Peter Ryseck built a pole that balances on a contact patch about the size of a coin and stays there long after most people would have walked away. Four drone propellers sit on a 3D-printed mount at the top and give small sideways pushes whenever the shaft begins to tip. Nearly all of the weight still travels down the tube and into the ground, so those motors spend most of their time barely above idle.
Photo credit: The University of Queensland
Australian researchers have fitted giant burrowing cockroaches with electrodes, cameras, and spring-loaded syringes so the insects can be steered like tiny remote vehicles and deliver medicine in places no human or ordinary robot can reach.
Finished on a new Guangzhou line, XPENG’s Iron stood up and walked away on its own. No remote pilot. No stage crew. Just a completed humanoid leaving the factory floor the way a car leaves a paint booth, only this one used two legs. The company called the September 7 moment the first time an advanced general-purpose humanoid had been built on automated production lines and then departed under its own power.
TECNO spent years treating phones like cameras that happen to make calls. CAMON Slim 5G doubles down on that idea and then flattens the whole package until it sits 6.39 millimeters thick, which is thin enough that a stack of two credit cards still looks bulky next to it. Official launch materials call the handset an art piece you hold in your palm, and the company is not being modest about the paint jobs. Five finishes arrived with the September 7, 2026 announcement: Burgundy Red in fiberglass with a matte velvet grain, Matisse Black with fluorescent green cut-out accents, Rebel Pink on a black body, Van Gogh Blue with a patterned gradient that tries to spin like the sky in The Starry Night, and Neo Mondrian, a photochromic white slab that only shows Piet Mondrian’s grid when ultraviolet light hits it.
Crowds on Shanghai’s Wujiang Road have a new reason to stall outside the Dairy Queen at No. 169, across from Louis Vuitton’s ship-shaped flagship. On August 29, Sharpa’s wheeled humanoid, North, started a daily shift behind a dedicated counter in that store, making Oreo Blizzards for paying customers on the same machines, cups, toppings, and blender a human crew already used. CFB Group runs the franchise. Sharpa and DQ call the setup the first live commercial kitchen where a humanoid works a full branded workflow without new fixtures, custom conveyors, or a rebuilt room.
Jackery first parked a wheeled solar generator on a CES floor in 2024 and called it Solar Mars Bot. Two years of work later, the same rover is back in public, this time at IFA Berlin 2026, still billed as a future product that can hunt sunlight, charge itself, then roll over to you with a few kilowatt-hours in tow.
Photo credit: TU Graz
In a hot attic on the Graz University of Technology campus, air next to one water-soaked ceramic block measured nearly seven degrees Celsius cooler than the space around it. Kristijan Ristoski, who built the water supply into a full cooling wall for his master’s thesis, said the drop was easy to feel across the room. That block is a cube about 23 centimeters on each side, printed from clay, fired at low heat so it stays open and thirsty, then loaded with water.
Agility Robotics posted a short clip this week of Digit rearranging a room, dragging a couch and shifting chairs, bags, and household clutter as if the furniture were just another tote. That demo is the company showing off generalized manipulation: objects of different sizes, weights, and grips, moved through a space built for people. The same skill set is what Digit already uses on mixed loads and changing layouts inside warehouses.
Con Hathy printed a stubby PETG rocket named Spark, loaded an Estes B4, and sent it up a launch rod. Jolly Logic Altimeter 2 data put the flight at 81 feet, 48 mph, and 6.4 G. He then wanted the same motor to do more work by firing it from a closed tube, the same idea that once helped the Arcas sounding rocket leave the pad faster than a rail ever allowed.
Plasma Channel packed a year of garage experiments into checked luggage and flew 14,000 kilometers to Namibia to see if 50,000 volts could pull drinkable water out of desert fog. The unit uses electrostatic precipitation: a high-voltage wire ionizes tiny water droplets so they race toward grounded mesh or rods, condense, and drip into a collector. Early two-stake versions ran at lower voltage and 39 watts. Later builds grew to a three-stake, double-stacked layout four times as wide, added solar charging, 3D-printed resin joints for travel, and a timer that cycled two minutes on and three minutes off between 6 and 8 a.m.