Europe showcases robots for chores as it seeks a bigger industry

2 min read•Sep 5, 2026•

Europe showcased AI-powered robots for household assistance, recycling and logistics at the European Parliament, first reported by Techxplore. The event underscored a gap between Europe’s research strengths and the political will and funding experts say it needs to build a larger robotics industry, as the United States and China scale faster.

Four human-assistance robots designed by France’s INRIA research institute, the German Aerospace Centre and others cleared a breakfast table in 10 minutes. One tidied cupboards and wiped surfaces, while the others put orange juice and milk in the fridge, discarded empty packaging and loaded the dishwasher.

The robots moved slowly and sometimes required a few attempts. INRIA’s Serena Ivaldi said that approach is deliberate because the machines must operate in human environments without startling the people they help, making precision more important than speed.

A multi-jointed robotic arm developed by France’s CEA research agency dismantled an electric battery model for recycling. KYON, a quadruped developed by the Italian Institute of Technology for logistics, bent its legs to pick up a package and took several steps to deliver it to a human.

ETH Zurich’s Transformer switched from four legs to two without losing balance, returned to all fours and climbed up and down stairs. Together, the demonstrations paired practical tasks with the commercialization problem identified by EU lawmaker Axel Voss: Europe is often good at inventing technologies but too slow to turn them into global companies.

Portuguese robotics researcher Pedro Lima said Europe has generated much of the science and research behind some successful cases in China and the United States, but lacks political will and funding. Voss separately warned that the United States and China are scaling faster while capital is flowing elsewhere.

China has invested heavily in humanoid robots; at the World Robot Games in Beijing, one of its machines broke Jamaican legend Usain Bolt’s record for the 100-meter dash.

Alin Albu-Schaeffer, coordinator of the EU-funded euROBin network that organized the event, said Europe should have a robotics industry branch as large and important as the current automotive industry within 10 years. He added that Europe could capture one-third of the global intelligent robotics market by then.

Oct 7, 2026

Arizona appeals court vacates manslaughter sentence after AI video

An Arizona appeals court vacated the 10.5-year sentence of Gabriel Horcasitas while upholding his manslaughter conviction, first reported by Nytimes. The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for resentencing without the video, after judges found that it presented scripted statements as if the victim himself were speaking in court.

The three-judge panel said the video generated a likeness of Christopher Pelkey’s voice and appearance but did not reflect actual events. It found that allowing and relying on the video made the sentencing fundamentally unfair, and noted that no prior Arizona case had addressed the admissibility of such a depiction at sentencing.

The judges said a victim’s right to speak cannot override a defendant’s right to be sentenced on accurate, reliable information. They said the video collapsed the distinction between the family’s belief about what Pelkey would have said and Pelkey’s own voice and opinions.

The ruling distinguishes family members speaking about Pelkey from a generated likeness that appeared to speak for him.

Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, presented the video during Horcasitas’s sentencing alongside victim-impact statements from family and friends. Wales wrote the script and said her husband and the couple’s longtime business partner helped create the video using Pelkey’s voice from a YouTube video and his face and torso from a funeral-service poster.

Judge Todd F. Lang praised the video as genuine, then imposed the maximum sentence of 10.5 years, more than the nine years prosecutors had sought.

Wales said nobody intended to make the court believe Pelkey was alive or that he had recorded the video before his death. She said she disagreed with the ruling and argued that families use slide shows, collages, hypothetical conversations and poetry to convey grief.

Wales compared the AI video with photography, saying it took 15 years of landmark cases around the 1860s before photography was widely accepted in courts.

The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for a new sentencing hearing without the AI-generated video.