One software team built the stack that quotes and cuts sheet metal in two weeks at Fabworks.

Physical AI money in Q3 went into fewer, bigger checks, with construction and plant robotics pulling in more.

David Cao's report cites Crunchbase: robotics startups drew $9.9B in Q3 2026 against $4.3B a year earlier, while deal count fell from 55 to 31. Bedrock Robotics, which builds excavator autonomy kits, raised $600M at $4.1B. Figures are secondhand.

uni-robot-agent (184 stars): one free toolkit to test whether an AI agent can run a robot before you buy one.

uni-robot-agent is an MIT-licensed harness that runs robot-use agents on Codex or Claude Code, tests them in the RoboDojo simulator, and can hand motion to a Pi0.5 action model. Tasks are lab work like stacking bowls, not plant work. It has 184 GitHub stars.

For operations and automation teams: test whether an agent can drive a robot before buying one.

ADNOC runs field master planning in hours, not months, as the first energy company on OpenAI Frontier.

ADNOC signed a multi-year deal to run OpenAI Frontier on G42's UAE infrastructure, the first energy company to deploy it. Named uses are field master planning in hours instead of months and agents that value every barrel across production, refining, logistics and trading. ADNOC says human experts keep oversight, which is the line to watch.

Image: ADNOC (via Gulf News)