u/amprather

One of the more interesting hubs will operate in Milton Keynes, a city already known for deploying autonomous delivery robots and experimenting with new mobility technologies.

Led by Smart City MK CIC, the Milton Keynes Robotics Adoption Hub will operate from the Smart City Experience Centre inside centre, a major shopping destination. Its partners include Milton Keynes City Council, Cranfield University, The Open University, Ohmio UK and several other organizations.

Unlike hubs concentrating on manufacturing or agriculture, Milton Keynes will focus on robotics operating in public and shared spaces. That includes autonomous vehicles, delivery robots, drones and other systems that must interact with people, infrastructure and existing transportation networks.

The initiative builds on the city's work developing ROBOPASS, a licensing framework intended to strengthen governance around robotic deployments.

If you want to understand where service robotics is becoming a business, start with 117,500.

That is the number of professional service robots reported by the International Federation of Robotics for transportation and logistics applications in 2025. It represented 47% of professional service robot shipments in the IFR survey and was up 21% from the previous year. Another number in the report is getting plenty of attention: about 7,000 full-size humanoids.

The contrast offers a useful snapshot of today's robotics market. Humanoids are emerging as a new commercial category, but much of the current scale in service robotics is coming from machines built around specific jobs with identifiable customers and economics.

First they sold off FedEx Freight, now FedEx Supply Chain will be no more. Wonder what they will do with the downtown HQ now.

Video footage from a Memphis Police Department officer’s body camera shows some officers got pepper sprayed as others moved to disperse the No Kings march in Downtown Memphis on March 28.

The Shelby County District Attorney General’s Office released the video on Monday, May 18, in response to requests from 25 organizations, including Indivisible Memphis, which organized the rally and ensuing march in Church Park.

A program pitched to lawmakers as a lifeline for Tennessee's lowest-income students is, so far, doing something else. Only a quarter of newly awarded Education Freedom Scholarship vouchers went to families in the lowest income tier — while nearly 9,400 went to households earning up to $173,160. For Memphis families weighing the program, the new numbers complicate the pitch.

Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) also posted on social media, saying that he and others were also removed from their committees.

“Speaker of the TN House Cameron Sexton just removed me and every Democrat — and therefore every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on," he wrote on X. “This move strips nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve in TN state leg.”

Memphis’ other Democratic Representative, Gabby Salinas, posted the letter she received. With it, she wrote a single message: “I would do it again.” In a video posted moments later with the same message, she said she served on the judiciary and state and local committees, as well as the public service and criminal justice subcommittees.

“This is a result of the actions that we took on the [House] floor last week,” she said. “It is interesting that disenfranchising an entire district here in Shelby County carries zero consequences ... but speaking out, using your voice, and representing interest of the people of Tennessee is something that they deemed punishable.”