Let humanoids do the dangerous work. Every year, around 330,000 workers die from occupational accidents worldwide. Minerva Humanoids wants humanoids to take on some of the jobs where the consequences can be even worse: oil & gas, refineries, bomb disposal, and hazardous-material response. Its first robot, called Roger, is built for remote operation. A trained human controls the robot from a safe location, while Roger handles balance and navigation on its own--keep the expert in control, but keep them out of harm’s way. Its first paid pilots are planned for this fall. Minerva was founded by former Tesla Optimus and Boston Dynamics engineers, with software and AI developed in the US and hardware engineered and assembled in Germany. The company just emerged from stealth with about $10M in pre-seed funding, led by General Catalyst.

Robots can now work by feel. One interesting demo at IROS 2026 comes from Daimon Robotics: a robot picks up tiny beads, aligns their holes, and threads them onto a flexible string. It looks simple, but the tricky part starts when the robot makes contact. A bead can slip, the string can deform, and a small change in force can throw off the next move. Vision can tell the robot where the bead is, but not exactly what is happening in its grasp. Daimon is tackling this with Daimon-TWM, a tactile-grounded world model that uses touch to understand the interaction, predict what happens next, and adjust the robot’s actions. The model is built on Daimon’s growing vision-tactile data, collected from both robot sensors and human operators, with the goal of giving robots more useful experience with physical interaction. A small bracelet demo, but it points to something important--robots may need to learn not only how the world looks, but how objects respond when they touch them.