This week’s robotics news is mostly about factories and warehouses rather than humanoids on stage. Four items, each at a different level of certainty:
- Reported: Tesla’s former Optimus AI lead has co-founded a startup building non-humanoid robots for skilled manufacturing work [1][2].
- Confirmed: AWS has published open-source sample code for running NVIDIA’s robot-training tools on its cloud [3].
- Company-reported: Locus Robotics says an analyst firm ranks it the top autonomous mobile robot (AMR) vendor by revenue in the Americas, for the second year running [4].
- Company-reported specs: ZS Robotics is bringing its low-profile H125 pallet shuttle to the Americas [5][6].
1. A former Optimus lead goes non-humanoid
Reported, not announced. The Information reported on 7 October 2026 that Ashish Kumar, formerly AI lead on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid team, has co-founded a San Francisco startup called Intelligent Machines [1]. The article is paywalled, so TSN relies on summaries of it published by GMT Eight and Breaking The News [2]. The company has made no announcement of its own.
According to those summaries, which cite people familiar with the matter [2]:
- The robots are not humanoids. They are meant for manufacturing, aerospace and other tasks that usually need highly skilled workers.
- Several former members of Tesla’s Optimus team have joined.
- The company trains its robots with reinforcement learning, rewarding success and penalising mistakes.
- It is focused on software for now, and management is discussing building its own hardware.
- It is reportedly raising a seed round of about $100 million.
Why it matters. One of the people who worked on Tesla’s humanoid has chosen a different body shape for factory work. That fits a wider pattern of putting the engineering effort where the paid work is. It does not prove that non-humanoid designs are better, and the funding figure is still a report.
2. AWS publishes a Physical AI toolchain
Confirmed. AWS has published “The Physical AI Toolchain on AWS” on GitHub under its aws-samples account, released under the Apache 2.0 licence [3]. It is a collection of reference architectures and Terraform infrastructure-as-code that runs NVIDIA’s robot-development software on AWS services. “Physical AI” here means AI that controls machines in the real world.
The README lists components marked “Available” [3]:
- NVIDIA Cosmos for generating synthetic training video
- Isaac Lab for reinforcement-learning training, with 4,096 parallel simulated environments
- Isaac GR00T for fine-tuning NVIDIA’s GR00T N1.6 robot model on SageMaker
- Isaac Sim as a GPU simulation workstation
- NVIDIA OSMO orchestration on Amazon EKS
- Strands Agents for controlling robots in natural language
Deploying trained models to Jetson edge devices is listed as “Planned”. A closed-loop evaluation component is in “Preview” [3]. AWS ships a worked pick-and-place example with a UR3 arm and 27 real teleoperation recordings. It also gives its own cost estimates, for example about $79 for a full GR00T training run [3].
Why it matters. Teams building robot software need three kinds of computing: large GPU clusters for training, flexible capacity for simulation, and small GPUs on the robot itself. AWS is packaging the cloud parts so a team does not have to wire them up from scratch. Two caveats apply. This is sample code, not a managed AWS service. And the costs are AWS’s own estimates. We did not find the “hours not weeks” set-up claim in the repository.
3. Locus keeps the top AMR spot in the Americas
Company-reported ranking. Locus Robotics said on 6 October 2026 that Interact Analysis’s latest Mobile Robot Market report names it the top AMR provider by revenue in the Americas, in both order fulfilment and total AMRs, for the second year in a row [4]. TSN has read Locus’s release, not the paid Interact report.
Locus’s own figures [4]: more than 22,000 robots in its fleet, more than 8.5 billion picks supported, and more than 150 customers across more than 360 sites in over 20 countries. Interact’s Ash Sharma is quoted saying that macro headwinds are “inducing some caution” around long-term fixed investment and pushing buyers towards more flexible options such as mobile robots [4].
Why it matters. That quote explains the trend. Mobile robots can be added, moved or leased, while conveyors and fixed systems lock in capital.
4. ZS Robotics’ H125 pallet shuttle comes to the Americas
Launch confirmed; specs are the company’s. ZS Robotics, which is based in Shanghai, announced the launch of its H125 four-way pallet shuttle in the Americas. The release is dated 24 September from Los Angeles, and US trade titles carried it on 6 October [5][6]. A pallet shuttle is a flat robot that runs along rails inside dense storage racking, carrying pallets in and out.
The company’s figures [5][6]:
- a 125 mm chassis height
- 13 safety sensors
- CE, UL and CSA compliance
- scheduling for 200 or more shuttles in one system
- 99.8% system uptime
- standard 120V single-phase charging
ZS says its partner Kingmore is opening a demonstration, training and spare-parts centre in Houston “soon” [5].
Also noted: positioning for machines
GEODNET, a decentralised GNSS network, said on X on 7 October that its centimetre-level RTK correction service is now live in Ellensburg, Washington [7]. It named farming, autonomous vehicles, robot mowers, drones and surveying as uses. RTK (real-time kinematic) corrections sharpen satellite positioning so that a machine knows where it is to within centimetres. GEODNET’s pitch is that users need no base station of their own. This is a company post, and it gives no usage figures.
What this does not prove
- That Intelligent Machines exists as described or has raised $100 million. Both come from The Information’s unnamed sources. The company has not announced anything [1][2].
- That AWS’s toolchain makes robot development fast or cheap in practice. It is sample code, and the costs are AWS’s own estimates [3].
- Locus’s market share. The release gives a ranking, not revenue or share figures, and we have not seen Interact’s report [4].
- ZS Robotics’ uptime or safety in the field. Those are company specifications [5][6].
- Waymo’s Detroit timing. Driverless testing there is covered separately, in TSN’s robotaxi-week update. No public launch date has been given.
The Bottom Line
None of this week’s items is a humanoid breakthrough. Taken together, they show where industrial robotics is heading: a former Optimus lead reportedly building task-specific machines [1][2], a cloud provider packaging the training pipeline [3], an AMR vendor thriving because buyers prefer flexible automation [4], and a pallet shuttle sold on safety and easy retrofit [5]. The useful test for each is the same: paid, repeatable work on a real floor.
Sources
- Kevin McLaughlin, “Former Tesla Optimus Lead is Launching an Industrial Robot Startup,” The Information (AI Agenda), 7 October 2026 (paywalled; not read in full by TSN). https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/ai-agenda/former-tesla-optimus-lead-launching-industrial-robot-startup
- “Former Tesla Optimus AI lead founds company to develop non-humanoid robots,” GMT Eight, 8 October 2026 (secondary summary of [1]); also “Ex-Tesla Optimus head said to launch industrial robot startup,” Breaking The News, 7–8 October 2026. https://www.gmt8press.com/flash/detail/1545117 ; https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Ex-Tesla-Optimus-head-said-to-launch-industrial-robot-startup/67251864
- AWS (aws-samples), “The Physical AI Toolchain on AWS,” GitHub repository README, read 8 October 2026. https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-aws-physical-ai-toolchain
- Locus Robotics, “Locus Robotics is named the #1 AMR provider by revenue in the Americas for the second consecutive year, according to Interact Analysis” (company press release), 6 October 2026. https://locusrobotics.com/news/locus-robotics-no-1-amr-provider-revenue/
- ZS Robotics, “ZS Robotics brings safe, compact, easy-to-use four-way pallet shuttles to the US” (company release, Los Angeles, 24 September 2026), as published by RoboticsTomorrow. https://www.roboticstomorrow.com/news/2026/09/28/zs-robotics-brings-safe-compact-easy-to-use-four-way-pallet-shuttles-to-the-us/27171
- “4-Way Pallet Shuttle,” MHL News (new products), 6 October 2026. https://www.mhlnews.com/new-products/product/55409948/4-way-pallet-shuttle
- GEODNET (@GEODNET), X post, 7 October 2026, 17:01 BST (company post). https://x.com/GEODNET/status/2107863840901709849
