Self-Driving & Autonomous Hardware
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Humble Hauler ditches the driver cab for a 360° sensor pod and a VLA stack
Eyal Cohen ran autonomy at Apple, Uber ATG and Waabi. His new company Humble came out of stealth on April 21 with $24M from Eclipse and a Class 8 freight truck that has no cab. The photo went viral on X within hours — less Peterbilt, more low-slung sled with a shipping container bolted on… Continue reading
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Coco Robotics x Uber Eats (San Jose Expansion): the first time sidewalk bots are hailed from a super-app
Coco’s pink, knee-high delivery robots turned on in downtown San Jose this week. Twenty bots, 1-mile radius, summoned straight from the Uber Eats app — first time these things are dispatched from a super-app instead of Coco’s own merchant flow. That last detail is the part worth paying attention to. The hardware on the sidewalk… Continue reading
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Anduril YFQ-44A Fury flies at Edwards AFB — and a maintainer launched it from a laptop
The week of April 5, Anduril delivered the first YFQ-44A Fury to the USAF Experimental Operations Unit at Edwards AFB. Days later, EOU maintainers — not test pilots — ran a full sortie: launch, recover, in-flight retasking, the works. That’s the Air Force quietly taking the leash off Anduril’s robot wingman. The hardware Fury is… Continue reading
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Northrop Grumman Lumberjack flew its first end-to-end autonomous mission on Palantir’s Maven
Northrop Grumman’s Lumberjack delivered what defense AI shops have been promising. At Operation Lethal Eagle in early April, the 101st Airborne ran it through a full autonomous mission cycle — sense, decide, recommend, strike — with Palantir’s Maven Smart System in the loop instead of a human pilot. What the hardware actually is Lumberjack is… Continue reading
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A Vancouver startup put self-driving pods in two real airports — not a pilot, actual revenue service. A&K Robotics closed an $8M CAD Series A on April 21, led by BDC’s Industrial Innovation Fund and Vantage Futures, to scale from dozens to hundreds of Cruz Pods a year out of a new Surrey, BC plant.
What the hardware actually is A&K Robotics Cruz Pod is a small electric indoor passenger pod. Tap a destination on the touchscreen, sit down, it drives itself through crowds using 360° lidar, cameras, sonar, and A&K’s own Kinesos AI motion planner. Live today at Vancouver International (YVR) and Madrid-Barajas — the latter run by Aena,… Continue reading
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Reliable Robotics Autonomous Cessna 208B: 200+ orders, $160M raised, first pilotless cargo route launches this summer
Reliable Robotics closed a $160M round on April 21, Nimble Partners leading, with Boeing AE Ventures, RTX Ventures, and Sumitomo Presidio on the cap table. Valuation is nudging $1B. Bloomberg, DroneXL, and AIN all ran it the same day. The hardware Not a new airframe. Reliable’s Autonomy System (RAS) is a retrofit kit that bolts… Continue reading
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Innok Robotics INDUROS family + Innok Cockpit: 1.3-tonne outdoor AMRs that talk VDA-5050
A German AMR maker most US readers haven’t heard of just had its strongest quarter ever. Innok Robotics is using Hannover Messe 2026 (Hall 26, G44(9), April 20–24) to roll out the full INDUROS family — 350s, 700, 700s, 1300 — plus a new browser-based fleet manager called Innok Cockpit. There’s also a “Physical AI”… Continue reading
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Hesai EXT Color-Detecting Lidar: 4,320 channels, native color, and a 40% PDE Picasso chip
Hesai announced the EXT on April 18, ahead of the Beijing Auto Show. It’s the first automotive lidar that outputs 3D points with color baked in at the pixel level, in one scan. No more stitching lidar and camera frames downstream. What’s actually in the box The trick is the Picasso SPAD-SoC — Hesai calls… Continue reading
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DoorDash Dot: the first delivery robot cleared for sidewalks, bike lanes AND public roads
DoorDash Labs’ in-house bot Dot is running commercial orders across Tempe, Mesa and two other Phoenix suburbs. About 1/10 the size of a car, top speed 20 mph. Unlike Starship (sidewalks only) or Nuro (roads only), Dot switches freely between sidewalks, bike lanes and public streets. That’s the unlock — and why April’s CBS segment… Continue reading
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GEODASH Aerosystems vs DJI Agras: map-free spraying drones target oil palm plantations
Paul Yam, CEO: “Agriculture does not need bigger drones — it needs smarter ones.” GEODASH Aerosystems, the Singapore JV between DroneDash Technologies and GNSS network GEODNET, went public April 15. Industrial AI spraying drone. Commercial launch Q3 2026. Why map-free matters Every DJI Agras or XAG job starts the same way: fly a survey drone,… Continue reading
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