Intelligence on machines that act
Quarterly
Our flagship quarterly, collecting the season's defining long-form journalism on autonomous systems. Issue 01 — 'Machines at Work' — publishes Q4 2026. Print and digital editions; subscriber and sponsor enquiries welcome.
From the current issue
Kraken Technology's uncrewed surface vessels are heading to the Royal Marines, US Special Operations and — via a Rheinmetall joint venture — the German line. The company's rise is a case study in how maritime autonomy became NATO's fastest-moving procurement story.
While robotaxis fight regulators and humanoids ship in dozens, the least glamorous corner of the sector quietly crossed the line that matters — a million Amazon robots, a billion DHL picks, and a fleet-management layer that has become the real battleground.
Three announcements in roughly 24 hours — DoorDash's Part 135 certificate, Walmart's Florida return and Flytrex's multi-modal play — mark the moment US drone delivery stopped being a pilot programme and started being logistics.
Qualcomm, Microsoft, Magic Leap, and now Agility Robotics — the executive running the West's most-deployed humanoid company has built a career on unfashionable patience. As Digit heads for the public markets, her bet is that reliability beats backflips.
The least glamorous autonomy — the camera watching a production line — is having its AI moment. Edge processors, example-trained models and a shift from "detect the defect" to "judge the part" are quietly rewriting factory economics.
A robot dog running 70% of the rounds at an oil-sands site. An ROV that stays down for a month. Autonomy in energy isn't chasing headlines — it's removing humans from height, depth and hazardous atmospheres, and the economics are unusually honest.
He won the DARPA challenge, built what became Waymo, then left to bet that the future of autonomy was freight, not taxis. Two decades in, Aurora's driverless trucks are running — and Urmson's long game is finally being marked.
The Autonomy Briefing
News, deals, deployments and regulation — curated by our editors every Thursday. Written for engineers, executives and policymakers. One sponsor per issue, clearly labelled.
