Manufacturing & Industrial Technology

Columbus, Ohio – September 23, 2026 -- Industrial robot installations have topped 500,000 units for four consecutive years, and MES Inc., a global manufacturing sourcing and supply chain partner to Fortune 500 OEMs, says structural aluminum components will now determine how fast robotics makers can move from prototypes to volume production.

Global robot installations hit 542,000 units in 2024, doubling the 2014 total

According to the International Federation of Robotics' World Robotics 2025 report, roughly 542,000 industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2024, more than twice the figure from a decade earlier. The global operating fleet reached about 4.66 million units in 2024, up 9% year-over-year, with annual installations holding above 500,000 units for four straight years.

Milan – September 22, 2026 -- Pirelli's Board of Directors has majority approved a roughly €1 billion ($1.2 billion) multi-year investment to expand its Rome, Georgia plant, with three board members -- Zhang Haitao, Xi Xiaohong and Wang Kun -- voting against the plan.

Rome, Georgia capacity to double to 6 million tyres by 2033

The expansion will lift annual production capacity at the Rome facility to approximately 6 million car tyres by 2033, including CyberTM Tyre technology, and is expected to create around 1,000 new jobs. The buildout begins in 2027 in two phases: a robotized production line using Pirelli's proprietary MIRS (Modular Integrated Robotized System) technology will scale from 2028 to 3 million tyres annually, while a separate fully automated conventional facility dedicated to premium products will add another 3 million tyres of capacity at full operation.

San Jose, Calif. – September 22, 2026 -- GS Microelectronics U.S. (GSME) and Teradyne, Inc. (NASDAQ: TER) have signed a multi-year strategic partnership to build a semiconductor test and evaluation center at GSME's new 42,000-square-foot Silicon Valley headquarters, with the facility set to open in Q4 2026.

GSME will run a dedicated Teradyne-equipped test floor for next-generation chips

The center will deploy Teradyne's latest test handlers, probers, and automated test systems to support customer demonstrations, device evaluations, engineering development, pilot production, and technical training. Target applications include AI hyperscaler devices, silicon photonics, automotive semiconductors, power management, and RF technologies.

Akron, Ohio – September 22, 2026 -- Ezurio has introduced the BL54LM20 Series, marking the first time its BL54L module line integrates Edge AI processing directly on the chip. The series includes three products: the BL54LM20A, the BL54LM20B, and a BL54LM20B USB-C Adapter, all built on Nordic Semiconductor's new nRF54LM20A and nRF54LM20B system-on-chips.

New modules pair dual processors with expanded memory for larger IoT applications

Each module combines a 128 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 application processor with a 128 MHz RISC-V coprocessor, backed by 2 MB of non-volatile memory and 512 KB of RAM. The BL54LM20A supports Bluetooth LE Core 6.x, 802.15.4 for Thread/Matter, and NFC within an 11 x 8 x 1.8 mm footprint, alongside Secure Boot, Secure Firmware Update, and Secure Storage.

Seoul, South Korea – September 22, 2026 -- AKA, a cognitive AI company, has completed an enterprise pilot of its EOS Sales Knowledge Engine with one of the world's largest consumer electronics companies, demonstrating measurable gains in sales knowledge accuracy and evaluation consistency across large, geographically dispersed retail and reseller networks.

EOS verifies sales claims against product documentation to close knowledge gaps

The pilot targeted a persistent problem in large-scale consumer electronics retail: keeping product knowledge consistent across linguistically and geographically diverse sales and reseller teams. Traditional evaluation relies on manager judgment for both soft-skill assessment and factual accuracy, a method AKA says introduces inconsistency and scales poorly across markets and languages.

New York – September 22, 2026 -- Evoto AI unveiled Evoto 8.0 at its annual launch event, opening a creator marketplace for photographers to sell presets and creative assets, backed by a $500,000 reward pool. The release spans Evoto Desktop, the Evoto App and Evoto Video, adding an Asset Hub, in-timeline portrait retouching for DaVinci Resolve, story-based culling for high-volume shoots, reusable workflow templates and a production-grade SDK.

Pittsburgh – September 22, 2026 -- Viam will debut BoxBot, a robot arm that opens taped cardboard boxes, at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh, running September 27 through October 3. The system was trained on just 125 teleoperated demonstrations collected in roughly five hours over four days, using a fine-tuned open-source vision-language-action model with no custom architecture required.

BoxBot combines visual servoing with a fine-tuned SmolVLA model on one data path

The robot uses image-based visual servoing to guide a cutting tip along tape seams typically 1 to 2mm wide, since no two sealed boxes present identical geometry. A fine-tuned SmolVLA model then handles the contact-rich task of peeling open and adjusting four box flaps. Both systems run as native services on the same machine, with the VLA policy inferring locally on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano through Viam's ML model service.

Austin, Texas – September 22, 2026 -- Sparx Engineering has opened its third Texas office, a 3,117-square-foot location at 1023 Springdale, Bldg 12B, in the Springdale General community in East Austin.

Sparx expands its Texas footprint with new East Austin lease

The Greater Houston-based engineering consultancy secured the space with representation from Aquila Commercial's Noah Yetley. The new office follows Sparx's first satellite branch, opened in Dallas in 2023, giving the firm operations in Houston, Dallas, and now Austin.

Initial team to grow to 10 staff by next year

An initial team led by Steven Block, P.E., and Tyler Chaney, P.E., will anchor the Austin operation, which is expected to reach a staff of 10 within a year. The office will support Sparx's four core service lines: electrical, mechanical, software and chemical engineering.

Redwood City, Calif. – September 22, 2026 -- Ivalua has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Direct Spend 2026 Vendor Assessment (#US54900426, September 2026), based on evaluations of its capabilities, strategy, market presence, and core architecture.

Unified data model spans sourcing, BOM, contracts and quality

IDC MarketScape identified Ivalua's single data model, which natively links sourcing, bill of materials, contract, quality, and supply chain collaboration objects, as its most substantive differentiator. The architecture enables full traceability from item to BOM to award to contract to invoice, reducing fragmentation that competitor suites reportedly struggle with.

Copenhagen – September 22, 2026 -- ATLANT 3D and the University of California, Berkeley have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to explore A-HUB California, a facility pairing atomic-scale manufacturing with AI-driven materials research.

ATLANT 3D brings its DALP technology to Berkeley's research ecosystem

The partnership combines ATLANT 3D's programmable atomic-scale manufacturing platform, built on its Direct Atomic Layer Processing (DALP®) technology and NANOFABRICATOR® platform, with UC Berkeley's research infrastructure. The proposed A-HUB California follows the model of ATLANT 3D's existing Copenhagen A-HUB, an autonomous materials foundry that combines AI, atomic-scale manufacturing, and automated testing in a closed loop to discover, validate, and scale advanced materials.