Industrial automation

Unimate was an industrial robotic arm designed by George C. Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger and built by Unimation; in 1961 it became the first robot installed on an assembly line, unloading a die-casting press at a General Motors plant.

Rodney Brooks (born 1954) is an Australian-born roboticist who promoted behaviour-based robotics and the subsumption architecture, directed MIT's AI Laboratory and CSAIL, and co-founded iRobot, Rethink Robotics and Robust.AI.

Unimation was the Connecticut company founded in 1961 by George C. Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger that built the first Unimate robot and later the PUMA series.

A department of China's State Council, established in March 2008 to administer industry, communications and informatisation. It consolidated industrial and information-technology functions that had previously been spread across several government bodies.

Baxter was a two-armed robot unveiled by Rethink Robotics in September 2012, designed to work safely beside people on factory lines without safety cages and to be taught by hand, at a list price of $22,000.

Apptronik is an Austin robotics company spun out of a University of Texas lab in 2016 that builds the Apollo humanoid robot and has signed commercial deals with Mercedes-Benz and GXO Logistics.

Stretch is Boston Dynamics' first commercial robot designed specifically for warehouses, unveiled in March 2021 to unload trucks and, in later plans, to build orders.

Phoenix is Sanctuary AI's sixth-generation humanoid general-purpose robot, unveiled in May 2023 and controlled by the company's Carbon AI system.

Apollo is Apptronik's humanoid robot, unveiled in August 2023: a 1.72 m electric machine with a 55-pound payload and swappable four-hour batteries, aimed first at warehouse and factory work.

UBTECH Walker S1 is an industrial humanoid robot released on 14 October 2024. Standing 172 cm and weighing 76 kg, it can walk while carrying a 15 kg payload and has been trialled in BYD and Audi FAW car plants.

UBTECH's second-generation industrial humanoid robot, launched in 2025, features a three-minute self-swap battery system and entered mass production and delivery the same year.

Agility Robotics builds Digit, a bipedal mobile manipulation robot, and assembles it at its own factory in Salem, Oregon. The company has tested the robot with Amazon and deployed it with a logistics customer under a multi-year agreement.

Digit is Agility Robotics' human-centric, multi-purpose robot for logistics work. It moves and handles totes in warehouses, including repetitive tote recycling for Amazon and conveyor feeding at a GXO facility.

Rethink Robotics was a Massachusetts robotics company whose humanoid robot Baxter, unveiled in 2012, was designed to work safely alongside people on factory production lines.

General Motors acquired the self-driving startup Cruise Automation in 2016, then stopped funding its robotaxi work in December 2024 and refocused on hands-free driver assistance such as Super Cruise.

Toyota Motor Corporation is an automaker that in 2015 announced the Toyota Research Institute, a separate company focused on artificial intelligence and robotics, backed by about $1 billion over five years.

Galbot G1 is a wheeled humanoid robot: 1,730 mm tall, 21 degrees of freedom, swappable hand, suction cup or gripper, an onboard NVIDIA AGX Orin computer, and, the company says, deployments in unmanned retail cabins at over 170 sites.

The National Development and Reform Commission is a ministerial-level department of China's State Council that drafts and implements economic and social development plans, manages investment and coordinates macro-economic policy. It descends from the State Planning Commission established in 1952.

Talen Energy is an independent power producer created in 2015 from the spinoff of PPL's competitive generation business, later taken private by Riverstone, restructured through bankruptcy, and now a nuclear power supplier to Amazon.

Kairos Power, founded in 2016, is an American company developing a fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor using TRISO fuel. It is building the Hermes demonstration reactor in Tennessee and plans 500 MW of projects with Google by 2035.

Handle was a Boston Dynamics research robot that balanced on two wheels and used Atlas-derived arms to move objects; the company credits it with truck unloading and pallet building, and says the work led to its warehouse robot Stretch.

Covariant is a robotics AI company founded in 2017 by researchers largely from UC Berkeley; in 2024 Amazon hired its founders and took a non-exclusive licence to its robotics foundation models.

EVE is a wheeled humanoid robot released by Halodi Robotics, later 1X, in 2018 for logistics, security and medical work. It later became the company's testbed for learning autonomous manipulation from video and teleoperation.

Sanctuary AI is a Vancouver-based robotics company founded in 2018 that aims to build human-like intelligence for general-purpose robots. Its humanoid robot Phoenix was named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2023 list, and the company reported its first commercial deployment that year.

American energy company headquartered in Baltimore, one of the largest electricity producers in the United States, known for its 2024 agreement to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1.

Galbot S1 is a heavy-load embodied robot for industrial, warehousing and logistics work, with two arms carrying up to 50 kg, a reach from the floor to 2.3 m shelves, and hot-swappable batteries for round-the-clock operation.

Zhang Yaqin is an electrical engineer and technology executive who spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, served as president of Baidu from 2014 to 2019, and joined Tsinghua University in 2019 as a chair professor of intelligent science.

Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) is an applied AI research institute set up under Zhang Yaqin, targeting the fourth industrial revolution through autonomous driving, AI plus IoT and brain-inspired intelligence.

A British multinational design and engineering firm founded in 1946 by Sir Ove Arup, known for complex landmark projects such as the Sydney Opera House and for ownership held in trust for its employees.