digit 5 watches for people in a 360-degree radius using proprietary AI and multiple sensor types, then avoids them, stops, or sits down. It signals its intent with visual and auditory cues, and an independent safety controller oversees its response when someone comes within an unsafe distance.Agility is also the first launch partner for NVIDIA’s Halos for Robotics platform, and Digit 5 will use NVIDIA’s Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab on its path to safety certification.Designing for the fallDigit 4’s legs were often described as having a “reverse knee.” Velagapudi said the architecture was different from what people assumed.“It was really kind of more of a birdlike architecture with three links in it, with, like a really long toe, essentially.”That design came out of early locomotion research. Co-founder and Chief Robot Officer Jonathan Hurst said in The Robot Report’s launch coverage that it was optimized for walking and running, while Digit 5’s legs are built for heavy lifting and frequent getting up and down from the ground.On the panel, Velagapudi explained the safety reason for the change. Safe motion has to cover a robot that is breaking down as well as one that is working.“So part of that is figuring out how does the robot actually move, both when it’s intentionally moving and when it’s failing, right? If you have faults, if you have a motor that has a wire disconnected or something like that.”That, he said, requires “this kind of holistic failure modes and effects analysis that incorporates, well, what’s the robot’s collapse pattern look like, right, when it has some sort of motion fault? How can you control it safely using the limited controls that you have?”The legs are the answer. “That’s where actually the leg design plays a role,” Velagapudi said. “It’s specifically shaped such that the robot in different fault conditions degrades such that we can guarantee certain fall profiles.”“So it’s actually a very subtle physics problem of designing a robot such that you can constrain where it’s gonna go, not just when everything’s working and you’re making an intentional decision, but when you’re responding to a fault.”Agility found that Digit 5’s leg architecture shrinks the space a failing robot can move through. “We discovered that the particular leg architecture in Digit 5 is actually conducive to minimizing that envelope,” he said. “So we have the tightest safe motion envelope we could have.”Most people wil
- 3 weeks ago4 min
What It Takes to Deploy Robots
A robot can deliver a package, climb stairs or draw a crowd at a trade show.The harder question is whether it can do a useful job, reliably, at a cost a customer can justify.In the second half of my conversation with Robot.com’s Felipe Chavez, we talked about advertising, a robot dog with wheels, and what the company has learned from putting robots into customers’ hands.The thread connecting those subjects was deployment: everything that has to work around a robot for the robot itself to make economic sense.“You need to deploy in order to learn,” Chavez said.Advertising helps pay for the robotOne example is R-Ads, Robot.com’s platform for human-robot interaction.At conferences and trade shows, people can interact with the robots, open their compartments and take merchandise. Chavez said several companies have used the robots at their events.This video shows people interacting with Kiwi robots set up for interactions where people can interact, open the compartment and take merchandise. Video has no sound and loops.On college campuses, advertising serves another purpose: it creates an additional revenue stream that can help lower the cost to customers.“That allows us to have better unit economics,” he said.That is a practical answer to a difficult question. Making a robot more affordable does not necessarily depend entirely on making the hardware cheaper. It can also mean finding additional ways for the same machine to generate revenue.But the experience matters, too. Chavez said the company is being careful to make those interactions feel natural and enjoyable.A robot sharing space with people has to earn their acceptance alongside its revenue.More capability comes at a costR-Dog tackles a different set of delivery problems.According to Chavez, the robot can bend to drop a package in front of a house and climb stairs to reach a door. It has both legs and wheels.It could also get into an autonomous car, opening the possibility of combining a vehicle’s longer-distance travel with a robot’s ability to reach the doorstep.“That’s something that our customers are very, very eager to test,” Chavez said.The distinction matters: this is a use case customers want to test. Its commercial value still has to be demonstrated.And those additional capabilities have a price. Chavez said R-Dog is more complex and more expensive than the company’s R-Kiwis, which is why it targets a different market. He said commercial deployment is planned for 2027.That tradeoff gets to a central question in robotics: which capabilities does a particular job justify paying for?The work starts after the demoAsked about the biggest lesson he has learned, Chavez moved quickly from robot capabilities to the business of operating them.“You need to actually prove the ROI to your customer,” he said.Then he listed what that entails:“You need to finance a robot, then you need to maintain the robot, then you need to pay for the on-field operations, then you need to also collect the money, then you need to renew your contracts and sign multi-year contracts.”“That’s when you learn a lot.”It is the less photogenic side of robotics, and a consequential one.An impressive demonstration can show what a machine is capable of. A deployment reveals what it takes to keep that machine useful—and whether a customer will keep paying for it.Chavez described REMI, the company’s robot orchestration intelligence, as part of that work: gathering data, supporting preventive maintenance and autonomy supervision, and improving the company’s own models and third-party models.Deployment also changes the hardware.“The first product that you launch normally is not going to be the final form factor,” he said.Customer experience helps determine what the next version should become.The next test is implementationWhen asked what we would be discussing a year from now, Chavez answered:“We’re going to be talking about implementation.”He said customers are setting up teams and expects larger robotics budgets to follow in 2027. With that spending will come questions about results.“Where is their ROI? How is implementation going?”His expectation is that robots will deliver value. The competition, as he sees it, will be over which companies and which form factors deliver that value most efficiently.There is a human dimension to implementation, too.Chavez pointed to the eyes and rounded forms of Robot.com’s machines. As ro
- Oct 5, 20267 min
How Kiwibot Became Robot.com
When I first encountered Kiwibot, the company was best known for its small delivery robots rolling around college campuses.I saw them again at NVIDIA GTC this year, where the Kiwibots were wandering around Plaza de Cesar Chavez Park and encouraging people to scan a QR code for a gift. The video below has no audio, but it’s like a “Where’s Kiwi?” challenge to see how many you can spot in just 30 seconds. (There were a lot of them roaming the park.) I enjoyed having them around.Since May of 1995, Kiwibot has grown into Robot.com, and the company’s scope and ambition have expanded considerably. I recently sat down with Robot.com co-founder and CEO Felipe Chavez Cortes to talk about his robots and the evolution from Kiwibot.From gaming to robotsFirst, though, I asked a question I have asked many founders:“Tell me your origin story.”The question brought a smile to Chavez Cortes.He grew up in Colombia and says his first real encounter with technology came through World of Warcraft. At 13, he had a technical role helping set up Spanish-language servers for the game.“That kind of blew my mind,” he told me, because it showed him that “you can actually build something that can help people with very low resources.”He later founded a food-delivery startup in Colombia, sold it and finished college.“Did that check mark for my parents,” he joked.In 2017, Chavez Cortes joined the Global Founders Program at UC Berkeley, where the team created an early food-delivery robot. UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck Fund became an early institutional investor.College campuses became an ideal proving ground.Students wanted the convenience of delivery, Chavez Cortes said, while campuses offered a more controlled environment than city streets.“It also allowed us to get better and faster feedback on the product,” he said. “And then we iterated from there.”That experience would eventually push the company well beyond food delivery.From Kiwibot to Robot.comAs customers began asking for different kinds of robots, the name Kiwibot increasingly described only one part of what the company was becoming.“Our customers started to request new types of robots,” Chavez Cortes said. As customers began asking for different kinds of robots, the company began looking beyond campus delivery to other sectors and environments.Today, Robot.com is developing several different robot types.R-Kiwi remains focused on delivery. R-Cargo is designed for industrial and warehouse environments.In June, Robot.com commercially launched R-Noid, a manipulation robot designed for repetitive jobs including packing, picking, folding and restaurant assistance. The company says R-Noid can be deployed under a Robot-as-a-Service model within eight to twelve weeks.Then, in August, Robot.com unveiled R-Dog, a four-legged concept designed for the difficult “last 100 meters” of delivery, including stairs, curbs, thresholds and uneven terrain that can stop a wheeled robot. Commercial deployments are planned for 2027.The different robots are tied together through REMI, Robot.com‘s fleet-management and orchestration platform. Chavez Cortes described it as the layer that allows the company to operate different robot types and connect them with its own autonomy systems, traditional robotics software and third-party robot foundation models.One robot exposes the next problemPerhaps the most interesting part of Robot.com‘s evolution is how solving one problem can reveal another.At one golf-course deployment, R-Kiwi robots could deliver orders. But someone still had to load them.That became the next automation problem.Customers began asking whether Robot.com could automate that step too, helping drive the development of R-Noid. The company’s June launch materials describe one early R-Noid “Packer” deployment at a golf course handling on-site order operations.It is a useful example of how Robot.com says it approaches robotics: deploy something, see where the bottleneck moves, and then decide whether another part of the workflow can be automated.</
- Aug 22, 20268 min
Machina Labs Wants to Make Factories Programmable
A damaged C-17 recently returned to the air with a RoboFormed structural repair part. Machina Labs made it directly from a digital design, using robots instead of dedicated tooling.“Qualifying a part from a new manufacturing process for flight can take years, time these critical programs don’t have time to spare,” Mehr said in the company’s August 18 announcement.A conventional factory usually begins with a decision: What will this factory make?That choice determines nearly everything that follows, from the machinery and tooling to the layout of the building. Once the investment is made, the factory becomes very good at producing the same thing, over and over.Mehr wants to loosen that connection between the factory and the product.“Our goal is to create a platform that can make car parts in the morning,” he told me. “But then in the afternoon, without any major physical change in the platform, it can start doing aircraft. And at night, autonomously, it can do missile components.”Machina calls its system RoboCraftsman. It is a general-purpose manufacturing platform designed to perform different jobs through software rather than through a physical rebuild of the factory.The company became known for RoboForming, its process for turning a flat sheet of metal into a finished shape with two industrial robots working from opposite sides. Watching the process brings to mind a potter molding clay, except the material is metal and the hands belong to robots.“People don’t realize that metal is very, very plastic,” Mehr said. “It’s very impressionable.”The robots supply the force and precision needed to shape the material incrementally. By applying compression from both sides, they can manage how the metal stretches and hardens as it takes form.The underlying craft is not new. Metalworkers have shaped material this way for generations. What has changed is who, or what, is holding the tools.“It’s almost the way craftsmen did it a while back,” Mehr said. “But now robots are doing it.”A different kind of scaleTraditional manufacturing excels when enormous numbers of identical products are required. Mehr points to Toyota, which can produce a vehicle roughly every 60 seconds in the United States.“What traditional manufacturing cannot do is make a different car every 60 seconds,” he said.That is the opening Machina is pursuing.In its work with Toyota, the company can customize parts that have already moved through the automaker’s conventional production system. A Tacoma hood or tailgate, for example, can be given a design chosen by its owner.Toyota keeps the efficiency of mass production while adding a level of individual expression that conventional tooling makes difficult or expensive.Manufacturing has traditionally relied on economies of scale: Invest in specialized equipment, then make enough copies of the same product to recover the cost. Mehr believes programmable factories could make variety economical, too.The result could be a world in which cars, buildings and other physical products no longer look so much alike.“That’s actually a limitation of manufacturing,” he said. “We can only scale and make cheap stuff today if we’re making the same thing over and over again.”Machina describes itself as a physical AI company because its larger goal goes beyond automating an existing production line. Mehr compares the idea to the way a person can express an intent to a large language model and receive text or an image in return.Here, the output is a physical object.Lessons from SpaceXMehr’s interest in flexible manufacturing grew out of his time at SpaceX.He remembers arriving at its Hawthorne factory and feeling like “a kid in a candy shop.” Rockets, which he had associated with governments and national space programs, were being built by a company in Southern California.He also saw how the physical constraints of manufacturing slowed even the fastest hardware companies. Every new product could require a different facility, a new set of tools and another large capital investment.“My focus has been on bringing this agility back,” he said, “bringing software-like agility to manufacturing.”Defense has become an early adopter because it presents precisely that problem. The sector needs many different systems, often in relatively small quantities, and must be able to respond quickly when demand changes.Lockheed Martin’s relationship with Machina spans investment and production. Lockheed Martin Ventures invested i
- Aug 5, 202610 min
A Robot Built to Give Disabled and Elderly Some Independence
Imagine having an itch on your head but being unable to scratch it. Or wanting a drink, but needing another person to stand beside you and hold it for several minutes. For someone with a significant mobility impairment, completing one of these actions can restore a small but meaningful piece of independence.Hello Robot is working toward a future in which robots give people greater independence in their everyday lives.The California robotics company expresses that mission in two short phrases: “Robots with purpose” and “Technology with empathy.”Hello Robot’s Stretch platform has become a widely used tool for robotics research and development. But one of the clearest expressions of the company’s purpose can be found in its assistive robotics work with people with disabilities, older adults and their care partners.I recently spoke with Hello Robot co-founder and CEO Aaron Edsinger about the company’s path from the research lab into real homes.A robot designed around peopleStretch does not look like the humanoid robots currently attracting much of the robotics industry’s attention. It moves on a compact wheeled base. A vertical mast allows it to reach different heights. Its telescoping arm extends into the surrounding environment, while cameras and sensors help it understand what is happening around it.In one pilot Edsinger described, a person wanted to use Stretch to scratch an itch. In another, a participant wanted the robot to hold a drink so that a caregiver would not need to remain beside them throughout the process.“These are very simple tasks, but they’re achievable today,” Edsinger said. “And they provide immense value to the people who are working with the robot.”The value extends beyond completing the task itself. Each action gives one person greater agency while giving the care partner more freedom.Assistive technology is often evaluated according to what it can do for the person receiving care. Hello Robot considers the care partner part of the equation.Edsinger spoke about an aunt who is bedbound and alone at night. If she needs water, getting up without assistance could be dangerous.A robot does not need to function as a fully autonomous butler to help in that situation. It could bring a drink, connect her with a remote caregiver or allow someone to perform a safety check. Relatively simple capabilities could support the existing care network rather than attempting to replace it.Helping people age in placeHello Robot is also participating in research involving older adults and people with cognitive impairments.Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have placed a socially assistive version of Stretch in the homes of people with dementia and their care partners. The robot combines its onboard capabilities with smart-home sensors to provide reminders, support daily routines and monitor certain safety concerns.In one deployment, the robot helped remind a man with dementia to eat, drink, exercise and complete parts of his daily hygiene routine.Because the robot can move, it can bring its screen and reminders to the person at the appropriate place and time. A tablet left on a bedside table cannot do that if it has been misplaced, forgotten or left uncharged.The research remains at an early stage. Stretch is not yet a consumer caregiving product, and Hello Robot is careful not to present it as one.But home deployments help researchers understand what people genuinely need from a robot, what they will accept in their homes and which capabilities are reliable enough to create value today.For an older adult, that value could mean remaining at home longer. For a family member, it could mean being able to leave the house without constant worry. For a professional caregiver, it could mean having help with routine activities while preserving more time for human care.Why Hello Robot did not build a humanoidEdsinger has extensive experience with humanoid robots. He studied at MIT with Rodney Brooks, spent more than a decade working on humanoids and previously founded a humanoid robotics company. He later served as director of robotics at Google, where he began thinking seriously about what it would take to place robots in homes.His conclusion was that the industry needed a different approach.After seeing research from his longtime collaborator and eventual Hello Robot co-founder Charlie Kemp, Edsinger became interested in a minimal robot with a telescoping arm.“It has to be more like a Roomba with an arm than a large humanoid clomping around in your house,” he recalled.The company’s rejection of the humanoid form is closely connected to its assistive mission. A useful humanoid must be large and powerful enough to balance, reach counters and manipulate objects. That size, we
- Jul 30, 20263 min
AgiBot Has Produced 15,000 Robots. What Comes Next?
Last month, AgiBot announced the production of its 15,000th robot. I discovered, while interviewing Peng Chen, Business Development Director for Agibot, that “15,000th” is almost impossible to say.Producing that many robots is difficult too. But it may not be the hardest part. The next test is whether those robots can leave the demonstration stage behind and perform useful work reliably in factories, stores, care facilities, and eventually our homes.Peng’s answer was direct: “We’re in the era converting from demo phase to deploy phase,” he said.What does 15,000 actually mean?On June 28, AgiBot’s 15,000th robot rolled off the production line. The company had reached 10,000 only three months earlier, an impressive ramp for a business founded in 2023.The figure represents cumulative production, not 15,000 robots working autonomously in the field. Production, shipments, and active deployments are different measures.Still, AgiBot has achieved meaningful scale. Omdia reported that it shipped 5,168 humanoid robots in 2025, representing 39 percent of the market it tracked.The milestone suggests that robot hardware is reaching a scale that can support broader experimentation and deployment.Not every robot looks like a personWhen people hear “15,000 robots,” they may imagine an army of identical humanoids walking off an assembly line.AgiBot’s portfolio is much broader.The company produces full-size humanoids, half-size humanoids, wheeled industrial robots, quadrupeds, dexterous manipulation systems, and commercial cleaning robots. The X2 featured in my interview is a half-size humanoid designed to appear approachable and interact with people.Peng described possible applications across education, research, manufacturing, logistics, retail, restaurants, healthcare, and outdoor inspections.The robot’s physical form depends on the job.A wheeled platform may make more sense on a factory floor. A quadruped may be better suited to inspection work. A smaller humanoid may be useful for entertainment, education, customer guidance, or social interaction.This diversity is a reminder that the future of embodied AI will not be defined by a single perfect human replica. It will probably include many types of machines designed for different environments.The difficult leap from demonstrations to deploymentRobotics demonstrations have become remarkably good at attracting attention.Robots dance, run, sort objects, fold clothes, perform backflips, and hold conversations. These moments are entertaining and often technically impressive.Check out this rehearsal of Agibots rehearsing for a performance at the AGI and Robotics summit at Stanford. Very entertaining. But a demonstration is not the same as a deployment. A demonstration asks whether a robot can perform a task under favorable conditions. A deployment asks whether it can perform that task repeatedly, safely, affordably, and with minimal human intervention. A robot working in a factory cannot succeed nine times out of ten and simply try again after a failure. It must operate according to production schedules, coordinate with people and other machines, and respond predictably when something unexpected happens. Battery life, maintenance, integration, safety, training, and the cost of human supervision all become part of the calculation.Peng acknowledged that this is not an AgiBot challenge alone.“The whole industry” is searching for places where robots can work autonomously and reliably, he said.This is why constrained environments are likely to come first.Factories, warehouses, and commercial facilities offer repeatable processes and spaces that can be adapted to machines. Homes, hospitals, and nursing facilities are far less predictable. Every room is different. Objects move. People behave unexpectedly. The consequences of an error can be much more serious.AgiBot has reported approximately 100 cumulative hours of factory livestream operations involving G2 robots in a tablet-production quality-inspection process. The robots worked alongside people and followed the rhythm of an active production line.That is a meaningful step beyond a short stage demonstration. It is not yet proof that general-purpose robots can operate autonomously everywhere, but it illustrates the path from controlled experiments to narrowly defined work.People may be more ready than expectedAgiBot expected some people to be uneasy around the X2. Instead, Peng said, public response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic.I saw that curiosity at NVIDIA GTC, where the robot’s friendly appearance and dance moves drew a crowd.The X2 can converse, perform, guide visitors, and give presentations. While complex physical work remains challenging, social interaction could become one of the first practical uses for sma
- Jul 20, 20265 min
Restaurant Robots Are Growing Up
When I first interviewed StarBot at NVIDIA GTC earlier this year, the company was demonstrating a wheeled service robot designed for restaurants. We were having a record heat wave that week in San Jose. It was was 93 degrees and we were in direct sun when the little clip below was recorded, which explains the references to water and air conditioning. Just over three months later, I caught up with engineer Ricky Wu at the Humanity & AGI Summit 2026 at Stanford University, where StarBot was showing something entirely different: a humanoid robot. The transition says as much about the service robotics industry as it does about StarBot itself.During our interview, Ricky explained that the shift was driven by customer feedback. Restaurant operators liked the original robot but kept asking the same question: could it climb stairs? The answer was no. A wheeled robot is efficient on flat floors but quickly reaches its limits in more complex environments. The company’s response was to build a humanoid platform that could navigate spaces designed for people while adding dexterous hands, depth sensing, LiDAR, and conversational AI.It’s a reminder that some of the biggest advances in robotics aren’t driven by new AI models. They’re driven by deployment. Real customers expose real problems.The restaurant industry has become one of the first proving grounds for service robotics, but adoption remains in its early stages. While robot waiters attract attention on social media, the vast majority of restaurants still operate without robots. Where they are deployed, robots typically transport food, bus tables, or handle repetitive delivery tasks, allowing staff to spend more time interacting with customers instead of walking dishes across the dining room.The labor equation also matters. Restaurants continue to struggle with hiring and employee turnover, making repetitive support tasks an attractive target for automation. Rather than replacing servers, today’s service robots are generally designed to augment existing staff by taking over physically repetitive work.At the same time, companies appear to be thinking beyond restaurants. In our discussion, StarBot described applications that extended into homes and other service environments. That reflects a broader trend I have begun noticing across multiple robotics startups. Instead of building highly specialized machines for a single market, many companies are evolving toward general-purpose robotic platforms that can be adapted through software and AI for a variety of settings.Whether that strategy ultimately succeeds remains an open question. A robot built for restaurants must satisfy a different set of requirements than one designed for factories or private homes. But the industry increasingly seems willing to pursue that broader vision.#robotics #physicalai #droidsnewsletter #starbotusa #AIRoA #HumanityAGIsummit #AIRoboticsAlliance This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit droids.substack.com
- Jul 15, 20261 min
Cheap drone mass-production startup Neros wins $500M Army contract
Neros Technologies, a startup founded by former teenage drone racers, has secured a Defense Department contract worth up to $500 million to supply first-person-view drones to the U.S. Army, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The deal marks one of the largest Pentagon commitments to low-cost, expendable drone technology from a nontraditional defense contractor.From Drone Racing to DefenseFounded in 2023 by Soren Monroe-Anderson and Olaf Hichwa, who competed as professional drone racers before entering the defense industry, Neros builds its Archer quadcopter FPV drone entirely without Chinese components. The company, headquartered in El Segundo, California, has positioned itself as a domestic alternative to the cheap Chinese-made drones that have dominated the market.Neros was already on the Pentagon’s radar. The company was selected for the Army’s Purpose-Built Attritable System program in late 2025 and won approval on the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue UAS list. It also signed a contract to deliver 6,000 Archer drones to Ukraine’s frontlines through the International Drone Coalition. Monroe-Anderson, now in his early twenties, has said the company can scale production to one million drones per year with sufficient Pentagon backing. Earlier this year, Neros acquired a 250,000-square-foot factory to support that ambition.A Broader Push for Drone ManufacturingThe Neros contract reflects a wider Pentagon effort to build domestic drone production capacity. On Monday, West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey announced that Helsing, a German defense AI company valued at $18 billion, will invest $50 million to establish its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The plant will produce Helsing’s HX-2 AI-enabled strike drone — already combat-proven in Ukraine — at a rate of 2,000 per month, employing 60 workers at an average salary of $125,000.“Factories win wars, and that’s exactly what we want to do in Berkeley County,” said Jennifer McArdle, general manager of Helsing’s U.S. subsidiary.Pentagon’s Appetite for Attritable DronesThe contracts underscore how lessons from Ukraine’s war have reshaped American military procurement. The Army has begun training soldiers with FPV drones modeled on Ukrainian tactics, and spending on expendable drone systems has accelerated sharply. Separately, the Pentagon awarded AeroVironment a $500 million counter-drone contract on July 1, illustrating both sides of the emerging drone equation — the need for cheap offensive systems and the defenses to counter them.Additional Resources for Inquisitive Minds:MILITARYNYI. FPV Drone Manufacturer Plans to Deliver 1 Million Drones a Year to U.S. Military. July 7, 2025. U.S. Department of War. Contracts for July 1, 2026#robotics #militaryrobotics #drones #droidsnewsletter #dailyroboticnews This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit droids.substack.com
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