Pollen Robotics, the French robotics company owned by Hugging Face, has opened pre-orders for Microduck, a $399 robot duck that stands 25 cm tall and weighs under 800 g. Its walking, skating and fall-recovery skills were trained with reinforcement learning in the MuJoCo simulator, and the software and full training stack are open source, so owners can teach it new moves.

Airbus and US partner Kratos have flown the U740 Valkyrie uncrewed combat aircraft in Europe for the first time, launching it with a runway-independent, rocket-assisted take-off at a test site in Northern Europe. The European version of the XQ-58A will next fly with Airbus's MARS mission system, and the partners say they are on track to deliver a combat-ready drone wingman for Germany and other European forces by 2029.

Bengaluru startup Airbound builds the TRT, a carbon fibre tail-sitter drone that lifts off vertically like a rocket, then cruises on its wing, carrying about 1 kg up to 40 km while weighing about 1.5 kg itself. It has been flying diagnostic samples for Narayana Health since January 2026, raised a 37 million dollar Series A led by Greenoaks in August, and is planning a three-city drone network in Andhra Pradesh targeting up to 10,000 flights a day.

Beijing-based KingKong Robotics has open-sourced the software toolkit for Jumper, the six-legged red crab robot that drew crowds at China's big AI and robot expos this summer. Open the GitHub repo in an AI coding assistant, and a one-line prompt can train new moves in simulation, design new shells or build new scenes.

Houston-based Deployable Energy will test its 1 MWe Unity nuclear battery at full power inside DOME, Idaho National Laboratory's 100-foot-tall microreactor test bed, in 2027. DOME is built inside the old containment dome of the EBR-II reactor and can host fuelled experiments of up to 20 MW thermal, and Deployable Energy will be only the second company to test there, after Radiant.

A compact tokamak in China has achieved hydrogen-boron fusion reactions, marking the first time a commercial fusion company has accomplished this on its own device. ENN Group announced that its EXL-50U compact tokamak reached the milestone. Unlike mainstream deuterium-tritium fusion, which releases high-energy neutrons and requires extremely rare and expensive tritium, hydrogen-boron fusion combines a hydrogen proton with a boron-11 nucleus to produce only helium nuclei and energy, with no neutron radiation. The ENN team achieved the result by precisely targeting the "first resonance peak," the energy region where fuel is most reactive, using high-energy neutral beam injection and radio frequency waves rather than uniformly raising plasma temperature. This generated fast protons that triggered a chain reaction pushing the fusion rate beyond 100 million reactions per second. More than 10 international experts reviewed the results and unanimously confirmed the detection of alpha particles as evidence of the fusion reaction. The achievement was described as "a significant and valuable contribution" to global research on magnetic confinement hydrogen-boron fusion. The research is published ahead of ENN's groundbreaking ceremony for its next-generation Helong-2 fusion device.