Congratulations to Dr Heba Khamis from Contactile, the winner of Australia's leading AI and Robotics sprint.

The Sydney-based company is giving robots a human sense of touch using bio-inspired tactile sensors and grippers, enabling reliable handling of delicate or variable objects without damage. Founded out of UNSW Sydney in 2019, the company operates at the forefront of industrial AI, where dependable physical manipulation is critical to moving from lab demonstration to real-world deployment.

"The market timing for tactile intelligence has never been better. As Physical AI moves from demonstration to deployment, robots need a reliable sense of touch, and Contactile is perfectly positioned to deliver it," said Dr Khamis.

Contactile will travel to MassRobotics in Boston for a one-month residency in October this year, with access to leading robotics companies and world-class institutions like MIT and Harvard.

"This residency is a tremendous opportunity to connect with the Boston robotics ecosystem more broadly and build relationships with some of the most exciting companies developing solutions in the Physical AI space."

The runner-up for this year is Andrew Ballard from SpatioTemporal, a Melbourne-based company building an intent-aware motion intelligence layer for Physical AI.

Meet the 2026 cohort:

MotionLogic: Founder Alex McClung. A vision AI platform for manufacturing operations that monitors material-tool interaction, worker ergonomics and safety on the factory floor.

"We've built an optical interpretation layer for ergonomics and productivity. It interprets the structure and events of manufacturing operations, looking at how items move over space and time." - Alex McClung.

ProxGrid: Founder Rasmus Gupta. A high-voltage-immune drone that inspects, cleans and coats powerline insulators on energised lines in a single pass, replacing helicopter-based maintenance at $15,000 per hour.

"Towards 2040 we need to build 1.5 times the power lines we have today, so that's a huge expansion of the power grid." - Rasmus Gupta.

OarSense (Rowboatix): Team lead Oscar Jones. Oar-mounted waterproof sensors that measure crew timing and technique in real time, giving rowing coaches objective synchronisation data.

"Synchronisation between teams is one of the most important things for rowing, which is what we want to measure." - Team member James Nichol.

Aurova Robotics: Founders Dr Hugh Zhou (CEO) and Dr Tianhao Liu (CTO). A zero-emission autonomous ground platform for vegetation management in orchards, vineyards and solar farms.

"We build autonomous platforms for the agriculture and energy sector, and the main differentiator of our business is we don't rely on GPS." - Dr Zhou.

SpatioTemporal: Founder Andrew Ballard (CEO), with COO Matt Dickinson. A motion intelligence software layer that sits between a robot's perception and planning systems to predict the intent of people and objects in shared spaces.

"We're giving them reflexes, that system one thinking of how to cope in and near people like us." - Andrew Ballard.

JP Robotics: Founders John Burtt and JP Angulo. Autonomous robots using UV light for pest control in vineyards and other crops, with a deliberately simplified hardware approach.

"We're using UV light and autonomous robots to get rid of some pests in the vineyards and in other crops." - JP Angulo.

Contactile: CEO and co-founder Dr Heba Khamis (with co-founders Benjamin Xia and Associate Professor Stephen Redmond). A tactile sensing stack built on the patented PapillArray sensor, giving robot grippers a sense of touch so they can grip fragile or irregular objects without crushing or dropping them.

"If you think of tactile sensing along the spectrum of compass to GPS, we are the GPS and the Google Maps." - Dr Khamis.