Realbotix has partnered with Bloom Procurement Services to launch a pilot program using socially assistive humanoid robots in elder care settings in Northeast England. The pilot will place Realbotix robots in care environments where they are expected to provide companionship, cognitive stimulation, emotional support and routine wellbeing check-ins for older residents. The program is designed to assess resident engagement, cognitive health indicators, staff feedback and effects on loneliness and quality of life.

UK robotics and artificial intelligence company Humanoid has introduced KinetIQ Ascend, a reinforcement learning system intended to improve the speed and reliability of robotic manipulation in industrial settings. KinetIQ Ascend extends the company’s KinetIQ platform by allowing robots to refine previously learned behaviours through trial-and-error training on specific tasks. Humanoid said the approach is designed to reduce the manual tuning and data collection required when developing new robotic capabilities.

The 2026 “Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Robotics & Automation” (IERA) goes to Swiss deep-tech company Verity for its fully autonomous indoor drone system. The aerial robots help in the logistics and retail sector, continuously keeping track of inventory without GPS or human intervention. The drones autonomously navigate aisles and scan barcodes before returning to charging stations. Across deployed fleets, a centralized cloud-based platform ensures continuous learning and optimization of performance.

The European Commission has presented a new package of measures aimed at reducing Europe’s dependence on non-European suppliers for critical digital technologies. The European Technological Sovereignty Package focuses on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, open source and the digitalisation of the energy sector.

Europe’s leading robotics association, euRobotics, has issued an urgent call to action, warning that the continent risks missing a critical window to harness robotics for its most pressing real-world challenges, while public attention is distracted by viral humanoid demos. In its Vienna Statement, published Monday at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), euRobotics argues that the stakes extend well beyond factory floors. Food and energy security, an ageing population, large-scale reshoring of manufacturing, maintenance of critical infrastructure, and deep-sea emergency response are among the challenges the association identifies as genuinely requiring capable robotic systems — not optional enhancements, but essential tools. “Humanoids performing household tasks or dance routines are merely entertaining distractions from the real priorities.”

GCHQ Director Anne Keast-Butler delivered the agency’s inaugural public annual lecture at Bletchley Park on Wednesday, using the occasion to address the growing role of artificial intelligence in both national security operations and the evolving threat environment. The speech covered a broad range of topics — from Russian hybrid warfare to quantum computing — but AI was the consistent thread running through nearly every section. For technology leaders and businesses, the key takeaways are practical: AI is accelerating threats, AI is being deployed to counter those threats, and organisations that have not yet prioritised cybersecurity in an AI context are behind the curve.

The European Robotics League (ERL) held its final at the pier in The Hague, bringing together competing teams, industry partners, city representatives, and sponsors for a week of applied robotics challenges across real-world scenarios. Despite characteristically changeable coastal weather, the event concluded with a full awards ceremony and the message: robotics is moving decisively from the laboratory into everyday environments.

Rocking Robots covers the European Robotics League 2026 in Scheveningen, where international student teams tested their robots in realistic outdoor challenges. The event brought robotics research, education and public demonstration together on the Dutch coast, with a focus on collaboration, autonomy and the future of robotics in Europe. This video impression captures the atmosphere, the teams and the technology in action.

AtkinsRéalis and the Oxford Robotics Institute at the University of Oxford have formed a global partnership to develop and deploy autonomous robotic systems for the nuclear and energy sectors.

Anthropic has published the results of its largest economic research effort to date, a survey of 81,000 Claude users that asked, in their own words, how artificial intelligence is reshaping their working lives. The results are striking in their honesty, their contradictions, and their implications for how policymakers, employers, and workers should think about AI’s march through the economy.