D-Robotics will host an online kickoff on Oct 8 for its RDK Challenge Winter. The session covers challenge intro and rules, an RDK X5 unboxing and setup demo, experience sharing from special guest mentors, and a live Q&A. The company says attendees are welcome whether they already have an idea or not. Registration is via the QR code on the event poster.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on September 30 the creation of a new four-star joint command, the Autonomous Warfare Command, to scale up autonomous and robotic combat capabilities. Its portfolio will include drones, artificial intelligence, and command-and-control systems.
D-Robotics has opened the RDK Challenge 2026 Winter, a free and newbie-friendly contest running about six weeks. It spans three stages: Ignite (power on your AI robot's brain), Build (design your own intelligent robot) and Launch (bring your robot to life). Prizes include a $1,000 grand prize, $500 each for the top 3 RDK Advocators, plus stage badges and exclusive rewards.
At a recent IEEE RAS Communications Board meeting, experts unpacked the common pairing of 'robotics and automation.' They explored whether robotics is a subset of automation, how definitions affect statistics and education, and why language keeps shifting with research trends.
US Vice President JD Vance said many Americans' first reaction to AI or "SI" is to compare it to Skynet, but he dismissed fears of Terminator-style robots taking over nuclear weapons as impossible.
Bain & Company says the global AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify data center investments. Existing consumer and enterprise AI services could cover $1.8 trillion, leaving a $4.2 trillion gap that may be filled by autonomous machines, robotics, and other emerging fields.
Cambridge researchers are investigating soil as an intelligent system, studying its structure, chemistry, and microbial networks. The work aims to inspire bio-inspired computing, precision agriculture, and environmental sensing.
RoboSense says its E2 and EM4 digital LiDAR now support NVIDIA Holoscan Sensor Bridge (HSB), enabling low-latency sensor-to-compute connectivity with NVIDIA edge AI platforms. The company states it is the first shipping LiDAR maker to integrate with NVIDIA HSB, building on its existing presence across NVIDIA Jetson, DRIVE and Omniverse platforms.
Tech leaders and lawmakers express concerns that Asimov's Three Laws are insufficient to address modern AI risks. Calls for slowing AI development and new legislation grow as experts warn of potential harm to society.
General Robotics is betting on modular intelligence rather than a single robot brain, as discussed by CTO Sai Vemprala on The Robot Report Podcast. The episode also covered news including Agility Robotics exploring wheeled robots and Boston Dynamics opening a new training center.
A team from ITESO in Guadalajara, Mexico, developed RoboMeshA, a portable educational platform that brings robotics and AI into high school classrooms. The EPICS in IEEE project aims to overcome the lack of robotics laboratories and provide hands-on learning for students.
Skild AI says it is taking self-play, the method behind AlphaGo, out of games and into the physical world. The company argues self-play can produce emergent, superhuman behavior, and is now applying that idea to robot learning.
Barbara Mazzolai, a former biologist turned roboticist, pioneered bioinspired robots based on octopuses, plant roots, and seeds. Now at the Italian Institute of Technology, she advocates for 'sustainability robotics,' a field that designs robots with minimal environmental impact and benefits for nature and people.
NEURA Robotics noted that a cognitive robot is only as good as the production data it learns from, which covers grips, tolerances and failure cases. Because that data is a company's own process knowledge, many firms hesitate to share it. The company asked followers whether they would feed process data into a shared robot training network and invited a vote in the post.
In Tai'an, Shandong, a data collection program trains community residents to record household chores and other daily scenes for robot training. More than 200 people in Taishan District now work as home-based collectors, and the model is expanding to supermarkets, pharmacies, and villages.
A red robot-monster can crusher bites and rolls its eyes when fed aluminum cans, turning disposal into an emotional feedback loop. Smart recycling devices show that immediate responses and gamified points can raise correct sorting and participation rates, though one machine cannot fix the broader U.S. recycling shortfall.
Natureland Wellness Group plans to launch Natureland Plus by the end of 2026, featuring robotic massage, AI-based client assessment, and smart therapy devices. The new format aims to assist therapists, offer short sessions, and address staff shortages and consistency issues in massage services.
TechXplore Robotics reports an open-source benchmark that tests whether AI coding agents can engineer working robots. It shifts evaluation from digital programming tasks to physical robotics, where agents must handle hardware, sensing, and real-world constraints.
Before Friday's US market open, key developments include China-US communication on a leaders' meeting, China's State Council addressing aging, the EU seeking to restrict Chinese hybrid car imports, the BOJ hinting at consecutive rate hikes, AI advances from OpenAI and Anthropic, Toyota's plan to deploy 400,000 robots, and market movements with tech stocks rebounding and the yuan strengthening past 6.7.
The physical AI sector is booming, but skepticism about false prosperity grows. As big tech ramps up robotics investments, the real challenge shifts from model parameters to real-world deployment.
JD.com has launched 7Fresh Chef, a local-life service that combines AI-generated meal plans, cold-chain delivery of prepped ingredients and an intelligent cooking robot, priced at 19,888 yuan. The model aims to extend dining into the home, but high upfront cost, supply-chain economics and uncertain consumer demand remain key tests.
NEURA Robotics says a cognitive robot only gets as good as the data it learns from in real production environments. That same data, however, encodes a company's process knowledge: grips, tolerances and failure cases, which is why many firms hesitate to share it. The company asks followers whether they would feed process data into a shared robot training network.
Noetix Robotics raised the question of why it is building a general-purpose robot brain now, setting out its thinking on the timing of general-purpose robot brains.
As of 13:17 on Sept 17, the CSI Robot Index rose 0.65%, with Robot ETF Huaxia (562500) extending its rebound. Nanwang Technology led gains at 7.21%, followed by Kelai Electromechanical and Huadong CNC.
Robotics has not yet reached a mainstream breakthrough, and Nvidia's Les Karpas will explain why at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. The event offers discounted passes for registrations completed before September 25, with savings of up to $200.
InOrbit.AI has released OpenRobOps, an open-source robot operations and fleet management foundation. The software provides the industry's first reference implementation of the ISO 21423 interoperability standard, aiming to help OEMs avoid the build trap of custom back ends.
At the All-in Summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on speakerphone and dismissed AI danger warnings as a scam, calling data centers the oil of the next 20 to 25 years. Huang replied that Nvidia would not let AI deceleration happen, a stance that contrasts with recent calls by Anthropic and OpenAI leaders to slow powerful model development.
Dongguan Securities says GRGBanking's profit quality is improving, with promising prospects in AI robotics, digital yuan, and computing power. The company posted a 9.16% year-on-year decline in first-half 2026 net profit to 423 million yuan, yet it remains China's top intelligent financial equipment vendor for 18 straight years.
The BRICS New Delhi Declaration praised the bloc's industry channel working groups, especially smart manufacturing and robotics, and highlighted AI's potential for growth, sustainable development, and inclusive global governance. It also endorsed the Shanghai World AI Conference for advancing international cooperation and AI for good.
The Robot Report Podcast Episode 261 features Monumental founder and CEO Salar al Khafaji discussing 'Walls as a Service' and the construction industry's automation potential. The episode also covers news from Agility Robotics, Figure, Boston Dynamics, and sponsorship opportunities.
AGIBOT released GE-Act 2.0, which it calls the first native World Action Model to validate a pretraining and scaling path for embodied AI. The model was trained entirely from scratch on embodied manipulation data: visual representation, future generation and action prediction all start from random initialization, with no inherited video generators and no task-specific fine-tuning. It was then put through a zero-shot real-robot test covering unseen scenes, unseen objects and 100 atomic tasks.
Business Insider asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok to rank paths to human extinction. The models agreed that killer robots are the least likely threat; the real danger is humans using AI for bioweapons and cyberattacks.
Huayan Robotics (1021.HK) surged against the market trend today, jumping nearly 80% intraday to HK$17, hitting a new high since early July, with trading volume expanding to HK$350 million.
LimX Dynamics shared an episode featuring RAI founder Vera Kovaleva, who gives an independent technical view on persistent memory, continuous learning and autonomous decision-making. She also discusses why open robotic platforms matter for developing and validating new intelligence, and how a sensing and acting body closes the loop from understanding to execution in changing physical environments.
At the 2026 Inclusion Bund Conference, Poke Robot founder Xu Huazhe argued that embodied AI's two commercialization paths — scenario post-training for cash flow and large-model generalization — carry inherently conflicting resource demands. He stressed that polished demos and closed-scenario wins do not prove a general-purpose robot brain has matured.
At the Aggregated Intelligent Industry Development Conference 2026, Zhang Yongwei said the auto industry's next focus is on 'work without wheels' as embodied intelligence becomes a key trend. With tech stack overlap exceeding 70%, nearly 20 automakers are entering the field, signaling that cars and robots are becoming the same business.
Robbyant released three more LingBot-World 2.0 models: Small, a 1.3B model that brings real-time world generation to a single consumer-grade GPU; Bidirectional, a high-quality source for distilling smaller, faster, domain-specific models; and Causal Pretrain, the backbone for post-training, evaluation and adaptation. The company says the series is now easier to run, study, distill and adapt, from pretraining to lightweight deployment.
Robbyant presents LingBot-World 2.0 as an open-source real-time interactive world model that keeps running for hours, responds to every move (attacking, casting spells, shooting or summoning storms) and keeps evolving through AI agents, scaling to 720p/60fps in its full setup. The company also open-sourced three more models: LingBot-World 2.0 Small (1.3B), Bidirectional and Causal Pretrain.
JD Logistics has revealed its full lineup of robots combining a 'Super Brain' AI model for intelligent decision-making and the 'Wolf Pack' robots deployed in warehousing, sorting, and delivery.
JD Cloud announced plans to build a massive computing cluster powered by 100,000 Chinese-made Moore Threads GPUs. The infrastructure will support large-model training and embodied AI, marking a major push for domestic hardware in cloud computing.
Zhiyuan released GE-Act 2.0 on September 9, a world-action model (WAM), marking the first systematic validation of its pretraining and scaling path.
At the 2026 JD Global Tech Explorer Conference, JD Cloud announced plans to build a 100,000-GPU cluster powered by Moore Threads' full-function GPUs, marking a milestone for domestic AI infrastructure.
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra autonomously completed Valve's puzzle game Portal over 24 hours using 3,336 tool calls, marking a milestone in long-horizon AI decision-making in 3D environments. Separately, bankrupted iRobot returned with a novel dual-robot cleaning system, betting on a niche to compete against dominant Chinese rivals.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued its 15th Five-Year Plan for the information and communication industry, prioritizing improved computing infrastructure, including R&D of key common computing technologies and exploration of space computing.
Astribot presents SmoothRL, an efficient online reinforcement learning method featuring asynchronous execution. Robots keep moving and models keep reasoning, allowing SmoothRL to learn precisely from actions executed in the real world. Uncut footage and a tech report are published.
Tesla's stock plunged 6.3% after its highly anticipated Cybercab event on Thursday failed to meet Wall Street's expectations, reversing earlier gains. The company is betting its future on autonomous driving and robotics.
Lenovo stock climbed as much as 7% after announcing a partnership with automation platform Workato to strengthen its Qira AI assistant.
The Hang Seng Tech Index extended its intraday gains to 3%, with AI firm MiniMax and autonomous driving chip maker Horizon Robotics both rallying over 7%.
Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria will discuss why food manipulation is the hardest problem in physical AI at RoboBusiness 2026. The company has developed a Food Foundation Model using real-world data from millions of servings to handle deformable materials.
Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360 Group, urged the cybersecurity industry to quickly build AI-driven vulnerability discovery, automated defense, and intelligent agent security frameworks to address the changed attack-defense landscape.
At an ICRA panel, researchers explored the overwhelming growth of robotics papers and potential responses, including LLM-based tools and peer review reform. Concerns over hallucination, salami slicing, and visibility overshadowing value were central to the debate.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Automation has launched a new international journal, DRA, to promote open data sharing and research collaboration.
Shanghai Hejian Industrial Software Group released its next-generation EDA product suite, including China's first EDA intelligent agent kit for digital chip verification and the first 3D chip physical design tool. These offerings fill gaps in domestic commercial-grade 3DIC physical design and EDA agents.
StartLux's 27B-parameter local model ranked second in CAICT's MCP test, outperforming DeepSeek-V4-Flash and nearly matching the 1.6T-parameter DeepSeek-V4-Pro. The company plans to launch commercial solutions within the year.
TIME has recognized Deng Taihua, Founder, Chairman and CEO of AGIBOT, as one of the 100 most influential people in AI. AGIBOT says embodied AI should solve practical problems and create real value.
Unitree Technology announced it will annually sponsor talented youths with no restrictions on project topics, offering 10,000-20,000 yuan in staged funding.
Mech-Mind Robotics reports over 29,000 deployments worldwide, showcasing its embodied intelligence across diverse real-world applications. Each deployment generates data to improve perception, planning, and manipulation, fueling a flywheel of stronger generalization and more applications.
Robot-related stocks on China's A-share market rallied in afternoon trading, with Meihu shares hitting the daily limit-up, while other names like Siling, Wuzhou, Shangwei, Beite, and Hongchang also advanced.
Robots are increasingly used for environmental tasks, but their own environmental footprint remains under-examined. New projects and tools aim to quantify and improve robot sustainability across the full lifecycle.
Figure AI, backed by OpenAI and NVIDIA, reveals its Index data engineering project to collect diverse real-world physical interaction data for training general-purpose robots. The initiative aims to build a foundational dataset that could rival ImageNet in robotics.
Figure has accumulated real-world data from 108 countries, as shown on a live global map on its website. The data supports its efforts to scale general-purpose robots.
Skild AI introduced S1, a new foundation model that learns from a single example. The model can be taught unfamiliar tasks lasting up to 10 minutes, using just one video prompt, with no fine-tuning required. The company shared a real-time demonstration of S1 operating via in-context learning.
SpaceX AI has unveiled a Browser Use plugin for Grok Build, enabling real browser automation with local Chrome or cloud browsers. The tool supports web scraping, form filling, screenshots, and full workflow automation, with local execution via uvx requiring no API key for local Chrome.
Chinese A-share markets closed lower on Wednesday, with the ChiNext and STAR indices both falling over 3%. Precious metals and coal sectors bucked the trend, while tech and medical stocks led declines.
Chinese stocks fell sharply on Thursday, with the ChiNext index plunging over 4% and the Shanghai Composite down 0.95%, led by declines in computing hardware, biopharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and robotics. More than 4,300 stocks declined across the three major exchanges.
Bhavana Chandrashekhar of Amazon Robotics will speak at RoboBusiness 2026's Women in Robotics Lunch, joined by MassRobotics' Joyce Sidopoulos. The event offers networking for women in robotics, held on October 20-21 in Santa Clara.
Anthropic will allow enterprise clients to keep their data on their own cloud infrastructure while using its advanced AI models, reversing an earlier policy meant to prevent cyberattacks. The new system, launching later this year, maintains a 30-day retention requirement but offers greater data control to customers.
Insilico Medicine announced a research collaboration with Byterna Therapeutics to build an AI-native mRNA R&D engine, focusing on personalized tumor vaccines and related therapies.
Chinese stocks closed sharply lower on Tuesday, with the ChiNext index plunging 6.26%. Coal, banking, and shipping sectors gained, while robotics and computing hardware stocks led the decline.
China's tech-heavy indices tumbled sharply on Monday, with the ChiNext down 6%, Shanghai Composite off 2.4%, and over 5,100 stocks falling. Computing, chips, robotics, and innovative drugs led declines.
Chinese stocks fell broadly, with the ChiNext and STAR 50 each dropping over 4% as tech and robotics shares led declines.
Since August, A-share tech stocks have seen rotation-driven gains across humanoid robots, brain-computer interfaces, and optical modules. Brokerages say the repair trend persists but emphasize that funding constraints and AI narrative shifts will likely lead to structural opportunities.
Robotic rehabilitation systems are transforming stroke recovery by enhancing neuroplasticity and enabling personalized, home-based therapy. AI-driven tools and error augmentation techniques promise more effective and accessible care for survivors.
JD.com's Qixian Coffee launched its first 24-hour smart unmanned store in Beijing's Galaxy SOHO, with robots handling the entire coffee-making process. The company aims to integrate AI and embodied intelligence into consumer scenarios.
Humanoid robots have advanced in locomotion and vision, but their communication and auditory perception remain underdeveloped, according to Treble Technologies. The company argues that without natural voice interaction in noisy real-world environments, robots will fail to gain human trust and adoption.
A fleet of 'Chengdu-made' robots, including an anime-style barista, an ice cream maker, and delivery couriers, debuted at the Tianfu International Animation City on August 14, showcasing AI-driven innovations for cultural tourism.
Suzhou Industrial Park's foreign trade surpassed 1 trillion yuan in the first seven months, up 126.8% year-on-year, driven by strong demand for AI hardware and smart robots.
US July CPI matched expectations, keeping Fed rate-cut bets steady. AI and robotics companies posted strong earnings, while the S&P 500 neared record highs.
Honor's CEO Li Jian announced that pre-orders for the Robot Phone have surpassed 400,000 units. The phone, starting at 9,999 yuan, will go on sale on August 18.
Qiangrui Technology announced a proposed private placement to raise up to 1.05 billion yuan, earmarked for AI server precision liquid cooling components, server automation assembly and testing equipment, high-end semiconductor equipment precision parts, and headquarters construction.
On August 11, the Shanghai Composite ended its five-day winning streak, while AI and robotics ETFs defied the trend and rose. Nonferrous metals plunged sharply, reflecting a clear seesaw effect in the market.
U.S. stocks fell from records as tech shares declined, while oil surged over 5%. Central bank signals and geopolitical tensions dominated global markets.
China's central bank vows FX stability, US finds pecan dumping, BOJ hints at September hike, and AI-driven tech earnings surge. Major tech firms see strong demand and price moves.
A concise morning briefing covering US jobs data, geopolitical tensions, China economic indicators, and corporate news including IPOs and earnings.
Hefei has launched a large-scale data collection and training facility for embodied intelligent robots, addressing a critical 99% data gap. The facility aims to provide high-quality training data essential for advancing humanoid and embodied AI technologies.
Damai, China's leading ticketing platform, announced its relentless fight against scalpers, citing advanced AI-powered risk control that intercepts over 6 billion malicious requests annually. The company emphasizes its commitment to safeguarding genuine fans' passion.
Global markets face a mixed start with chip stocks sliding, Alphabet announcing a $25B bond sale, and SoftBank beating expectations despite Vision Fund losses. Major moves include Unitree IPO pricing, DeepSeek price hikes, and Apple's DRAM purchases.
The University of Florida has launched a new robotics lab dedicated to industrialized construction, funded by a $1 million donation from Autodesk. The lab aims to address housing shortages and labor retirement challenges through advanced automation.
SpikingNav, a spiking neural framework for indoor embodied navigation, achieves competitive clean performance and stronger robustness under visual corruptions with fewer parameters and lower computation than ANN baselines, validated on a neuromorphic chip.
Xiaomi has open-sourced its embodied-AI foundation model Xiaomi-Robotics-1, covering the full pipeline from post-training to deployment. The model, pretrained on over 100,000 hours of UMI data, aims to democratize access to advanced robotics AI.
In Tesla's latest earnings calls, Elon Musk has devoted nearly half his speaking time to AI, robotaxis, and full self-driving, up from 15-20% in 2022. Meanwhile, discussions about cars and manufacturing have dropped to less than a third, reflecting a strategic pivot amid intensifying competition in the auto market.
Anshun College students achieved remarkable results in the 28th China Robot and Artificial Intelligence Competition, winning 19 national awards including 5 first prizes. This performance marks the best outcome in the school's history, showcasing the strength of local institutions in nurturing innovative talent.
Elon Musk announces that the company will base its technology stack entirely on Nvidia, citing the growing bandwidth demands from AI and robotics.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang credits Elon Musk's AI leadership to his massive compute infrastructure and real-world data collection advantages, naming him the winner of the AI race.
Introducing ETA, a new agentic paradigm for embodied tasks that combines a planner, interface, and world loop to enable generalization and controllability. The open-source implementation OpenETA provides modular components for simulation and real robots.
A Seoul research team developed 3D-printed porous foot pads with an AI controller to recycle energy in quadruped robots, cutting energy use by up to 6.2%. This offers a practical alternative to traditional leg springs, improving endurance for inspection and rescue tasks.