Mission Possible: Rise of Agent Machines

This week: robotics data scarcity opportunity (paid), materials innovation, construction equipment factory tour, fluidic soft systems, precision ag with AI, toolkit for robot kinematic optimization.

Jun 01, 2025

∙ Paid

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

The convergence of AI and robotics is creating unprecedented strategic value for both robotics startups and established companies. As David Sacks highlighted, the concept of networked learning between robots represents a transformative network effect that could dominate entire industries, as seen in autonomous vehicle fleets and robotaxis. Even if startup products struggle to find a product-market fit, these startups will possess critical assets, including intellectual property on robotic hardware components and trade secrets about AI training methods, that established tech companies and manufacturers may find essential to acquire as AI capabilities rapidly advance and hardware costs continue to decline.

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

✈️ Meet the chemical engineer piloting Boeing’s materials innovation

✍️ Author: Prachi Patel

Soon after she started at Boeing, Seebergh turned her attention to increasing the durability of coatings. Airplanes are designed to last 20–30 years, and over that time their surfaces take a beating from harsh weather and chemicals such as hydraulic fluids. Durable coatings bring performance and sustainability benefits as well as savings, Seebergh says. “If a coating system lasts 10 or more years, our airline customers don’t have to repaint their aircraft every few years, which saves water and waste.”

On Seebergh’s watch, the company is switching to Cr(VI)-free primers and coatings that make metal alloy surfaces paintable. She is working with academic and industry partners to find benign corrosion inhibitors for paints and other surface treatment layers. Seebergh says Boeing is testing several other materials technologies, including coatings that keep surfaces free of ice and contamination; shark skin–inspired films that reduce air friction; and lightweight sealants. “There’s a lot of sealant on aircraft—and making those less dense can take out hundreds of pounds,” she says.

Read more at Chemical & Engineering News

Elon Musk and Sandy Munro Discuss SpaceX and the Mission to Occupy Mars /Munro Live/
How does an Airbus data scientist keep up to date? /Spotify/
PyroGenesis Achieves Approved Supplier Status with Boeing /GlobeNewswire/
Joby confirms $250 million equity investment from Toyota /AeroTime/

🏭 Hitachi Construction Machinery Full Factory Tour!

Go deeper inside the medium excavator line /Aaron Witt on YouTube/
The process of constructing a train station using a Japanese 3D printer /ProcessX on YouTube/

🖨️ A standardized platform for translational advances in fluidic soft systems

✍️ Author: Maks Gepner, Jonah Mack, Adam A. Stokes

Soft robotics holds transformative potential for healthcare, manufacturing, and human-machine interactions, but the lack of standardized, scalable fabrication methods limits progress in research and toward reaching commercial goals. The open-source flex printer platform addresses this gap, enabling rapid, reliable production of ultra-flexible soft robots with embedded fluidic logic. By lowering technical and financial barriers, this work aims to democratize access to soft robotics, accelerate innovation, and foster new applications that can benefit society in both the short and long term. Ultimately, this platform lays the groundwork for widespread adoption and collaborative advancement in the field. We demonstrate the capability of this technique by showcasing a fully 3D-printed soft robot, which has a bill of materials of 1 and embedded/embodied control and can walk out of the machine that made it.

Their user-friendly setup can be assembled for less than £400 using off-the-shelf parts. The team demonstrated the capabilities of their new system by creating robots made solely from a soft plastic material and powered by air pressure. Once printed, the palm-sized devices are connected to a compressed air supply before walking out of the machine on which they were made.

Read more at The University of Edinburgh and Devices

Design and development of open-source, multi-purpose wire arc additive manufacturing machine /The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology/
Accurate inverse process optimization framework in laser directed energy deposition /Additive Manufacturing/
Toward Fully Autonomous Flexible Chunk-Based Aerial Additive Manufacturing: Insights from Experimental Validation /arXiv/

🚜 Farmer Answers Farming Questions

Farmers fuming over California's ban on driverless tractors, other robots /YouTube/
Cooperative Ventures invests in Precision AI, bringing artificial intelligence to the farmgate /CHS/

PyRoki: A Modular Toolkit for Robot Kinematic Optimization

✍️ Author: Chung Min Kim, Brent Yi, Hongsuk Choi, et. al

Robot motion can have many goals. Depending on the task, we might optimize for pose error, speed, collision, or similarity to a human demonstration. Motivated by this, we present PyRoki: a modular, extensible, and cross-platform toolkit for solving kinematic optimization problems. PyRoki couples an interface for specifying kinematic variables and costs with an efficient nonlinear least squares optimizer. Unlike existing tools, it is also cross-platform: optimization runs natively on CPU, GPU, and TPU. In this paper, we present (i) the design and implementation of PyRoki, (ii) motion retargeting and planning case studies that highlight the advantages of PyRoki's modularity, and (iii) optimization benchmarking, where PyRoki can be 1.4-1.7x faster and converges to lower errors than cuRobo, an existing GPU-accelerated inverse kinematics library.

Read more at arXiv and Chung Min Kim on X

China’s Startups Race to Dominate the Coming Humanoid Boom /Bloomberg/
Humanoid robots spark debate about safety, form and function /FT/

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

Unlocking Industrial IoT with Litmus MCP Server

The Litmus MCP Server is an official server implementation from Litmus Automation. It’s a secure, real-time bridge between large language models (LLMs) and industrial systems like Litmus Edge and external or local systems like GenAI development environments, visualization tools, and analytics platforms.

Built using the official Litmus APIs and SDK, the server offers strong security, native performance, and reliable integration. It’s listed in the official MCP server registry and available on platforms like Glama and MCP.so.

Manhattan Associates Unveils Agentic AI Innovation at Momentum 2025

Manhattan Associates announced sweeping Agentic AI support within Manhattan Active® solutions that includes intelligent, autonomous digital agents to revolutionize supply chain commerce execution, optimization, and user experiences.

These out-of-the-box AI agents, powered by large language models (LLMs) and Manhattan’s cloud-native, all-microservice API architecture, will autonomously perform tasks, adapt to changing conditions, and dynamically orchestrate workflows. This breakthrough marks a generational leap from traditional chatbots and static workflow configurations to dynamic, intelligent, and situationally aware orchestration across the entire supply chain and commerce lifecycle.

Business Transactions

This week's top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

Cathay Innovation Closes $1B Venture Capital Fund to Bring Vertical AI to Critical Industries /Cathay/
Mitsui Chemicals Launches New Corporate Venture Capital Fund ‘321Catalyst™’ /Business Wire/
State of Michigan Announces New Round of "Make It in Michigan" Mobility Prototyping Grants with a Focus on Autonomous Systems and Critical Technologies that Address Domestic Supply Chain Gaps /Michigan Business/

🇮🇹🦾 MECH-I-TRONIC: Three Hills, Azimut Libera Impresa, and HAT join the capital with a €105 million deal

A new strategic operation for MECH-I-TRONIC: Three Hills, Azimut Libera Impresa, and HAT announce their entry into the industrial group with a total investment of €105 million. At the same time, the group has extended its credit line by an additional €75 million, also thanks to the involvement of CDP, Crédit Agricole, and Banca Sella. With these new resources, the group intends to accelerate growth both organically and through acquisitions, synergies, and expansion into new international markets, targeting revenues of approximately €500 million by 2028.

🇮🇱🏗️ Buildots Raises $45 Million to Scale AI-Powered Operational Excellence in Construction

Buildots, a leader in AI-powered construction management, announced the completion of a $45 million funding round led by Qumra Capital with participation from OG Venture Partners, TLV Partners, Poalim Equity, Future Energy Ventures, and Viola Growth. This investment brings Buildots' total funding to $166 million. With triple-digit revenue growth projected for another year, Buildots continues to gain momentum as it reshapes how construction is managed. As part of the collaboration, Boaz Dinte, Managing General Partner at Qumra Capital, will join Buildots as a board member.

The surge in data center and semiconductor fab construction, which is itself fueled by accelerating advancements in AI, has also emerged as a significant growth driver. Intel, a client-turned-investor, uses Buildots to boost operational efficiency in its global semiconductor fab construction program. The Series D funding will fuel continued development of Buildots' platform, expanding its capabilities to address challenges across the construction lifecycle and cementing its role as a transformative industry force.

🇺🇸 Heron Power Raises $38M Series A to Accelerate an All-Electric Future

Heron Power, an energy infrastructure company, announced that it raised $38 million in Series A funding led by Capricorn Investment Group’s Technology Impact Fund, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Gigascale Capital, Powerhouse Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, and former Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn. The round brings the total funding raised by Heron Power to $43 million. The company is developing industrial power electronics purpose-built for the 21st-century grid, helping the electricity sector to grow faster with scalable, reliable and software-integrated infrastructure. Heron Power will use the new funding to expand its team and complete engineering of the Heron Link, a solid-state transformer solution displacing legacy transformers and power converters.

🇮🇳 Frinks AI, a manufacturing AI startup by IIT Hyderabad alumni, raises $5.4m led by Prime Ventures

Frinks AI, a deep-tech startup founded by IIT Hyderabad alumni, has raised $5.4 million in a Pre-Series A round led by Prime Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $6.25 million. The company is building next-generation Vision AI systems that help manufacturers automate and elevate quality control on their production lines.