Humanoid robots move closer to factory floors as Noble Machines debuts Moby3

Noble Machines debuts Moby3, an AI-powered humanoid robot that learns tasks through human demonstration, aiming to streamline deployment in industrial settings.

Reuters

March 18, 2026

Humanoid robots move closer to factory floors as Noble Machines debuts Moby3

Phantom-01, a humanoid robot developed by San Francisco-based startup Foundation for military purposes, sits at the company's factory in San Francisco, California, U.S., February 4, 2026.

Aleksandra Michalska/Reuters

Bay Area startup Noble Machines showcased a humanoid robot designed for physically demanding and hazardous industrial jobs at the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference.

The company, led by co-founder and CEO Wei Ding, demonstrated its third-generation robot, Moby3. Formerly known as Under Control Robotics, Noble Machines was founded in 2024 by engineers from Apple, SpaceX, NASA and Caltech and is focused on building general-purpose, AI-driven humanoid robots for deployment across industries.

So we are working with customers across manufacturing, semiconductor, and logistics for the tasks that are typically labor-intensive, or even hazardous for their people," CEO Wei Ding told Reuters.

At the Nvidia GTC 2026 booth, a robotics engineer remotely controlled the humanoid robot, guiding its movements as it grasped containers and placed them into bins.

Victor, our robotics engineer, is from one of the top robotics labs in the world. So he is currently controlling the robot," Ding said. "That serves two purposes. First, we use that approach to train the robot skills. There's no programming, there's no C++, no Python through this process."

Instead, Ding said, the robot learns through demonstration, with human operators stepping in when mistakes occur. "So when the robot makes a mistake, Victor can take over and teach the robot the correct behavior," Ding explained.

"We are not there yet, but we see the development of AI really give us the horizon, the line of sight to achieve that goal. So once you have achieved that goal, imagine when we ship a robot to a factory. You open up the package, in two hours, the robot starts creating value for our customer. That's the goal we want to achieve," he said.

The ultimate goal, Ding said, is to dramatically reduce the time it takes to deploy robots in real-world environments, making them as easy to onboard as a new human worker.

If successful, Ding said, companies could integrate robots into their operations within hours.

Production: Jayla Whitfield-Anderson, Elizabeth Mendez/Reuters