DoorDash puts its own drone on the menu

PLUS: Figure jumps into fiery inferno

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
October 01, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. DoorDash wants to fly your next takeout order straight to your backyard, and it just pulled the cover off the aircraft behind DoorDash Air.

But the biggest delivery headache may come before takeoff: getting dinner from a busy kitchen onto a drone.

Plus, Dyna’s new robot tackles the laundry room, ETH Zurich’s crawling robotic hand brings ‘The Addams Family’ to life, and Figure humanoids jump into a fiery inferno.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • DoorDash builds its own delivery drone

  • Dyna’s robot handles the entire laundry stack

  • ETH teaches disembodied robot hand to crawl

  • MIT puts living muscle into a paper-thin robot

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DOORDASH

Image source: DoorDash / Images 2.5

The Rundown: DoorDash just unveiled the in-house aircraft behind DoorDash Air — a six-rotor drone assembled in San Francisco, plus the kitchen handoffs, packaging and dispatch software that get a Chipotle order from counter to backyard in 5 minutes.

The details:

  • Following DoorDash Air’s July launch, the company unveiled its aircraft with six slow-spinning propellers and a winch for collecting and lowering orders.

  • DoorDash estimates 80% of typical restaurant orders fit its size and weight limits; limited early tests averaged under 5 minutes from restaurant to doorstep.

  • The company designed loading systems, packaging, and kitchen handoffs before the aircraft, with software coordinating drones, couriers, and ground robots.

  • Wing, expanding with Walmart, reports over 1M commercial deliveries; Uber and Zipline, meanwhile, are targeting 1M daily deliveries by the end of 2029.

Why it matters: DoorDash’s earlier experiment paying workers about $5 to load Dot robots exposed how much human work can remain inside an autonomous delivery. Its drone strategy tackles those handoffs directly, but the commercial test is whether controlling more of the journey makes delivery cheaper and more dependable.

DYNA ROBOTICS

Image source: Dyna Robotics

The Rundown: Redwood City, California, startup Dyna Robotics just unveiled Taku, a wheeled, two-armed robot that took laundry from washer to shelf in an hour-long demo, which the company says is autonomous and uncut.

The details:

  • Taku pairs two arms with four steerable wheels and a folding body, letting it reach deep into dryers and crouch to stock low shelves.

  • Dyna says the robot loads and starts machines, folds towels, sorts stacks by size, and retries failed grasps without calling for help.

  • Its Dyna-2.1 system tracks the room’s changing workload: it can interrupt folding when a dryer finishes, then remember where it left off.

  • Dyna’s earlier stationary robot could fold napkins for 24 hours, but people still replenished supplies and cleared stacks.

Why it matters: Laundry has become a robotics proving ground, with Figure and Physical Intelligence tackling fabric that crumples, tangles, and changes shape. Dyna aims to master entire workflows to make robots economical across hotels and other workplaces, where constant human supervision can eat up the labor savings.

ETH ZURICH

Image source: ETH Zurich

The Rundown: ETH Zurich researchers taught a store-bought robotic hand to carry itself to work, using its five fingers to crawl, balance, and operate a keyboard without an arm attached.

The details:

  • The Soft Robotics Lab mounted a Raspberry Pi, motion sensor, and battery on a commercial WUJI hand, creating a 1.8 lb. robot with fingers and joints untouched.

  • Reinforcement learning in simulation taught it to coordinate its uneven fingers and offset thumb in simulation; watch it in action here.

  • Steered by gamepad, the untethered hand crossed 14 indoor and outdoor surfaces, including grass, gravel, and metal grating.

  • With no camera and after manual positioning, it executed 29 of 32 keyboard commands. With an overhead camera, it pushed a cube toward targets.

Why it matters: EPFL’s detachable crawling hand, which we covered earlier this year, tackles mobility with reversible fingers, while ETH gives a commercial, human-shaped hand new abilities through learned control. Together, the projects point toward robots that could send individual parts into spaces their whole bodies cannot reach.

MIT

Image source: Melanie Gonick, MIT

The Rundown: MIT engineers just built a wafer-thin robot the size of a stick of gum, using living muscle cells to swim and flashes of light to steer it through an underwater maze.

The details:

  • The swimmer has two gel fins lined with genetically engineered mouse muscle cells that contract when exposed to blue light.

  • Researchers control each fin independently, adjusting light pulses to steer and change speed; the robot topped out at four body lengths per minute.

  • Tiny grooves align the cells into stronger muscle fibers, while a daily light-driven “workout” increased their contraction stroke 4x compared with untrained controls.

  • The muscle films produced 20x more force per unit of tissue volume than earlier 3D muscle designs and remained functional for more than 30 days in lab culture.

Why it matters: Getting more force from fewer muscle cells could make muscle-powered robots smaller and cheaper to build. Their soft, flexible bodies could eventually suit delicate work in fragile aquatic environments, but this swimmer is still a lab prototype that researchers steer with light, and it tires under continuous use.

QUICK HITS

Figure AI dropped a clip of its retiring F.02 humanoids autonomously leaping into a Finnish arc furnace, with the recovered metal becoming limited-edition collectibles.

Amazon plans to invest more than $100M in an Indiana manufacturing hub to supply its expanding warehouse robotics network, with the facility expected to open by 2028.

Agility Robotics, the company behind the two-legged Digit humanoid, is exploring wheeled robots, though it hasn’t settled on a design or launch date.

Tesla is reportedly building hundreds of Optimus bots weekly, but hand manufacturing problems and supplier bottlenecks are complicating its push toward mass production.

Bill Gates told Ezra Klein that companies replacing workers with robots should pay equivalent payroll taxes to keep funding Social Security and Medicare.

An unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with an SUV near the Las Vegas Strip last week, sending the SUV’s driver to the hospital with minor injuries.

Evri is testing a two-legged delivery robot from Japan’s Refined Robotics, designed to handle stairs and uneven ground while hauling packages weighing up to 33 lb.

Mercedes-backed Momenta aims to grow its robotaxi fleet from 100 vehicles to several thousand by the end of 2027, expanding into Dubai and more European cities.

The Pentagon plans to launch Autonomous Warfare Command, a new military command to scale the development and deployment of military drones and robots.

Flourish is launching a $3,555 Raspberry Pi-powered home robot that it says busy parents can teach household chores using a smartphone in under 30 minutes.

Ukraine says its new amphibious Triton robot traveled 25 miles across land and water to deliver ammunition and supplies to frontline troops on its first logistics mission.

That's it for today!

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