Four autonomous and robotic systems developments landed simultaneously in May 2026: AIRO unveiled a hybrid-electric VTOL drone with 18-hour endurance, Dassault and OHB proposed the VORTEX-S reusable spaceplane to ESA, Xynova released the 23-DOF Flex-2 robotic hand, and Horizon Robotics published HoloMotion-1 — a 4B-parameter AI model running at 300 fps on edge devices.