Amazon turns Ring cameras into robots

PLUS: SoftBank backs $8.5B German humanoid

AuthorAuthorAuthorAuthor

Jennifer Mossalgue, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
November 12, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Amazon’s Ring spent a decade putting cameras on front doors. Now its newest cameras can move: one flies, one rolls.

The new Ring Robotics line sends a $250 indoor drone or a $1K business rover to check what tripped the alarm or make scheduled rounds.

Also: A German humanoid eyes $8.5B, feds question Waymo’s school-bus fix, and a robot takes “some assembly required” into orbit.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Amazon revives its flying home camera

  • Germany’s Agile Robots lands $500M

  • Feds doubt Waymo’s school bus fix

  • Caltech robot starts building in space

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AMAZON

Image source: Amazon

The Rundown: Amazon’s Ring, the company that put a camera on millions of front doors, launched Ring Robotics, with a $250 indoor drone for homes and a $1K wheeled guard for businesses, and both map and patrol their spaces without a pilot.

The details:

  • The $250 drone cam sits in its dock with the camera off until a flight starts. Then it flies to whatever tripped (a back-door sensor, say) or runs patrols you schedule.

  • It records 2K video, with LED lights for the dark. It ships Jan. 27, but Ring can’t sell it until the FCC authorizes it.

  • The $999.99 rover cam robot conducts scheduled patrols, responds to alarms, records 4K video, and uses lights, sirens, and two-way audio to confront intruders.

  • The drone records only while patrolling the area set in Alexa Home Map. Its video encryption uses rotating keys, with Ring deleting its copies after 24 hours.

Why it matters: Amazon has spent six years trying to put an autonomous robot inside homes and offices: the Always Home Cam was only sold by invitation, and Astro for Business was discontinued in July 2024. Ring cuts the job down to what it already sells at scale: when an alarm trips, something now goes to check.

TOGETHER WITH GRANOLA

The Rundown: Granola, the AI notepad for people with back-to-back meetings, now does the typing, too. Hold a key and talk, and clean text appears in any app. It already knows your team’s names and jargon from your meetings.

With Voice Typing, you can:

  • Dictate lab notes, emails, and prompts in any app

  • Get names and technical terms spelled right the first time

  • Use it now on Mac, Windows, and iOS

AGILE ROBOTS

Image source: Agile Robots

The Rundown: Agile Robots, a Munich spinout of Germany’s Aerospace Center, just raised $500M from SoftBank, Nvidia, and others at an $8.5B valuation to get more of its Bavarian-built factory robots onto production lines, as it expands in the U.S.

The details:

  • Agile says the new money will help it expand in the U.S., boost manufacturing in Germany, enter new markets, and prepare for a possible IPO.

  • Agile’s ONE SN humanoid is built around Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T stack and Jetson Thor computer, giving an integrated system for training and deploying robot skills.

  • A new plant near Munich opened this year and is designed to produce up to 10K humanoids a year.

  • Agile eyes 1K–2K of its smaller humanoid models next year for research labs and companies, with Stanford and ETH Zurich among prospective users.

Why it matters: Founder and CEO Zhaopeng Chen told the NYT that Agile has deployed close to 30K robotic systems, 3K–4K of them humanoids, and that sales should double this year to about €600M ($668M). Those are company figures, and they come five years after the 2021 SoftBank-led round valued Agile at more than $1B.

WAYMO

Image source: Waymo

The Rundown: Federal safety regulators are scrutinizing Waymo’s robotaxis again after finding that the autonomous vehicles continued illegally passing stopped school buses even after a software update was supposed to fix the problem.

The details:

  • NHTSA has opened a new “recall query” covering 2,895 Waymo vehicles, saying most reported violations occurred after Waymo updated the software.

  • Waymo finished pushing the software update to affected vehicles in Nov. 2025, then filed a recall on Dec. 10 covering 3,067 fifth-gen vehicles.

  • The defect: robotaxis slowed or stopped, then drove past buses with red lights flashing or stop arms extended.

  • Austin ISD documented 19 violations by November 2025 and has issued multiple $300 citations; Atlanta Public Schools reported six incidents that year.

Why it matters: Waymo says it has received no school-bus-related citations since March 2026. NHTSA opened an investigation in January after a robotaxi struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school. The latest query also comes as Waymo reportedly plans to expand its fleet fivefold to 20K vehicles by the end of 2027.

SPACE BOTS

Image source: DARPA / Colie Wertz

The Rundown: A Caltech robot just put together part of an antenna frame in low Earth orbit with no astronauts involved. Its team calls it “the first time that a structure has been autonomously constructed in space.”

The details:

  • The DARPA-funded ASTRA fits lightweight rods and metal joints together while deploying reflective film — a tiny assembly line on Momentus’ Vigoride 7 craft.

  • Two sections launched already built; the robot added a third in orbit. The full 11-section antenna is unlikely to be finished before the mission ends in December.

  • Engineers sent commands, checked photos, and tested fixes on a duplicate robot back on Earth. The assembly was automated as engineers troubleshot problems.

  • The “first” claim needs context: robotics company GITAI reported autonomous assembly of structures and panels inside the International Space Station in 2021.

Why it matters: Robots that can build reliably in orbit could assemble giant telescopes that see deeper into the universe, vast communications antennas, and solar power stations above Earth. ASTRA’s small construction job points toward a future in which rockets deliver the parts and machines build infrastructure too big to launch whole.

QUICK HITS

Boston Dynamics put Atlas on scooter wheels to stress-test its learned controller and hardware, with the lessons now feeding back into a more robust walking humanoid.

Path Robotics, which builds AI-powered autonomous welding robots for factories, raised $300M at a $2.45B valuation, nearly 4x its previous mark.

An Eric Trump–advised U.S. robotics startup is in talks to supply Israel’s military with up to 1K humanoids for Gaza tunnels, the Financial Times reports.

NATO is reportedly testing amphibious robots that cross Arctic ice and open water, carrying comms and surveillance into a High North with limited infrastructure.

DeepMind unveiled Gemini Robotics 2.5, a new robot AI tested in Mercedes factories, alongside an open benchmark for testing whether robots resist unsafe instructions.

Apple researchers trained a humanoid control system largely in simulation and reported a 91% success rate across 360 single-task trials covering six skills in six unfamiliar real-world environments.

Mosaic Intelligence Labs raised $47M to build AI surgical tools that map blood vessels in real time and make complex procedures easier to perform.

Figure AI is hiring humans at $40–$45/hour to supervise its humanoids overnight, a sign that the autonomous-worker future still depends on people monitoring them.

The U.S. is using the Gulf conflict as a real-world proving ground for autonomous vessels designed to hunt sea mines without putting sailors in harm’s way.

A humanoid robot attempted to take part in an ultramarathon in Antarctica, but the extreme cold and harsh conditions proved too challenging for it to complete the race.

Dynamic Creatures is partnering with Hasbro’s Sixth Wall Studio to turn Hasbro characters into robots designed to talk with guests and remember them across visits to theme parks and resorts.

Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in San Antonio and expanded its Austin coverage to nearly 450 square miles, bringing the service to eight cities across Texas and Florida.

That's it for today!

Before you go we'd love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

See you soon,

Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — The Rundown’s editorial team