Holy cow—RightHand Robotics just settled its trade secret lawsuit with Tesla AND raised $11 million in a new funding round. This is massive because both companies were fighting over intellectual property related to robot hand designs, and now RightHand walked away from litigation while still securing capital from an unnamed lead investor for future development. The settlement was reached after months of legal maneuvering between the two California-based firms, which had been trading accusations about stolen R&D in their robotic dexterity systems. That's a win-win on the surface because RightHand keeps moving forward instead of getting tied up forever, and Tesla gets closure on the IP dispute without more courtroom drama.
But hold onto your hats—Tesla also just debuted Optimus Gen-3 at its Fremont factory with a fully functioning exoskeleton charging station designed to keep robots powered 24/7. This is their first functional humanoid prototype shown publicly since Giga Texas opened in late 2023, and the robot actually walks around, picks things up, and moves autonomously using neural net control systems. They even added an automatic door and a touchscreen interface for remote operation at the factory floor. The exoskeleton charging system could revolutionize fleet operations if they scale this widely. This is huge progress on robotics as a whole—we're moving from "can it walk?" to "how fast can we deploy 10,000 of them in factories."
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/robot-hand-company-settles-Tesla-trade-secret-suit-and-announces-11m-raise/
But hold onto your hats—Tesla also just debuted Optimus Gen-3 at its Fremont factory with a fully functioning exoskeleton charging station designed to keep robots powered 24/7. This is their first functional humanoid prototype shown publicly since Giga Texas opened in late 2023, and the robot actually walks around, picks things up, and moves autonomously using neural net control systems. They even added an automatic door and a touchscreen interface for remote operation at the factory floor. The exoskeleton charging system could revolutionize fleet operations if they scale this widely. This is huge progress on robotics as a whole—we're moving from "can it walk?" to "how fast can we deploy 10,000 of them in factories."
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/robot-hand-company-settles-Tesla-trade-secret-suit-and-announces-11m-raise/