ANYbotics

A vision-language-action (VLA) model is one neural network that reads camera images and a plain-language instruction and outputs a robot's next motor commands, built by training a vision-language model on robot demonstrations. Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Figure AI, Skild AI and AgiBot lead, and the commercial race now turns on the cost of action data rather than model design.

ANYbotics designed Shift to help maintenance teams run industrial inspections, detect failing equipment, and turn data into work orders.

Swiss legged-robot maker ANYbotics has released Shift, a four-module platform that plans robot inspection rounds, analyses the readings and pushes findings into plant systems such as SAP and IBM Maximo. The company says Shift already analyses more than 120,000 inspections a month across over 1,000 industrial assets.

Shipments of professional service robots rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025, led by 117,500 transport and logistics robots, the International Federation of Robotics said on 30 September 2026. The IFR counted about 7,000 full-size humanoids sold worldwide and 174 humanoid makers, more than half of them in China, and said most humanoid uses still rely on teleoperation.

Eni signed a memorandum of understanding with Genoa start-up Generative Bionics on 30 September 2026 to test the GENE.01 humanoid in inspection and remote assistance and to study producing, testing and recycling the robots' batteries at Eni sites. Chemicals arm Versalis and its subsidiary Finproject will work on the robot's feet, and Eni will assess opening its high-performance computing to Physical AI training. No financial terms were disclosed.

Two months after announcing a Series C of up to $1.4 billion, Germany's NEURA Robotics agreed to take over Bosch Rexroth's ACTIVE Shuttle transport-robot business on August 13, 2026 and bought all of Ulm-based ADLATUS Robotics on August 24. Together with a compute-module deal with Italy's SECO and a new training centre at RWTH Aachen, the moves show NEURA assembling a European physical-AI group by acquisition rather than only by in-house development.

The EU's Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, was published on July 24, 2026 and took effect on July 27. It delays high-risk AI obligations to December 2, 2027 for stand-alone systems and August 2, 2028 for AI built into products, and shifts machinery, including industrial robots, into a lighter AI Act regime whose substance will instead be written into the Machinery Regulation by delegated act.

Zurich-based ANYbotics said on June 16, 2026 it had opened an office at the DFactory Barcelona Industry 4.0 campus to expand engineering in computer vision, machine learning, software, mechatronics and DevOps. The site becomes its third hub after Zurich and San Francisco, following a Yokogawa software partnership in February and the hiring of a chief revenue officer in March.

Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 on April 14, 2026, an embodied reasoning model built on Gemini 3.0 Flash and offered as a preview through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. DeepMind said the model reads industrial instruments correctly 86% of the time, or 93% with an agentic zoom and code execution step, against 23% for ER 1.5. Boston Dynamics is using the capability for Spot facility inspections.

UBTech Robotics said in its 2025 annual results that revenue from full-size humanoid robots rose 2,203.7% to RMB820.6 million on 1,079 units, lifting group revenue 53.3% to RMB2.0 billion. The net loss narrowed to RMB789.8 million, while three share placings raised RMB5.78 billion to fund capacity for more than 6,000 robots a year.