Runway AI introduced Praxis-1, an open-weight world action model that turns large-scale video pretraining into robot control. The company is testing it with early partners including Noble Machines, Standard Bots, and Ultra, and plans a public release with open weights in the coming months.
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.
Sanctuary AI published Part 1 of its Dexterity Explained series, outlining what manual dexterity is, why it matters, and how robotic hands and Physical AI work together to add skill, precision and control to physical tasks. The company said the more dexterous robots become, the more complex industrial work they can take on.
On September 20, a Chinese company put two personal robots on sale in China, starting at RMB 19,999 (about $2,800). Anyone typing "a robot that does my chores" into a search box now has, for the first time, an option they can actually order. It does not do chores. The one that does sits on the other side of the Pacific, costs roughly seven times as much, and still keeps a remote operator on call for the hard tasks. Article structure: - 1. What People Search For, and What Is Actually on Sale - 2. What $2,800 Buys - 3. The Price Tag on Chores - 4. Why Companionship Comes First - 5. What to Watch Over the Next Twelve Months
Galbot announced that LATENT, a project that turns imperfect human motion data into real-world humanoid tennis rallies, won the Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper Award at IROS 2026. The team thanked all coauthors and collaborators. Project page, arXiv paper and code are available.
D-Robotics has launched the Pumpkin Robot campaign, an open robotics project that challenges makers and developers to turn an ordinary pumpkin into a moving, thinking, or otherwise unexpected robot. The builds use the RDK X5 platform, and participants sign up by scanning the QR code on the poster. The company says it wants to see what these pumpkins can do.
Sharpa says dexterity goes beyond grasping: continuous manipulation requires all five fingers to coordinate in real time while keeping control of an object in motion. The company's W01 and W01 SE hands demonstrate two forms of multi-finger dexterous manipulation.
A Chinese embodied AI data company has raised nearly 100 million yuan in funding. The company collaborates with Nvidia and Huawei to provide data solutions for embodied intelligence.
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.
Innodata has opened a motion-capture lab in New Jersey that captures 3D body motion at sub-millimeter accuracy to train humanoids and other physical AI. Built with Vicon, the facility also independently validates robot performance data and offers off-the-shelf or custom training datasets.
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.
Boston Dynamics says it has already commercialized autonomous mobile robots, creating markets with Spot and Stretch, and is now repeating that playbook with Atlas. The humanoid learns in real environments and is designed for manufacturing at scale, which the company calls a new era of physical intelligence.
AgiBot has put 100 robots to work in retail stores, calling it the start of the “deployment era.” The rollout marks a shift from lab demos to commercial operation for embodied AI.
Funding in the robotics sector is being reshuffled, with some startups raising hundreds of millions of yuan in their founding year. According to Leaderobot, investment logic and funding-round structures are shifting.
A Chinese team has officially released the first embodied robot with a fully domestic electronic architecture, aiming to provide a domestic 'nervous system' for physical AI.
AGIBOT's X2 humanoid robots appeared on a livestream hosted by ASD, interacting with the host, introducing products and taking part in cooking demonstrations. AGIBOT says the appearance shows humanoids moving into everyday, customer-facing environments, where they interact and work alongside people instead of only running preset demos.
RoboSense announced that its E2 and EM4 LiDARs are now integrated with NVIDIA Holoscan Sensor Bridge, marking another key entry into NVIDIA's ecosystem. With half-year sales surging over 500%, its robotics business may have become a new pillar.
Faraday Future's founder and CEO Jia Yueting announced that FF's robotics business will merge with Nasdaq-listed AIxC and list independently at a $2 billion valuation, aiming to accelerate the global embodied AI robotics industry.
Qiteng Robotics has launched Yuanyu Zhixun, an application-level embodied AI platform for industrial scenarios, built by its controlled listed company Shengtong Energy. The platform connects simulation and real-world operations through pre-modeling, simulation rehearsal, real-machine operation, and data feedback, while the company also unveiled two new explosion-proof robots and set a 2030 global expansion goal.
The world's first large-scale embodied AI theme park opened in Zhuhai Hengqin with over 300 robots deployed. While robots may reduce labor costs for theme parks, operational and custom development costs could offset savings, and building a lasting robot IP remains a challenge.
Kyland Technology has unveiled a fully domestic electronic architecture for embodied AI robots at an event in Yichang, Hubei. The architecture integrates domestic operating system, deterministic network, tool software and AI chip technologies, and has passed strict safety tests for control security and fault isolation.
SenseTime launched SenseMart OS, a physical operating system for retail that connects robots, equipment, and commercial operations. The SenseMart Go robotic store demonstrates how the system can coordinate embodied intelligence in real-world retail settings.
In September, two contrasting moves in robotics: Skild partnered with Nvidia and Foxconn to deploy AI models on dual-arm robots for precision assembly, while Universal Robots redesigned its platform for easier AI integration. Sanctuary AI shifted focus from humanoid robots to deploying Physical AI on existing industrial arms, achieving over 99.5% success in wire harness insertion.
Shenzhen's Luohu District has launched an integrated training-competition-evaluation project for humanoid robot soccer among primary and secondary students, with the first Luohu Cup entering preparation. The initiative, backed by the education bureau and industry partners, aims to bring embodied AI into K-12 classrooms, with the league slated to kick off in December 2026 and finals in January 2027.
Faraday Future plans to merge its robotics business into Nasdaq-listed AIxC and list it separately at a $200 million valuation, aiming to become the first US-listed pure-play embodied AI robotics ecosystem. The deal, still subject to definitive agreements and regulatory approval, comes as FFAI shifts its auto strategy toward Robotaxi networks, smart-cabin technology and Physical AI investment.
AgiBot has established a new technology culture company in Hengqin, Zhuhai, with a registered capital of 5 million yuan, wholly owned by its Shanghai affiliate. The move extends AgiBot's regional presence into the Greater Bay Area, likely supporting its cultural tourism operations, including the large-scale robot theme park with Chimelong.
In September, over 2,700 listed companies received institutional research, a sharp increase from August. Institutions showed growing interest in small-cap stocks under 10 billion yuan, particularly in machinery, electronics, and basic chemicals.
NVIDIA unveiled its Open Agent Safety Platform, built on the open-source OpenShell runtime and the Sentry watchdog, to govern robots running AI agents. Gecko Robotics is among more than 100 organizations testing the framework, applying enforceable boundaries to its climbing, crawling, flying and swimming inspection robots, including the U.S. Navy's Komodo.
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.
Robbyant and the Arab Federation for Digital Economy (AFDE) signed a framework MoU at the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo. The two sides will work on deploying and localizing full-stack embodied intelligence and robotics solutions in the UAE, the GCC and the wider Middle East, covering model localization, workflow adaptation, real-world applications, responsible collaboration in data and model training, and regional ecosystem development.
ChangSheng Bearing said on September 28 that it currently has no collaboration with Tesla in robotics and will seek embodied intelligence partnerships based on its own market strategy.
Unitree announced the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Summit, scheduled for October 22, 2026. The company invites people to register by scanning a QR code in the post and says it looks forward to seeing attendees.
The 2026 Global Open-source AI Challenge has officially concluded, with DEEP Robotics supporting the event end to end. The company said the competition used real-world challenge scenarios to test the true deployment capabilities of embodied intelligence, helping drive a full-industry application loop.
Jingshi Technology has unveiled its VIVA dexterous hand, claiming the world's first real-time human-robot four-hand piano duet. The company also announced a VIVA × CADA milestone, shifting robots from executing preset motions to artistic expression and continuous learning.
China disclosed 218 winning humanoid and embodied robotics bids worth 1.72 billion yuan in H1 2026, while the sector raised over 90 billion yuan — a 52-fold gap between money and real orders. The deeper risk lies in collection: government-linked buyers are stretching payment terms past twelve months, turning order announcements into cash-flow fiction.
At a seminar in Beijing, Chen Pu of Yuankee Vision emphasized that robot training data must evolve from 2D to 4D with sub-millimeter precision to build a 4D data foundation. He highlighted that current bottlenecks include single training scenarios, insufficient dynamic data, and inconsistent underlying foundations, and outlined Yuankee's approach to multimodal data collection.
A Hangzhou social experiment places companion robots Yuanluobo and Yuanbao in 30 homes of elderly people living alone, starting with Zhao Yongfu in Sijiqing Subdistrict. The project, led by Zhou Chaonan and Su Jun, plans to reach 300–500 households nationwide and track results for three years.
At the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo, Star Species Robot reported 500 million yuan in orders for its restroom-cleaning robots, with over 100 devices already operating in Hangzhou and 500+ new intent orders, mostly from overseas. The article argues that small, clearly bounded scenarios like restroom cleaning and garment handling are practical paths to commercialization, but warns that orders must be distinguished from actual revenue and that success requires five key metrics.
From Sept. 26–27, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China hosted a robotics and AI industry-academia integration event at its Shahe campus, part of its 70th anniversary and second alumni culture festival. Nearly 30 robotics firms exhibited, and a somersaulting panda robot drew particular attention.
The Fifth Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou featured over 2,000 exhibitors and 50,000 professional buyers, with robots demonstrating tasks from soccer to surgery. A reporter observed that the industry is moving from showy motion to practical work.
Automakers are increasingly entering embodied AI, leveraging existing supply-chain experience and commercialization scenarios. The overlap could reduce duplicated investment and help build a shared AI ecosystem.
On September 28, the world's first embodied AI robot built on a fully domestic electronic architecture made its debut in Yichang, Hubei Province. The architecture covers the operating system, networking, tool software and AI computing chips, enabling isolated integration of control and AI computation.
At the 15th InnoTrans in Berlin, CRRC unveiled a next-generation AI-integrated metro train—the first to apply embodied AI in rail transit—alongside a hydrogen fuel-cell hybrid locomotive and an intelligent flatcar. The metro uses over 600 sensors and onboard AI to monitor conditions and predict faults.
On Sept. 28, a launch event in Yichang, Hubei, unveiled the world's first embodied AI robot powered by a fully domestic electronic architecture. The architecture, described as the robot's nervous system, spans operating system, networking, tool software and AI compute chips, offering a domestic alternative to foreign solutions.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index opened 0.18% higher at 24,554.58 points, while the Hang Seng Tech Index rose 0.29%. Tencent Music, NetEase, Horizon Robotics, and Tencent Holdings each gained more than 1%.
According to Leaderobot, the Embodied AI Robot Challenge has entered a hardcore competitive phase, with multiple events running in parallel and linked scenarios that test robots in realistic conditions.
Lumos Robotics introduced Lumos Ego Vue, a head-mounted egocentric multimodal data collection device for robot learning. It offers binocular first-person capture, high-precision hand tracking and multimodal time synchronization to record real-world tasks and operating data. Connected to the company's Lumos NexCore, the pipeline supports multi-source data input plus data quality control and processing.
Ukraine's former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov has launched a "Robot Army" initiative promising a humanoid robot kill within six months and an infantry-free assault within a year. The launch video shows only AI-generated renders, and the effort rests on a recruitment form rather than government backing or named hardware.
Light Origins has released Light-O1, its first general embodied foundation model, trained on human motions recovered from internet videos to provide a reusable starting point for robots across tasks and embodiments. The company also launched Light-O1-Preview, a text-to-motion model that accepts natural language and generates whole-body motion sequences.
Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov has unveiled a defense technology initiative called the Robot Army, aiming to deploy humanoid robots and other autonomous systems for the military's most dangerous tasks. The project remains early-stage, with Fedorov seeking engineers, robotics teams, tech companies, and investors to build the ecosystem.
Toyota plans to deploy 400,000 of its ELEY humanoid robots across global factories, with 150,000 at Toyota and 250,000 at group companies. Starting in 2028, it will invest about 1 trillion yen annually in factory automation.
Jingshi Technology unveiled VIVA, a dexterous robotic hand that performs real-time four-hand piano duets with human pianists. The company says the hand integrates the CADA music embodied AI model, enabling musical creation, performance, and continual learning.
Fangqi Technology, founded by a post-95 Tsinghua PhD who left Tencent, has raised a tens-of-millions-yuan angel round to build a general robot brain. The company proposes a semantic world model and Turing learning paradigm to enable cross-embodiment skills, aiming to become a skill exchange for robot body makers.
The Embodied AI Robot Challenge at the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou drew more than 100 teams and featured 14 official events spanning speed, competition, and endurance. Organizers framed misjudgments, loss of balance, and route replanning not as failures to hide but as part of a competition designed to expose real engineering problems.
AgiBot subsidiary Critical Point's dexterous hand OmniHand won seven golds at the World Humanoid Robot Games. CEO Qiao Tianjie says dexterous hands are key for robots to use human tools, but reliability, algorithms and commercialization remain major challenges.
Mifeng Technology launched Mifeng Pai, a crowdsourced platform that recruits ordinary people as robot trainers. In a 12-hour trial, the author wore MEgo gear to record chores and earn money.
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.
AgiBot and Chimelong Group opened what they call the world's first large-scale embodied AI theme park, deploying over 300 robots across seven cultural tourism scenarios. On the same day, AgiBot delivered its 20,000th general-purpose embodied robot, an Expedition A3 Ultra, to Chimelong at Hengqin Chimelong Spaceship Park.
Shenzhen robot companies are bringing AI tennis robots to international events and the consumer market. From the Billie Jean King Cup to the China Open, startups like Wo'an Robotics and Inhans Dynamics are racing to define the future of tennis training with hardware, AI, and new business models.
Qi Teng Robotics unveiled Yuan Yu Zhi Xun, described as the first application-level embodied intelligence platform for industrial scenarios, at its brand launch conference in Chongqing. The company also debuted two explosion-proof robots and said it has deployed more than 10,000 industry solutions across over 40 countries and regions.
Intrinsic, Google's AI robotics group, has open-sourced key parts of its platform under the name Intrinsic Core. The release includes hardware-agnostic control, pose estimation, motion planning, grasp planning, simulation, camera calibration, and ROS drivers, plus a reference design for machine tending.
Unitree founder Wang Xingxing told the Global Digital Trade Expo that embodied AI will have its own ChatGPT moment once robots can handle 80% of tasks in 80% of unfamiliar settings. He argues the field's core bottleneck is a few-millimeter mismatch between AI models and the physical world.
ETH Zurich researchers have built an 818-gram cableless robot hand that can use its five fingers as legs to crawl, recover from falls, and interact with objects. The project combines a humanoid hand with reinforcement learning to explore a design principle of reducing hardware and letting existing parts perform more functions.
The 2026 Global Digital Trade Innovation Competition has released the promotion list for its Embodied AI Robot Challenge, covering the 23rd–24th. Leaderobot reported the announcement, though further details on teams and results were not immediately available.
At the REK robot combat event in San Francisco on September 20, China's EngineAI T800 humanoid robot knocked down influencer boxer Frankie LaPenna with a single kick. The bout was not autonomous: an operator in a VR headset drove the robot remotely while the machine handled balance and posture correction.
SenseTime's retail subsidiary SenseMart launched SenseMart OS, a physical operating system for robot-run stores, on September 23 in Shanghai. The system has already been deployed in over 20 stores across multiple Chinese cities, integrating robot hardware, software, and operations.
The 2026 Global Digital Trade Innovation Competition's Embodied AI Robot Challenge kicked off in Hangzhou, with over 100 teams competing in 14 events including legged robot racing and humanoid basketball. A 6-hour endurance race tests robots' long-term reliability, mirroring future industrial and service scenarios.
Knowin released GLOW, a generative learning architecture for general embodied intelligence, aiming to let robots learn tasks from a single demonstration. The technical report details a unified multimodal autoregressive model and reports leading results on RoboDojo, LIBERO-Pro, and Embodied Arena.
Mengfengpai launched a data crowdsourcing infrastructure that includes head-mounted and gripper collection devices, a user-facing app, and a data governance engine. The company also announced a 100-million-yuan subsidy plan and a scenario data alliance to scale embodied AI training data to billions of hours.
At a Sept. 23 seminar in Beijing, ModelBest engineering vice president Zou Zhensheng said the last mile of embodied AI scaling depends on reliability and whether customers can justify the economics. He outlined data-mix strategies, a scenario ladder and ecosystem collaboration, predicting that over the next two to three years edge models will advance along a perception-thinking-action loop, with automotive, consumer electronics and robotics becoming major commercialization scenarios in turn.
On September 24, Qizhi's 20,000th general-purpose embodied AI robot, Expedition A3 Ultra, rolled off the line and was delivered to Chimelong Group. The same day, the world's first large-scale embodied AI theme park opened, with over 300 Qizhi robots deployed for regular operation, marking a shift from R&D validation to mass production and large-scale delivery.
At the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing predicted embodied AI will reach its own 'ChatGPT moment' once robots can handle 80% of tasks in 80% of unfamiliar scenarios. He identified millimeter-level discrepancies between AI outputs and the physical world as the key bottleneck.
Changan Automobile announced plans to accelerate its push into emerging industries like embodied AI humanoid robots and flying cars, aiming for mass production of humanoid robots by 2028 and commercial route flying cars by 2030.
Agility CTO Pras Velagapudi joined @MIT_CSAIL for a discussion on physical intelligence. The company highlighted the conversation as a deeper look at the topic. The post did not include additional details or figures.
Astribot says it will join partners in Pittsburgh from Sept 27 to Oct 1 to show how physical AI research is applied to real-world robot tasks, under the tagline "AI That Grows by Doing," and invites attendees to visit its booth to discuss collaboration.
Astribot announced it will present its Physical AI stack and partner projects at an event in Pittsburgh from Sept 27 to Oct 1. The company says it combines in-house innovation with open collaboration, and invites partners to build the next generation of physical AI together.
Sharpa will co-host two competitions at IROS 2026: the 2nd ROCO and the Origami challenges, run with @BitRobotNetwork. Powered by Sharpa's robot platforms and software, the events brought together 48 teams from institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, KAIST and NUS, who will test robotic manipulation and dexterity on Sharpa hardware through challenging real-world tasks.
Mifeng Technology on Sept. 23 launched “Mifeng Pai,” a platform that lets ordinary users such as mothers, store clerks, and craftspeople collect embodied AI data by wearing MEgo devices in real-world settings. The company says registration requires personal information authorization and that privacy data will be desensitized.
AGIBOT announced that its 20,000th robot rolled off the production line, up from 15,000 units. The company said it is scaling production while expanding humanoid robot deployments in real-world scenarios. AGIBOT described the 20,000-unit mark as more than a production milestone, calling it a new stage for embodied AI in which robots move from proving what they can do to large-scale real-world deployment.
LimX Dynamics has officially opened the SDK for its Luna robot, offering tool-based support across the entire development pipeline. The company says developers can go from data to real-robot execution in as little as half a day.
Several leading EV startups are ramping up robotics efforts. Leapmotor confirmed a fully self-developed robot, while Xpeng earlier announced first-round financing for its robotics unit, intensifying the automaker humanoid race.
At the WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 opening ceremony on September 22, 19 Unitree humanoid robots performed alongside 120 dancers before more than 10,000 spectators. Unitree says it was the world's largest-scale full-size general-purpose humanoid robot performance, with the AI-driven autonomous cluster show streamed live worldwide.
Polybot, a Tübingen startup spun out of the ELLIS Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, has built a truss-tomato harvesting robot trained on human demonstrations, and it has already moved from the lab into real greenhouse rows. Its first full pilot is planned for summer 2026, with deliveries to growers possible as early as 2027.
On Sept 18, the CSRC disclosed Weiyi Zhizao's overseas listing filing, making the Changzhou-based industrial embodied AI robot maker the first profitable contender to approach a HKEX hearing. Unlike dancing humanoid peers, it has built market leadership on factory tasks like inspection and polishing, with two years of profit and positive operating cash flow.
Guangdong Embodied AI Technology Co., Ltd. has added Dobot, Frontop, and Zhongjin Lingnan as shareholders, with registered capital increasing to 300 million yuan. The cross-industry investment signals a potential provincial-level coordinated effort in Guangdong's embodied AI sector.
Huxiu AI100 closed-door meeting gathered experts to discuss whether world models and GPT-6 can serve as robot brains. They debated evaluation criteria, language vs. action, real-time limits, self-evolution, hardware coupling, and the missing AI Coding scenario for embodied AI.
On September 20, Xidian University and Shenzhen Intellifusion Technologies unveiled a joint laboratory for embodied intelligence. The lab will focus on AI chips, intelligent computing, and embodied intelligence, combining Xidian's academic strengths with Intellifusion's industry experience.
Shangwei New Materials, a 30x stock acquired by AgiBot, launched two consumer personal robots under its Qiyuan Robotics brand on September 20, but its shares fell for three straight days afterward. Analysts say the home scenario remains the hardest nut to crack in embodied AI, making the startup's fun-first, usefulness-later path a test of long-term value.
AGIBOT said its 20,000th robot has rolled off the production line, up from 15,000 units. The company is scaling production while expanding humanoid robot deployment in real-world scenarios, and frames the 20,000-unit mark as a new stage for embodied AI: moving from proving capability to deploying at scale.
Zheng Nanning, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, argues that embodied intelligence is not equivalent to humanoid robots; humanoid form is just one carrier. The true measure is whether an intelligent system can operate in the real world, forming a closed loop of perception, cognition, decision, action and feedback.
Intel and Comtech have launched FoxJack X1, an embodied AI development kit that integrates high-level decision-making and real-time control into a single 125 mm square platform. Based on Intel Core Ultra 300 series processors, it aims to reduce cost, latency, and complexity for humanoid, mobile, and industrial robots.
Moying Technology's industrial embodied AI foundation has been ranked No. 7 in the 2026 AI Innovation Application TOP50 Model Cases, the only benchmark enterprise in its category. Its Moying Baichuan platform abstracts hardware protocols, pluginizes products, and templates scenarios, cutting new device onboarding from three months to as fast as seven days.
AgiBot has delivered its 20,000th general-purpose embodied AI robot, the Expedition A3 Ultra, to Chimelong Group at Hengqin Chimelong Spaceship Park. The robot will join others for regular visitor interaction, guided tours, performances, and science education.
The world's first large-scale embodied AI theme park has opened at Chimelong Spaceship Park in Hengqin, jointly built by AGIBOT and Chimelong Group, marking embodied AI's move into mass entertainment.
Skild AI posted a short clip of its robot, saying the machine was brought to life once it was ready. The company, which builds foundation models for robots, gave no further technical detail in the post.
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.
Skild AI says it trained a robot to play football using self-play. The system went through the equivalent of 140 years of a virtual World Cup during training before the policy was moved onto a real machine.
China's robot IPO window narrowed in H2 2026: 14 companies listed, a STAR Market applicant withdrew, and the test became who pays the revenue.
D-Robotics has completed a $400 million Series C round led by Mirae Asset, with Meituan Strategic Investment, Hefei State Investment, Nanshan Strategic Emerging Investment, and existing investors Hillhouse Venture Capital and 5Y Capital participating. The company has not yet responded to questions about the use of funds or its future plans.
Lumos Robotics announced that founder and CEO Yu Chao has been named to Fortune's 2026 40 Under 40 list. The company said the recognition reflects its different path for Physical AI, grounded in real-world tasks and industrial deployment. At the core is NexCore, its skill evolution engine for Industrial Physical AI, which links real-world tasks, data, models, skills and robotic systems so robots can continuously acquire and improve new capabilities.
Qualcomm plans to acquire U.S. embodied intelligence company Picknik, according to a Wallstreetcn flash. The move would expand the chipmaker's reach into robotics software and edge AI.
Lumos Robotics has launched Lumos Station Lite, a real-robot development and validation platform powered by NexCore. It spans skill development, model deployment, dual-arm execution and task evaluation, helping developers turn embodied AI capabilities into real-world performance. The workflow runs from data to skills, deployment, validation and evolution, aimed at accelerating the industrial embodied AI developer ecosystem.
Humanoid robots could assist people in homes, offices, healthcare facilities, and public spaces. Before reliable deployment, they must safely navigate cluttered, dynamic environments using whole-body AI control that coordinates the entire body.
Kaizhi Data launched the Lighthouse Plan, aiming to build 1 million hours of real-world scenario data with 100 partners in 100 days to support embodied AI training.
Lens Technology announced it has overcome ultra-precision surface polishing barriers, conducted customer validation for HDD glass hard disks, and achieved small-batch shipments. The company also reported deep collaboration with leading customers in embodied intelligence, with cumulative shipments of robot core components ranking among the industry's top.
Elon Musk said in a Sept. 23 CCTV Finance interview that everyone could one day own a personal robot. He forecast at least 1 billion humanoid robots in 10 years, 10 billion in 15 years, and 100 billion in 20 years.
Zhongyi (Shenzhen) Embodied Technology has closed a nearly 100 million yuan angel round led by Anda Intelligent's controlling shareholder to build an operating-system-level foundation for robots. The company, which does not make robots itself, has also launched a lifecycle service platform aggregating over 40 leading hardware manufacturers.
Stardust Intelligence's Stardust OS Hackathon Beijing concluded with 15 teams producing more than 10 runnable robot applications in 36 hours. The event showcased low-barrier development on the AOS platform, with teams using skill packages and natural-language generation to turn one-sentence requests into deployable robot apps.
Ouka Zhihai, a sea-surface embodied AI company, has closed a Series C round in July 2026 led by Xigao Investment, bringing its cumulative funding this year to nearly 300 million yuan.
Guangdong province has already deployed more than 2,000 humanoid robots in manufacturing enterprises, with the number expected to exceed 3,000 by the end of 2026. At the second Guangdong AI Application Matchmaking Conference, Cross-Dimensional Intelligence signed an agreement with Bestar to bring robots into new energy factories, while the province released a list of 388 AI application needs in manufacturing.
Guangzhou Daily Press Group's Information Times and Cloudbutterfly Technology signed an agreement to deploy the Huacheng Study AI embodied intelligence kiosk, expected to launch within the year. The robot shop assistant will sell books, drinks and Guangzhou cultural products, extending embodied AI from retail into routine community services.
CRRC launched a green-intelligent digital metro train at InnoTrans in Berlin, calling it the first metro to use embodied intelligence. The train uses multi-source sensors for autonomous perception, cuts weight by about 18 percent, and was shown alongside a hydrogen fuel cell locomotive and an intelligent flat car.
Leju Robotics and Hunan University have inaugurated a joint R&D center for industrial embodied AI, focusing on three key areas: wide-area multimodal perception, embodied AI large models, and dexterous manipulation. The center aims to accelerate the application of embodied intelligence in manufacturing production lines.
Humanoid robots aimed at personal and family use have appeared in Shanghai at prices of roughly $1,400–$2,800, pushing the technology from labs toward consumers. But executives and researchers say that bringing one home is only the first step, with safety, usefulness, and trust still to be earned.
Intel will use RoboBusiness 2026 to outline the open, edge-first infrastructure it says physical AI needs to move from prototype to production. Nagesh Puppala, Intel's general manager of physical AI and robotics, will speak on Oct. 20 in Santa Clara, Calif.
Ukraine's military says it has for the first time airdropped suicide ground robots behind Russian front lines in northern Donetsk, in an operation that also blinded Russian drones.
Agility chief business officer Daniel Diez argues that real market differentiation in robotics comes from deployment rather than demos, and discusses what it takes to scale a new market category.
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.
Intrinsic has open-sourced Intrinsic Core, a set of ROS-compatible capabilities for building robot applications, under the Apache 2.0 license. Announced at ROSCon 2026, the release includes real-time control, pose estimation, motion and grasp planning, and a machine tending reference design.
As embodied-AI funding cools and investors focus on commercialization, Chinese robotics developer Zhishen Technology has raised a several-hundred-million-yuan Series B led by UAE-based Stone Venture. The deal highlights continued Middle East interest in China’s robotics sector.
Zhongyi (Shenzhen) Embodied Technology has completed a nearly RMB 100 million angel round led by Andar Intelligent's controlling shareholder, lifting its post-money valuation by an order of magnitude. The deal reflects a broader 2026 shift in China's embodied AI sector, where industrial capital is entering aggressively while questions grow over inflated valuations and weak commercial deployment.
Changan Automobile's Tan Huan told the 2026 TEDA Auto Forum that smart cars will evolve into embodied-intelligence composite agents and that the automotive engineering system should empower the robotics industry. Changan's plan puts robots to work in car manufacturing, logistics and inspection first, with the endgame of using robots to build robots.
The 2026 GDPS International Embodied AI Skills Competition is now recruiting university teams. The event, held in Shanghai this October, converts real industry pain points into competition tasks, with winners receiving investment, financing, and certification.
Shenshi Weishi closed three funding rounds in under a year, most recently a several-hundred-million-yuan Series B, betting that embodied AI can replace welders in non-standard, small-batch scenarios. Chairman Wang Dezhao attributes the momentum to growing deployment certainty and a proprietary data flywheel built from real production data gathered since 2020.
GPT-6 Astra achieved 95% success in a robot-control task with far fewer tokens than Fable 5.1, but RoboDojo tests found it issued unsafe actions and damaged hardware, forcing early termination. Noematrix's RoboRSI framework uses four-agent loops and code solidification to improve continuous execution, diagnosis, and adaptation, raising LIBERO pass rates and cutting token use.
Qiyuan Robot, backed by listed company Shangwei New Materials, has received 210 million yuan in pre-sales for its Q1 and T1 personal robots but has yet to recognize revenue. The launch faces challenges in delivery, equity incentives tied to aggressive revenue targets, and the need to separate brand association with Peng Zhihui from corporate governance.
Xiaomi's AI hardware team has open-sourced YareLampGo, a robotic arm desk lamp that integrates AI interaction. The lamp can respond to voice commands with physical movements, demonstrating embodied AI in home devices.
Daxiao Robotics and PetroChina Shanghai Sales Company are trialing a fully closed-loop embodied AI robot project at a gas station convenience store in Shanghai. The robots pick, move, and pack goods in narrow aisles and high shelves, with plans to scale the standardized solution across PetroChina's convenience store network.
Zhao Yingwei, 25, studied landscape architecture but now works as a data collector for an embodied AI company. After a CCTV News interview highlighted his unconventional career path, he has become an online curiosity and is self-studying programming to advance in the robotics industry.
Embodied AI is moving from showcases into everyday scenarios, from robot boxing to robot cooking and delivery. Beyond replacing labor, it is reshaping industrial logic, connecting the digital and real economies, and releasing new industrial growth in the stock era.
China's State Council Information Office outlined plans to deepen 3D Realistic China and spatiotemporal intelligence, promote authorized operation of public geospatial data, and advance BeiDou applications. The policy aims to support intelligent driving, low-altitude economy, and embodied intelligence by providing cheaper, more compliant access to geospatial data.
In the first half of 2026, China's embodied AI sector attracted 172 financing deals totaling 109.17 billion yuan, yet fewer than 20% of humanoid robots actually enter manufacturing and logistics. Interim results from Unitree and UBTech show record revenues but reveal different business models, highlighting a growing gap between capital narratives and industrial reality.
A newly listed founder has publicly exposed how China's humanoid robot industry's headline numbers—40,000 units shipped in H1 2026 and a claimed 97% global share—mask the fact that only a few thousand robots actually work in factories. Self-dealing data-collection centers, remote-controlled demos and wealth-management income are propping up financials rather than real robotics revenue.
Market rumors suggest embodied AI data company Mifeng Technology is approaching a 10 billion yuan valuation, but the company declined to comment when contacted.
On September 20, Zhiyuan Robotics' bipedal humanoid robots Lingxi X2 and Expedition A3 appeared at the 2026 Greater Bay Area Film and Music Gala in Macau. Expedition A3 interacted with hosts and celebrities in a livestream, while Lingxi X2 danced for a performance of 'Love Bird.'
Universal Robots has launched its Gen 7 platform at IMTS, featuring new g-Series arms, controllers, and OS to simplify AI-driven automation. The company aims to make physical AI practical for factories by addressing integration challenges and embracing open standards like ROS 2.
Li Jiong, General Manager of Haoling Robotics, says that the industrialization of industrial embodied AI must be scene-driven, transitioning from specialized to general-purpose solutions to overcome the limitations of traditional robots.
Boston Dynamics has opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai's Georgia plant to train Atlas humanoids for automotive manufacturing. The facility uses real parts, teleoperation, simulation, and UMI devices to prepare Atlas for tasks like parts sequencing, with expansion planned through 2030.
D-Robotics says ROSCon Global 2026 is about to open and that it will see attendees tomorrow, signaling the company's presence at the robotics developers conference.
Wuyan Intelligence and automotive thermal-management supplier Falada Group have signed a memorandum of understanding to validate a "physical AI brain" on flexible manufacturing workstations. The partners frame Falada's high-mix, fast-change production lines as a representative testbed for embodied AI.
NEURA Robotics asked its followers whether they would feed process data into a shared robot training network, opening a poll on data sharing for robot learning in production settings.
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.
Tsinghua University, Infinigence, and Zhengxing Innovation have jointly open-sourced RPent, an embodied agent infrastructure that connects general large models with expert VLA models, memory, tools, and robot interfaces. RPent achieves 92.6% success on LIBERO-PRO and over 7x end-to-end speedup, enabling robots to understand tasks, invoke capabilities, and adapt in open-world scenarios.
As of 14:44, China's three major A-share indices were higher, while the CSI Robot Index edged up 0.03% with mixed constituent moves. Robot ETF Huaxia (562500) turned positive intraday after Qiyuan robot drew attention for a sub-20,000-yuan price.
Figure AI's Helix 2.5 claims a human-to-robot scaling law after testing in 30 real homes, achieving 56% success on household tasks. But critics say the mixed results show imitation learning still fails to generalize reliably.
SAP held its first Embodied AI Jam at the Swiss Smart Factory in Biel, pairing customers with system integrators and robot makers to tackle real business challenges. Teams produced in three days the kind of concrete use cases and architecture proposals that normally take weeks.
Humanoid robots broke sprint records in Beijing, yet tasks like folding clothes remain far more difficult. As learning speeds up and costs fall, the gap between spectacle and practical work is narrowing.
At @HackTheNorth, the @darksorceror_ team built Goostriever in just 36 hours on D-Robotics' RDK dev kit. The voice-controlled robot takes a spoken command, identifies the target object, plans a route around the room, drives over, grasps the item and brings it back. Its stack combines vision, navigation and an LLM planner, with an RDK S100 board running ACT inference locally for the grasping action.
Fangqi Technology has completed a multi-million angel funding round led by TusStar Venture Capital and others. The company proposes a semantic world model and Turing learning paradigm to address the disconnect between physical and semantic knowledge in embodied AI, aiming to build a general-purpose robot brain.
Embodied AI firms are attracting record funding, but a wave of high-profile technical and business leaders are leaving. The real challenge is not capital but building the organizational capability to retain and grow talent.
Qiyuan Robotics has connected its Q1 and T1 robots to Tencent's WorkBuddy, becoming the first embodied-intelligence company on the platform and gaining access to more than 10,000 Skills. The partners offer three access modes and a four-layer safety mechanism to turn cloud AI reasoning into verified physical action.
China's 2026 undergraduate catalog adds interdisciplinary majors including embodied intelligence and low-altitude technology, shifting talent training toward national planning. Feisi Lab, under Zhuoyi Intelligent, offers an air-ground collaborative embodied intelligence lab solution for universities, combining simulation, hardware-in-loop verification, and real-machine deployment.
Warehouses are becoming the first major battleground for embodied AI in China, where system-level integration matters more than individual robot performance. Atomix, a logistics robotics company with a decade of experience, offers a 4+1 framework and has merged with embodied AI firm Yuanli Lingji to combine large models with real-world scale.
At the 22nd China Automotive Industry Development (TEDA) International Forum, Chen Chao of Qingyan Precision explained how the company uses automotive testing and validation expertise to help embodied AI companies achieve batch delivery in industrial scenarios. He proposed an RIL (Robot-in-the-Loop) system and a vocational school model to bridge the gap between robot companies and industrial clients.
Boke Testing (301598.SZ) announced on its investor platform that it has developed testing equipment for embodied robots, drawing on its automotive testing expertise.
The Guanggu Humanoid Robot 7S store is preparing new branches in Wuhan and other cities, with Xianning and Yichang next. Hubei Science and Technology Investment Group is building the ecosystem through an innovation center, test scenarios, and a leasing platform.
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.
Youibot and Huawei Cloud unveiled the CloudRobo embodied intelligence inspection solution during Huawei Connect 2026, with a flagship case now in regular operation at China Southern Power Grid's Guangzhou Power Supply Bureau. Youibot, which ranked first in the global industrial mobile manipulator market in 2024, has delivered over 800 projects and reports a customer repurchase rate above 70%.
Anhui Province released key technology directions for its smart connected new energy vehicle industry under the 15th Five-Year Plan at a Hefei conference held during the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention. The plan builds a "1+3" framework centered on deep AI empowerment and proposes pre-positioning for embodied intelligent vehicles built from independently evolving agents.
Shangwei New Materials' consumer embodied AI brand Qiyuan Robot launched the Qiyuan Q1 and T1 personal robots in Shanghai on Sept 20. The Q1 is priced at 19,999 yuan, and both models ship immediately upon purchase.
D-Robotics announced that it is a sponsor of ROSCon Global 2026 and will bring its RDK platform to the @OpenRoboticsOrg event. The company says ROS 2 is not an add-on but a core part of the RDK robotics development experience. Across the RDK platform, multiple ROS 2 distributions are supported, while TogetheROS.Bot builds on ROS 2 with hardware-accelerated capabilities tailored for robotics.
D-Robotics shared a few moments from @HackTheNorth 2026 in Waterloo, described as Canada's biggest hackathon. The team reported developers getting hands-on with the RDK X5 board, plus talks, demos and conversations across the venue over a single weekend.
AGIBOT and Chimelong Group will open the world's first large-scale embodied AI theme park at Zhuhai Hengqin Chimelong Spaceship Park on September 24, featuring more than 300 robots and the world's largest human-robot opening dance.
At the Greater Bay Area Film Concert, AGIBOT's A3 robot interacted with celebrities in real time, following the conversation and coordinating its speech, movements and expressions. The company says A3 runs on WITA-Omni, which lets it perceive its surroundings and respond naturally in the moment.
Inspire Robots has joined Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and other institutions to open-source the HandEdit dataset and benchmark for first-person human-to-dexterous-hand image editing. The release contains over 200 million editing samples across 26 URDF configurations, with Inspire's DFX and G2 hands included in the data conversion pipeline.
Tencent Cloud announced on September 20 that consumer embodied AI brand Qiyuan Robots has integrated its Q1 and T1 robots with WorkBuddy, making Qiyuan the first embodied AI company to access the platform. Tencent Cloud describes WorkBuddy as the brain for reasoning and dispatching cloud Skills, while Qiyuan robots act as the body for interaction and execution in office and home scenarios.
AGIBOT and Chimelong Group will open the world's first large-scale embodied intelligence theme park at Hengqin Chimelong Spaceship Park on September 24, 2026. More than 300 AGIBOT robots will take on roles across seven core scenarios, while a joint research institute and several industry-first achievements, including a 5G-A application, are unveiled.
The world's first large-scale embodied AI theme park, jointly created by AgiBot and Chimelong Group, will officially open on September 24. Over 300 robots from AgiBot's full lineup will begin operations at Chimelong Spaceship Park in Hengqin.
Jensen Huang argues that every moving thing will gain autonomy, but the core challenge for robots is manipulation rather than navigation. Nvidia's physical AI stack and the partial transfer from autonomous driving show progress, yet contact-rich operations remain the missing half before physical AI's ChatGPT moment.
A Hong Kong-listed founder criticized the industry's prevalent assembled entrepreneurship, which relies on related-party transactions to create fake revenue. As regulators plan to tighten humanoid robot IPO reviews, real orders must pass three tests—quality, real demand, and engineering capability—while companies like Jiyi Intelligent adopt a scene-first approach to grow capabilities.
Huawei Cloud and Fulongma Group unveiled a new-generation sanitation robot built on Huawei Cloud's CloudRobo embodied intelligence platform. The system pairs cloud-side scheduling with millisecond-level edge response, under a roadmap targeting full embodied intelligence integration by 2028.
Dongfeng Motor has introduced several technology plans at its 10th Science and Technology Innovation Week, with humanoid robots and robot dogs as key embodied AI exhibits. The automaker says its humanoid robot will begin factory work in October and enter limited trial production by year-end, aiming for human-level capability by late next year.
Wang Xingxing, speaking at the 2026 Private Economy Innovation Development Conference, identified alignment as the biggest shortcoming of humanoid robots. He noted that errors in the last few centimeters or millimeters block generalization and practical deployment, while envisioning a future where robots can tidy unfamiliar rooms without prior training.
The 2026 Global Digital Trade Innovation Competition (Embodied AI Robot Challenge) will take place Sept. 23–27 at Hall 6B of the Hangzhou Grand Convention and Exhibition Center. The event combines robot races, combat, soccer, and endurance tests with audience participation, product displays, robot band performances, and live streaming.
Tesla, BMW and Mercedes-Benz are putting bipedal humanoid robots on production lines, where operating costs of $2–$5 per hour undercut the $35–$45 fully loaded hourly labor cost in Europe and the US. A $15 trillion long-term market is forecast, but scarce physical data, limited hardware durability and union resistance remain the three obstacles before 2026's paid-deployment start.
Changzhou Weiyi Zhizao Technology has received a CSRC filing for an overseas listing and plans to issue up to 42.8671 million shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s main board. The company focuses on industrial embodied AI robots, holds a 31% domestic market share, and grew revenue from RMB 434 million in 2023 to RMB 796 million in 2025 with rising gross margin.
Chinese robot hands now cost a fraction of their 2025 prices, yet fewer than 1% of them work on automotive lines. The industry has three separate ways of judging a hand, and the one that measures lifespan has no common scale.
Xuanji Dynamics, an embodied AI robotics company, announced its entry into the ASEAN market at the 23rd China-ASEAN Expo. The company has secured key orders in Vietnam and is conducting validation in airport inspection and petrochemical scenarios in Southeast Asia.
On Sept 16, 2026, a Tesla team arrived in Ningbo, a port city in Zhejiang province, and began a mass-production audit of its robot suppliers the next day. The names reported from that round, Tuopu Group, Sanhua, Joyson Electronics, Zhejiang Rongtai and Xinquan, are almost all long-standing suppliers to Tesla's car business. Why would a robot have to clear the production lines of auto parts makers first? Because what an audit measures is cycle time, yield and cost, and those three sit with companies the car industry has spent decades hardening. Tesla's own description of the task is that "almost every part is new, with no ready supply chain." The list is therefore more than a purchase order. It is Tesla looking for a manufacturing path it can repeat. Article structure: - 1. The audit: four departments on site, three answers - 2. The list: why it is almost all auto parts makers - 3. The threshold: how far an audit is from mass production
Multiple sources say SoftBank Group has agreed to acquire the Robotics and AI Institute from Hyundai Motor Group, with the deal now under CFIUS review. The move would return a piece of Marc Raibert's robotics legacy to SoftBank, which owned Boston Dynamics from 2017 to 2021.
Figure shared footage of its Helix 2.5 model operating for 4 consecutive hours across 30 homes without any additional training. The company presents the run as evidence that the vision-language-action model generalizes to real household environments out of the box.
Recent robotics funding rounds show capital accelerating toward the perception layer of embodied AI, with Shutu Technology raising nearly RMB 100 million and Paxini's cumulative funding exceeding RMB 4 billion.
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.
Xpeng Group Chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng said most robot companies severely underestimate hardware complexity, while expressing high hopes for the G9L's global sales, profit, and overseas growth.
D-Robotics has raised $400 million in Series C funding to support its Sunrise chip portfolio and a full-chain software platform for robot development. The company said its revenue grew several times year over year in the first half of 2026, with cumulative Sunrise chip shipments surpassing 8 million units and its embodied AI business entering mass production.
Hangzhou-based Zeno Robotics has closed a multi-hundred-million-yuan seed round from investors including Sunny Optical and MetaX. Founded in 2025, the physical intelligence startup also released Zeno-1, a collaborative intelligence foundation model for reliable, dexterous robot systems.
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.
Qing Tian Zu held its 2026 RaaS Land Ecosystem Partner Conference in Shanghai, launching the 'Qing Tian Star Map' ecosystem plan. The company introduced CEO Li Yiyan's Worken concept, which aims to standardize robot productivity by defining completed work as measurable units, and outlined ambitious three-year goals including 10 billion yuan in platform revenue.
Anthropic has reportedly established a biology lab for physical experiments to advance drug discovery, aiming to have its Claude AI control robots and run lab tests with minimal human involvement, according to Reuters.
Researchers at EPFL propose a new discipline called 'Sustainability Robotics', which evaluates robots by their overall contribution to sustainability goals. They argue that robots must be minimally invasive, accessible, and symbiotic, and that sustainability should become a key performance metric.
As of September 18, 2026, A-shares rose broadly, with the CSI Robot Index up 1.65%. Tesla is reported to have started robot mass production audits, and the Robot ETF (562500) is aiming for a third consecutive gain.
Hangzhou Shenhao Embodied Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd. has been established with 70 million yuan in registered capital, wholly owned by Shenhao Technology. The new company covers robot manufacturing and AI algorithm development, extending Shenhao's inspection robot business toward more general embodied intelligence.
Treble Technologies, an Icelandic startup, has raised $18 million in A-2 funding to advance physics-based acoustic simulation. The company aims to extend its audio testing platform to robotics, where hearing could complement vision for more complete environmental perception.
Figure released Helix 2.5, a model that enables robots to perform household chores autonomously in 30 rented Bay Area homes without extra training. Testing shows a single Index-pretrained foundation model adapted to three behaviors, raising zero-shot task success from 8% to 56% while using half the task-specific data of Helix 02.
At the 5th BeiDou Scale Application International Summit, Qianxun Position CEO Chen Jinpei said the focus is shifting from quantity to quality in BeiDou applications. He proposed a spatiotemporal network as the third network for physical AI, alongside computing and communication networks, and highlighted the integration of spatiotemporal data with large models.
A spinal cord injury patient in Beijing used a domestic NEO brain-computer interface to control a robot in Shanghai 1000 km away, delivering a bottle of water. At a Shanghai academic conference, Tsinghua professor Hong Bo presented the demonstration and said the technology chain for the Avatar Project is fully connected.
The Greater Bay Area Science Forum held a technology transfer event at Great Bay University in Dongguan, focusing on embodied intelligence. Five projects were showcased, and enterprises, universities, and technology managers engaged in matchmaking to bridge information gaps in technology transfer.
The 9th China Robot Summit main forum opened in Hangzhou, focusing on the intelligence and quality transformation in the 'Robot+' era. The summit released key initiatives including a collaborative innovation platform for healthcare robots and an embodied intelligence evaluation framework, while discussing the mass production year of humanoid robots.
Crunchbase highlights five underreported funding rounds spanning nuclear energy, construction, robotics, and agriculture. The startups use AI and automation to solve industry-specific problems rather than selling pure software.
LimX Dynamics released EP.4 of its TRON 2 VLA demo series, showing the robot autonomously opening a drawer and retrieving a toy. The VLA pipeline runs four steps: identify the drawer, pull it open, locate the target object and retrieve it precisely. The company says the demo completes a full temporally constrained task sequence, so the robot must work out the correct order of actions. One wrong step means it cannot get the toy.
Doubao and Volcano Engine launched the AI-native Doubao Cockpit Assistant, with its first partner vehicle set for pre-sales. Separately, Ditu Robotics closed a $400 million Series C round.
On July 8, 2026, engineers and surgeons at the University of California San Diego published a paper in Nature reporting that two teleoperated humanoid robots had performed laparoscopic gallbladder removals on live pigs. The platform was an off-the-shelf Unitree G1, nicknamed Surgie, standing five feet tall and weighing 60 pounds. The dedicated surgical system it was measured against weighs about 1,800 pounds. The paper also supplies the numbers that matter: straight-line tracking error of about 1.3 millimeters, circular tracking error of about 10.4 millimeters, and 156 milliseconds of latency. Across two dry-lab tasks the humanoid already beat unassisted human hands, while remaining clearly behind the da Vinci Xi. This article unpacks that scorecard, and the four gates still standing between the robot and a clinical operating room. **Article structure** : - 1. The Surgical Record: Two Live Porcine Cholecystectomies - 2. Why a General-Purpose Humanoid: Footprint, Reach and Cost - 3. Measuring Precision: Straight Lines, Curves and 156 Milliseconds - 4. Four Gates Before Clinical Use: Sterility, Ports, Recalibration and Remote Operation - 5. Conclusion: What the First Time Proves, and What It Does Not
On Sept. 17, D-Robotics said it raised $400 million in a Series C round led by Mirae Asset of South Korea, its third round this year. The company does not build robots. It sells the chips that go inside them. The announcement carried three numbers: $400 million raised, 8 million chips shipped to date, and coverage of more than 50% of customers in embodied AI. The three numbers describe the same business, yet they point in different directions. The announcement does not say which machines took those 8 million chips, or how the 50% was calculated. Article structure: - 1. $400 Million: A Third Round This Year, No Valuation Disclosed - 2. 8 Million Chips: Where They Went - 3. "Over 50% Coverage": One Metric, Three Versions - 4. Spun Out of Horizon Robotics: Engineering Lineage and Product Boundaries - 5. Conclusion: Revenue Structure and Three Metrics to Watch
Figure says Helix 2.5 was built to answer a harder question: whether a humanoid can enter a home it has never seen and immediately get to work with its whole body, on its own. The company published a detailed technical write-up on the model.
Figure posted four hours of footage of its humanoid robot doing zero-shot work across 30 rental homes, showing the robot operating in homes it had not been trained in.
Figure released Helix 2.5. The company rented 30 homes in the Bay Area and said the robots arrived with no additional training and started doing useful work on site.
XPeng chairman He Xiaopeng says developing robots is about 20 times harder than building cars, adding that the company's robot capabilities may jump as mass production starts around the fourth quarter and early next year.
D-Robotics announced on Sept. 17 that it closed a $400 million Series C round led by Mirae Asset, with strategic investment from Meituan and participation from several government platforms and institutional investors. The company says it is entering a high-growth phase of commercialization.
Arm Holdings has launched Arm Total Design for Physical AI, an ecosystem of more than 80 companies spanning software, silicon, sensors, and robotics. The company also introduced a six-level Robotics Capability Framework, partly inspired by SAE's autonomous-driving levels, to create a shared vocabulary for robot capabilities.
NEURA Robotics has written an article on data sovereignty in cognitive robotics and invited readers to take a look.
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.
NEURA Robotics published an article on data sovereignty in cognitive robotics, following its post asking whether companies would share process data to train robots.
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.
Shenzhen Digua Robotics has raised $400 million in Series C funding, led by Mirae Asset with participation from Meituan and other investors.
D-Robotics has raised $400 million in Series C funding led by Mirae Asset, with Meituan and multiple government and private investors joining. The deal, alongside other robotics financings, highlights continued VC/PE interest in robotics and AI drug discovery.
The Huizhou Zhongkai Embodied Intelligence Industrial Park infrastructure platform has been approved with a total investment of 103.1 million yuan. The project will deploy 80 intelligent robot workstations, 4,800 IoT points, and comprehensive digital systems to support tenant robot companies.
Leapmotor announced at its 2026 Tech Day that it has developed a fully self-researched embodied AI robot, with all core components including motors, controllers, batteries, perception algorithms, and computing platforms developed in-house. The company aims to leverage its automotive technology stack for robotics and seeks commercially viable applications beyond lab prototypes.
Galaxy General chairman Yin Fangming used the SCO Digital Economy Forum to argue for an open-collaboration path in embodied AI, as OpenAI spends billions to build a commanding data lead. Meanwhile a team tied to Galaxy General's CTO produced the first systematic test of GPT-6 Astra's capability limits in robotic manipulation.
51WORLD's stock rose after announcing that its APER embodied intelligence business, launched on August 18, has accumulated over 200 million yuan in orders in less than a month. The company expects more than 90% of these orders to be delivered in mass production by year-end.
Ahead of Xingyuan Robotics' Q1 and T1 consumer robot launch, robotics shares and the Huatai-PineBridge robotics ETF climbed intraday on September 17, with Fengta Technology up 9.83%. The market is pricing the event in early, and observers say pricing and delivery timelines will matter more than specifications.
The 9th China Robot Summit opened on Sept 17 in Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City under the theme of a smart-connected ecosystem for the robot+ era. Its five exhibition zones and forum topics span humanoid and embodied AI, industrial, service, medical and supply chain, with humanoid robot testing and certification emerging as a key standardization issue.
Mech-Mind Robotics will exhibit at VISION 2026 in Germany, presenting its Eye-Brain-Hand approach that combines 3D perception, AI-powered decision-making and robotic manipulation. At its booth the company promises live demos of embodied AI plus 3D vision across multiple industries, with robots perceiving challenging real-world objects and environments, alongside demonstrations of intelligent robotic solutions.
HuaXin Securities has issued a 'Buy' rating for Fulin Precision, citing the company's high-compaction lithium iron phosphate volume ramp and the potential for robotics to become a second growth curve.
D-Robotics previewed its HackTheNorth 2026 demo: an RDK X5 board paired with an Agilex Robotics Piper arm, which the company calls the minimum viable platform for embodied AI research, with perception, decision-making and action all running on-device. The post invites people to try it at the Hardware Showcase on Sept 18 and says the next great RDK project could come from attendees.
At its September 16 ecosystem partner conference in Shanghai, QingTianZu CEO Li Yiyan argued that a robot's model no longer determines commercial success; instead, value lies in the work it performs and the business return it generates. The company showcased real RaaS deployments and introduced Worken, a unit to quantify robot productivity, aiming to shift the industry from hardware sales to service scheduling.
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.
D-Robotics, a Chinese robotics company, has completed a $400 million Series C funding round led by Mirae Asset, with participation from Meituan and several government and private investment firms.
D-Robotics has raised $400 million in Series C funding, led by Mirae Asset with participation from Meituan and other investors. The company's customer coverage in embodied intelligence has exceeded 50%.
D-Robotics said on September 17 that it raised a $400 million Series C round with Meituan and Hillhouse participating. The company will use the funds to expand its Sunrise chip lineup and build a full-stack embodied AI software platform.
D-Robotics announced on Sept. 17 that it has completed a $400 million Series C round. The funding will support its Sunrise chip lineup and an integrated software platform for embodied AI, targeting development from established robot categories to general-purpose humanoids.
Drobot, a robotics company incubated by Horizon Robotics, has closed a $400 million Series C round led by Mirae Asset, with participation from Meituan and other top-tier investors.
Digu Robotics announced on September 17 that it has raised $400 million in Series C funding, led by Future Asset with participation from Meituan and several government and private investment firms.
On September 17, robot-concept stocks strengthened, with the CSI Robot Index up 0.95% and related robot ETFs rising nearly 1%. The move followed QingTianZu's launch of seven robot RaaS products.
Physical AI introduces new robot safety risks beyond component failure, because attackers can manipulate perception, decisions, and actions. Research across model backdoors, system exploits, and runtime manipulation shows cybersecurity must join functional safety throughout the robot lifecycle.
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.
Zijin Mining's wholly owned unit Zijin Xiamen Equity plans to contribute 1 billion yuan as a limited partner to the Xiamen Times Shenyuan Venture Capital Fund, taking a 20.4081% subscribed share. The 4.9 billion yuan fund targets artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence, technology applications and frontier technologies.
In September, the embodied AI sector saw a wave of model launches, with three robot body makers releasing five models in eight days. Songyan Dynamics launched its Scalabot sub-brand and two HERON architecture models, as hardware firms seek to add stronger AI "brains."
Henggong Precision plans to issue convertible corporate bonds to unspecified investors, raising no more than 810 million yuan, with proceeds aimed mainly at embodied AI robot manufacturing and R&D.
The ninth China Robot Summit will take place from September 16 to 18, 2026 at the Future Sci-Tech City Academic Exchange Center in Hangzhou, themed "Smart-Connected New Ecosystem, Empowering All Scenarios." Organizers have released the full agenda, exhibitor list, transport and hotel guidance, and free registration details.
Hangzhou Tuorui Intelligent Equipment has closed a first-round financing of tens of millions of RMB, backed by industrial investors including Power Future Technology and Tongli Technology. The company will use the funds to build an embodied intelligence pilot base, scale production lines, and expand its talent pool as it advances full-stack ODM and real-machine data services.
The 2026 Embodied AI Robot Challenge will debut at the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo from September 23-27 in Hangzhou. The event features 14 competitive events, interactive experiences, and corporate showcases, allowing visitors to race and compete alongside robots.
China Pacific Property Insurance's Beijing Branch and Beijing Daqi Yuequan Bionic Technology signed and submitted China's first insurance policy for embodied-AI key components, covering dexterous hands. The product insures equipment loss from accidents, natural disasters, defects and operator error, plus third-party injury and property damage.
DEEP Robotics has released footage of its robot barista, showing a humanoid handling a real-world service task. The company says it is exploring how humanoid robots can bring embodied AI into more practical scenarios, from everyday chores to emerging applications.
Shangpin Home Collection and Tangyuan Technology have released WorldSimReady-Home, an open-source simulation dataset covering 100,000 square meters of high-fidelity home scenes and 10,000 interactive assets. It aims to bridge the Sim2Real gap by letting humanoid, quadruped, and wheeled robots train on standardized home tasks before deployment.
RealMan Intelligent Technology has built a data training ground in Changzhou with 150 robots to address key pain points in embodied AI data collection. The facility generates 2GB of raw data per robot per minute, highlighting challenges in storage, time synchronization, and cost reduction.
ZhiXing Robot has been invited to Hong Kong's first International Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival, where its wheeled humanoid robot Hanyue will perform the traditional craft of lacquer fan making using precision force control, 3D vision and adaptive grasping. The event runs September 17-27 at Victoria Park, placing frontier robotics alongside Qinhuai lanterns and local Hong Kong lantern craftsmanship.
Israel's national AI plan designates physical AI as a strategic priority and proposes controlled testbeds, but it does not explicitly include the electromagnetic environment. Experts argue that radio propagation, jamming, spectrum congestion and digital twins must be part of validating autonomous systems, alongside roads, weather and walls.
Mekamind founder Shao Tianlan's public criticism has exposed how related-party deals and publicity-driven announcements inflate order figures in China's embodied-AI sector. Interviews and tender data show most humanoid robot orders come from education, government and pilot projects, while stretched payment cycles turn headline contracts into cash-flow illusions as IPO scrutiny shifts toward sustainable revenue.
Over 70 embodied AI training grounds have been built in China, with more than 40 planned. But most rely on selling data, which is insufficient to cover costs, forcing a shift to training-as-a-service and sustainable business models.
Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee announced the territory's first five-year plan for 2026-2030, designating artificial intelligence as a key future industry. The plan includes measures to build AI infrastructure, foster cross-sector integration, and support SMEs and public AI literacy.
Hong Kong's three major indices opened higher, with robot concept stocks showing collective strength led by Ledong Robot's 12.8% gain, while the leading lithium battery stock continued to decline.
Agility CEO Peggy Johnson appeared on Bloomberg TV with Ed Ludlow to discuss the company's humanoid robots, their move into more complex industrial work, and how AI is accelerating the development of new skills.
Boston Dynamics has released new updates to Spot and Orbit that break down operational silos and enable agentic workflows. The features allow bi-directional communication between robots and other factory systems, and let Spot take action in response to what it receives. The company presented the capabilities in an on-demand webinar.
CATL's wholly-owned subsidiary Ningbo Wending will contribute 1.12 billion yuan to a venture capital fund with total capital of 5.768 billion yuan, focusing on new energy, AI, and embodied intelligence.
Lumos Robotics has introduced Lumos NexCore, a platform that connects data, models, skills and robots in one continuous workflow. The company says users can train, test, improve and deploy a robot skill through the same system.
LimX Dynamics released a podcast episode featuring Rogier Bikker, co-founder of The Robot Bureau. He shared views on real-world robotics and the European market, why LimX stood out to him, and how the modular design behind TRON can support expansion. The episode notes that as automation takes hold in logistics and manufacturing, the next wave of value for humanoid robots lies in complex, low-volume, high-mix tasks.
HONOR says its Robot Phone offers an open Agent Skills interface that lets third-party developers build new experiences on the device's gimbal, perception and embodied-interaction capabilities.
HONOR says its Robot Phone, running on MagicOS, introduces a YOYO Robot Mode that combines multimodal perception, contextual understanding, gesture recognition and physical movement.
Fuzozo, a 399-yuan companion robot, has sold nearly 300,000 units in China, and Haivivi's BubblePal claimed similar volumes at its US launch, while UBTech's U1 ultra-bionic companion orders dwarf its full-size humanoid sales. The article argues that embodied AI's first validated market is emotional companionship in the home, not the factory.
Shendu Jizhi's PrimeLite is a lightweight, 3D-printed robot designed for students to assemble and program. The company bundles curriculum, teacher training, and competition platforms to overcome cost and safety barriers in schools.
Lei Jun visited Unitree's Shanghai headquarters on September 14, where he watched humanoid robot demonstrations and lightly kicked one robot, which stepped back and regained balance. The visit followed Shunwei Capital's early investment in Unitree and came after sharp stock volatility, while Lei also stopped by Bilibili's Shanghai headquarters the same day.
D-Robotics and Agilex Robotics are heading to Toronto Metropolitan University for a Sept 18 seminar hosted by the TMU Robotics Council, covering robotic manipulation, embodied AI and real-time system integration. A live demo will run on the D-Robotics RDK S100 development platform alongside an Agilex robotic arm, showing how onboard computing and robotic hardware work together.
Zinova, a 2025 spinout from RIC Robotics, proposes a non-dexterous gripper and force-feedback sensor instead of dexterous hands, enabling robots to use human tools across construction tasks. Its first public demo used LimX Dynamics' TRON 2 to perform a scaled tilt-up concrete workflow, though real-world site validation remains ahead.
Digital Huaxia cofounder Chen Junmin says humanoid robots have progressed from legs in 2024 to hands in 2025, and 2026 will be about brains—moving from demos into real scenarios. He argues model capabilities may be overestimated while engineering and real-world data are underestimated, and that no player has fully solved commercialization by ROI standards.
Tokyo-based MW is embedding robotic arms into ceiling tracks instead of building bipedal humanoids, targeting 10,000 robot-equipped homes a year by 2035. The company controls the full chain from land acquisition to AI models, but current prices of $1.3–2.7 million keep the product in the high-end market.
Hesai Technology and JD Group have announced a strategic partnership to explore physical AI applications, leveraging high-precision 3D perception to support unmanned logistics and robotics.
Panasonic's Nicobo, a 1.5 kg knitted home robot, has sold more than 10,000 units since 2023 despite—or because of—its deliberately limited abilities. Users treat it like a baby or family member, and Panasonic plans to add a large language model to its cloud service to spark imagination, not advanced conversation.
University of Southern Denmark researchers have proposed a concept robot that substitutes vision with a fluid-filled tactile sensor inspired by the star-nosed mole. The prototype remains conceptual, but it highlights a shift toward multimodal robot perception that combines touch with sight.
Galbot announced a Physical AI community meetup in Pittsburgh on Sept. 29, 2026, from 5:00 to 9:00 PM EDT at The Pittsburgh Foundation (The Point), held during the 2026 conference. The company's founding team will join builders from academia and industry for an evening of ideas, networking, drinks and bites.
On September 14, D-Robotics and GigaAI announced a strategic partnership to integrate GigaAI's world model and embodied foundation model with D-Robotics' edge AI computing platform. The first integrated solution combines GigaBrain-0.7 and Sunrise S600 to deliver affordable, deployable edge embodied intelligence.
PaXini has led or participated in 51 international, national, and industry standards projects for embodied intelligence, covering perception, data, and complete robots. The company is translating engineering experience into standards to strengthen China's voice in global embodied AI rule-making.
At the 2026 World Robot Conference, humanoid robots shifted from dancing and performance toward practical tasks such as chores and food service. Experts say the biggest remaining hurdle is embodied AI generalization, which separates stage demos from reliable work in real homes.
China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security has added 11 new professions and 23 new work types, including the embodied AI robot application technician. This role involves training robots in real-world scenarios with over 500 data sets per action, reflecting the growing demand for skilled workers in embodied AI.
On Sept. 14, 2026, China's A-share indices fell, but the CSI Robot Index rose 0.35% and Robot ETF Huaxia traded against the trend as robot skin moved out of the lab, drawing attention to robotics commercialization.
Wang Xingxing has narrowed his forecast for embodied AI's ChatGPT moment from 'two to three years' to 'possibly even next year' — his third revision in six months. The shift hinges on his earlier '80/80 standard', 80% task completion in 80% unfamiliar scenes, now a common yardstick for whether the sector has crossed the commercialization threshold.
A robot kindergarten co-founded by Tashi Tech and Turing laureate Richard Sutton's Openmind has opened in Beijing's Shijingshan district. Robots from various companies learn through trial and error, tactile sensing, and autonomous charging, aiming for continuous autonomous learning.
Chinese A-share robot concept stocks rose in volatile trading, led by Wanxun Automation's 20% limit-up. Kesen Technology had earlier sealed its limit-up, while Qijing Machinery, Zhejiang Rongtai, Beizi Technology, and Jiangsu Beiren gained over 5%.
Tianjin Robot Town is taking a harder path than conventional robotics parks, building a Xinchuang embodied-intelligence lab with domestic chip and OS makers and planning to release a locally-stacked robot in October. The city targets over 20 billion yuan in core robotics output by 2028, betting on chip adaptation, pilot testing and scenario validation.
LimX Dynamics took part in the Ultralytics event in Shenzhen during YOLO Vision 2026, where its humanoid robots LimX Oli and Luna demonstrated embodied AI by combining vision, intelligence and whole-body control in the real world. The company said it valued connecting with the open vision community and exchanging views on what comes next for robotics and Physical AI, framing the work as Physical AI built for the real world.
XPeng's humanoid robot walked off its own automated line on September 8, 2026. Who is building China's robots, and can the EV supply chain deliver them?
After the 2025 startup boom, embodied AI funding in 2026 is concentrating on top projects with clear commercialization paths, with over 2 billion yuan flowing into the sector in two months and home robotics attracting major attention.
Deep-sea embodied AI robot company Gongzhi Ocean has closed an angel round of nearly 100 million yuan, backed by investors including Zhongxin Zhidi, Lihe Finance, and Yinfeng Capital. The deal follows recent large financings for other deep-sea robotics firms such as Shihang Intelligent and Shenhai Zhiren.
Robbyant hosted talks with young scientists and CEOs from leading embodied AI companies, covering data, models and real-world deployment. The company also launched the inaugural Robbyant Embodied AI Challenge and invited the community to take part.
At the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund, Robbyant's LingBot-VLA powered its R2 robot plus machines from Leju, Astribot and Ti5 across pharmacy, logistics and industrial workflows, with the post asking fans which use case stood out.
On September 10, Liu Liehong, Director of China's National Data Administration, chaired a symposium on embodied intelligence. Representatives from leading research institutes and companies discussed how data can empower the development of embodied AI, highlighting the growing demand for high-quality, diverse, and large-scale data.
Xieyue Intelligence has raised hundreds of millions of yuan in an Angel+ round backed by Linear Capital, Junshan Capital, Hongyi Capital and Hidden Hill Capital, according to The Paper. The company will use the funds for embodied foundation models, compute and data infrastructure, team expansion, and home robot development.
Global humanoid production passed 20,000 units in 2025, ten times 2024. Factory deployments stay case-by-case. A four-layer data check, from Longcheer's 64,828 tasks to Unitree's IPO filing.
Li Xiaofei, a Tsinghua PhD and founder/CEO of Shenpu Intelligent, has developed robots now entering hotel service. He previously co-founded an autonomous driving company and led commercialization of cleaning and logistics robots.
IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday highlights a humanoid robot traversing monkey bars, Unitree's open-source embodied model, and other robotics demos. The roundup also covers disaster robotics, aerial manipulation, industrial certification, and applications from dishwashing to burrito delivery.
RoboSense plans to sell its embodied robot complete-machine business and assets to Shenzhen Xiyuan Robotics for RMB 59.878 million in cash. The buyer is 35% controlled by RoboSense chairman and chief scientist Dr. Qiu Chunxin, making the deal a related-party transaction.
From September 9 to 12, the 2026 Inclusion·Bund Summit took place in Shanghai, where Qiyuan Robots and Feikuo Technology demonstrated a health detection application for the Qiyuan Q1. The collaboration uses voice commands and a handshake to collect vital signs, opening new service scenarios for personal robots.
Aishida (002403.SZ) announced that its embodied AI robot business is newly developed and still in its early stages, with sales revenue of only 137,200 yuan so far, and it expects no significant impact on this year's financials.
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.
At the 2026 China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing, MeeFeng Technology demonstrated embodied AI data collection devices that allow people with disabilities to work as robot trainers. The company also announced a crowdsourcing platform, launching September 23, to let disabled individuals earn income by collecting real-world data from home.
West Lake Robotics Technology (Hangzhou) has raised several hundred million yuan in a Series A1 round from Haiyuan Capital, Cuiwei Fund, Ginkgo Valley Capital, Xihu Kechuang Investment, and Zhongshan Venture Capital. Founded in 2021, the embodied AI company aims to advance general robot intelligence by integrating reinforcement learning with large models.
At the Bund Conference, a robot dog named Tutu demonstrated autonomous ordering and payment, but the real challenge for embodied AI payment is liability, not perception. Risk-control models can identify over 230 scenarios, yet regulation and responsibility rules lag behind agent-driven transactions.
Westlake Robotics, a Hangzhou-based general brain company, has completed an A1 financing round worth hundreds of millions of yuan. The funds will be used to develop its embodied AI foundation model WR1 and expand commercialization.
At CIFTIS, Shendu Jizhi unveiled Prime Lite, a 3D-printed modular educational robot that lets students assemble, wire, and debug a full system. The bet is not on today's education market but on building a pipeline of engineers who can repair, debug, and deploy embodied-AI robots a decade from now.
At the Beijing Seed Industry Conference on Sept. 7, the Chinese Academy of Sciences' GEAIR 2.0 demonstrated robotic pollination, completing a flower in under 10 seconds. The article argues its real breakthrough is not the robot arm but a gene-edited tomato designed to cooperate with machines, an approach called crop-robot co-design.
On September 10, Riyadh hosted the Middle East's first humanoid robot combat match, featuring EngineAI T800 robots. Organizer Hero Esports plans an eight-stop global league, arguing that fighting generates valuable adversarial data for physical AI and offers a more viable commercialization path than factory or service work.
JD Logistics has deployed nine categories and 11 robot models across more than 20 provinces, with one dexterous arm achieving positive single-machine economics. The Leaderobot article argues that humanoid robots are a vanity project, while JD's form-follows-function strategy makes unit economics work across warehousing, sorting, transport, and delivery.
Across Europe and Asia, deployed elder-care robots are mainly selling companionship and monitoring, not physical care, because assistance with daily tasks remains technically difficult. Despite large labor shortages and rising subsidies, adoption is constrained by payment models and older adults' desire to preserve autonomy.
A Drexel University study found that expressive, humanlike robots can influence people more, but their mistakes trigger a steeper trust collapse. The effect appears tied to social judgment, not mechanical failure, and oxytocin may amplify attention rather than trust.
West Lake Robotics has completed its A1 funding round with investors including Haiyuan Capital and Cuiwei Fund. The funds will support the development of its general embodied AI model WR1 and commercialization of embodied intelligence.
Shao Tianlan, founder and CEO of newly listed Mech-Mind Robotics, publicly criticized the embodied AI industry on WeChat Moments, questioning the revenue authenticity of some companies.
Swarmer Inc. has agreed to acquire Ukrainian uncrewed ground vehicle maker Ratel Robotics in a cash-and-stock deal worth up to $224 million if earnout milestones are met. The deal would add more than 300 Ratel employees to Swarmer and combine battle-tested UGVs with Swarmer's swarm-control autonomy software.
Sanctuary AI has published highlights from episodes 60 through 64 of its Robots Doing Stuff series. The five episodes cover different sides of automating complex physical work, including welding, failure recovery, bimanual threading, power tool use and delicate object handling. The company says the episodes showcase a range of Physical AI and dexterous manipulation capabilities under development at Sanctuary AI.
Boston Dynamics published a corrected notice pointing robot owners to its software update and release notes, asking users to refresh their robots' software and check the notes.
Skild AI said it reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue within 10 months of beginning deployments. The company's robots are now working on factory lines, on construction sites, in kitchens and in data centers, taking on tasks including cleaning, welding, building and cooking.
Boston Dynamics released Spot and Orbit 5.2, a software update that adds a connective layer aimed at breaking down data silos at industrial sites. The company says the release enables agentic workflows that reason across plant systems, so Spot robots can be deployed where they are actually needed.
RoboSense announced plans to sell its embodied robot complete-machine business and assets for RMB 59.878 million. The buyer is 35% controlled by Chairman and Chief Scientist Dr. Qiu Chunxin, making the deal a connected transaction aimed at optimizing robot business layout and strengthening core operations.
RoboSense is selling its embodied robot business and assets for RMB 59.878 million to refocus on core robotics components.
A humanoid robot has learned to sprint and perform spin kicks using AI trained on human motion data. This advancement could lead to more versatile robots capable of handling a broader range of tasks in real-world settings.
PaXiniTech says it is building the data and technology foundation needed to scale Physical AGI, with the goal of bringing embodied intelligence closer to real-world deployment. The company positions large-scale data and technology infrastructure as the prerequisite for moving embodied AI out of the lab and into practical applications at scale.
Noetix Robotics announced on September 8 the launch of Scalabot, a new sub-brand. The company is best known for building robot bodies, while Scalabot will focus on building the brains that power them. Noetix also released a video giving a quick look at what Scalabot is working on and where it is headed.
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.
Unitree has fully open-sourced its UnifoLM-WLA-1.0 embodied foundation model, claiming new SOTA results across multiple benchmarks among open-source models worldwide. A single model coordinates desktop and whole-body mobile manipulation, and supports cross-task and cross-end-effector generalization.
China's humanoid robot industry is scaling fast, with five companies holding 86% of global shipments in early 2026, driven by low costs, heavy funding and a broad testing market. The real test is turning impressive demos into reliable, repeat-order commercial workers—a 'ChatGPT moment' that still awaits better data, software and safety.
Unitree Robotics has open-sourced UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, an embodied foundation model that unifies tabletop and whole-body mobile manipulation and supports cross-task and cross-end-effector generalization.
Ananda (603350.SH) said on an investor interaction platform on Sept. 10 that it currently has no plans to develop robot joint modules, without giving further details.
Tactile sensing has become a focal point in robotics as funding tops RMB 7 billion in 2026 and tactile sensor penetration in commercial humanoid dexterous hands rises above 60%. Chinese startups such as Qianjue Robotics are advancing multimodal tactile sensors, data collection systems, and VTLA embodied models to enable precision assembly and flexible grasping.
Thundersoft (300496.SZ) said on an investor interaction platform that it currently has no plans to build humanoid robot bodies. The company instead emphasized its focus on AIOS and intelligent agents to help robots become AI carriers in the physical world.
The CyberHero humanoid robot sports league launched in Riyadh, with plans for an eight-city global tour. However, an analysis argues that the entertainment-focused competition is unlikely to drive core breakthroughs in humanoid robotics technology.
InHand Networks (688080.SH) is conducting forward-looking research on embodied AI robots, focusing on 3D vision, dexterous actuators, motion control, and autonomous learning for industrial flexible manufacturing.
PHYMI, an embodied AI startup founded by former DeepRoute.ai executive Liu Nianqiu, has raised nearly US$100 million in seed funding led by IDG Capital. The company is developing 'Physical Agents' that can understand goals, manipulate objects, and complete tasks in open, dynamic environments.
At the 2026 Bund Conference, Ant Lingbo Technology demonstrated robots performing practical tasks like pharmacy picking and logistics sorting without flashy moves. The company's LingBot-VLA 2.0 model, an embodied general brain, adapts to 17 robot brands and 20 configurations, enabling real-world deployment from labs to 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.
Thunder Software Technology announced that its mobile robot product matrix, including latent, forklift, composite, and embodied robots, has been deployed in production and warehouse logistics automation projects for several Fortune 500 companies.
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.
In an April 2026 security demonstration, a commercial quadruped robot was hijacked remotely and turned on a human dummy, prompting 360 founder Zhou Hongyi to warn that embodied AI converts code flaws into physical destruction. Research by DARKNAVY and others found a well-known humanoid robot could be fully compromised in under eight hours, and the Unitree G1's "UniBLEed" flaw chain may even be wormable, while standards and security investment race to catch up.
At Punahou School in Hawaii, sixth graders programmed wheeled robots to perform breakdance moves, illustrating a shift in robotics education from hardware assembly to programming and algorithms. The exercise involved coordinate transforms, timing, feedback, and motion planning, mirroring industry demand for talent able to program complex robotic actions and correct errors in real time.
At RoboBusiness 2026, AGIBOT's Yinghao Song will present strategies for scaling humanoid robots from pilot projects to commercial deployment. He will cover investment logic, supply chain, ROI frameworks, and software-hardware integration through open SDKs.
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.
At an internal all-hands meeting on September 8, NIO Chairman and CEO William Li stated that the company will engage in embodied intelligence mainly through strategic investments for the foreseeable future, without making it a core business.
Mech-Mind Robotics says robots need more than automation as they take on complex tasks. The company integrates Eyes, Brain, and Hands with Physical AI, enabling robots to perceive, understand, and act in real-world environments. With over 29,000 deployments, 100+ Fortune 500 customers across nearly 50 countries and regions, its technology supports over 100,000 goods types and 50+ applications.
Beijing's municipal government has released a development plan for high-precision industries during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, emphasizing full-stack autonomy and comprehensive AI applications to lead global competition.
AGIBOT's X2 robot performs circus-style skills in a new demo: jumping through a flaming hoop, pulling off a diabolo trick, jump-roping in sync, and lifting and carrying objects in coordination. AGIBOT says the routine is a serious test of real-time perception, reaction and movement, with its AGILE 2.0 system turning visual input into real-time coordinated motion.
EX Robots, a Chinese startup, is deploying hyper-realistic humanoid robots in cultural tourism and education rather than factories. The company leverages its expertise in silicone skin and facial expression technology to create immersive experiences, targeting emotional connection over industrial utility.
At AI Show 2026, Zhejiang demonstrated its strategy for deploying humanoid robots in real manufacturing settings. By opening up factory scenarios and building data infrastructure, the province is turning embodied intelligence into practical production tools.
China's Ministry of Human Resources has officially designated 'Embodied Intelligence Robot Application Technician' as a new occupation, highlighting the human role in robot deployment. This move aligns with broader policy signals redefining human jobs alongside automation.
JD.com announced a five-year plan to deploy 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 drones, retraining 700,000 couriers as robot maintenance engineers to address workforce displacement.
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.
Zhiyuan Robotics unveiled AGILE2.0, an integrated visual-motor end-to-end model enabling robots to see, plan, and act in real time. Demonstrations include dynamic tasks like fire hoop jumping and ball walking, showcasing breakthrough whole-body coordination.
Antioch, a 16-month-old startup, has raised $32 million in Series A funding led by Greylock to advance cloud-based simulation for robotic testing. Its platform, already adopted by Amazon's Ring, reportedly matches real-world physical tests closely, promising to accelerate development cycles.
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.
Shenzhen's new embodied AI hub in Bao'an aims to close the gap between robot development and real-world deployment. The facility offers data services, ecosystem support, and real-world testing grounds to accelerate commercialization.
At the 2026 World Robot Conference, embodied intelligence shifts from universal robots to specialized solutions for specific scenarios. Companies showcase vertical applications in garment sewing, biomedical experiments, airport luggage handling, and emotional companionship, alongside system-level multi-robot collaboration.
On September 8, 2026, AI firms pivoted from model scale to engineering reliability and real-world adoption, with DeepSeek hiring 150 engineers (none in research), ByteDance advancing spatial video models, and Mistral raising €3B.
China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced 11 new professions and 23 new job types, including embodied AI robot application technicians and low-altitude logistics personnel, to align with emerging industry trends.
Four robot-run convenience stores in Hefei, China, are testing humanoid robots in real retail settings, achieving a 99% order fulfillment rate. The project, led by Guoxian Holdings and Zero Robotics, aims to scale to 500 stores by 2026.
Youdi Robotics, a Chinese developer of autonomous driving and embodied intelligence systems, made a strong debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on September 9, with shares opening 142.21% higher at HKD 35.00 per share.
JL MAG (300748.SZ) said that embodied robots represent a major future demand growth point for high-performance NdFeB magnets and motor rotors.
Chinese makers built over 97% of the world's humanoid robots in H1 2026 but exported only 12.4%. What IFA 2026 shows about Europe's barriers.
Zhiwei Intelligent (001339.SZ) announced its 'Zhiqing' product line for robotic domain controllers, covering NVIDIA Jetson and Intel platforms, and has delivered solutions to leading domestic humanoid robot clients.
At WRC 2026, LimX Dynamics' Richard Robinson addressed the fear that robots will take something from people, suggesting instead that robots may offer more time for connection, creation, collaboration, and care. The first episode of the company's series explores the next steps for robotics after demos. The full conversation is available.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory demonstrated a magnetic-field communication system through 3.6 feet of Arctic ice using an ROV, achieving 1.2 KB/s data transfer. The test, conducted under extreme conditions, marks a step toward a large-scale underwater sensor network for climate and military monitoring.
At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Paris-based design duo Batten & Kamp presented 'Beauty Seeker', a six-legged AI robot transformed into a mobile vase carrying an orchid. By stripping its advanced features, they provoke reflection on cohabitation, threat, and the value of attention in a tech-saturated world.
Chinese scientists unveiled Jier 2.0, the world's first humanoid embodied intelligent breeding robot, at the 33rd China Beijing Seed Industry Conference. It autonomously pollinates tomatoes in under 10 seconds, integrating gene editing, AI vision, and dual-arm operation.
iKairos, created by Singapore startup Lingverse, is a modular AI device that switches between a pendant and a desktop robot head. It aims to passively record and understand a user's life to offer proactive memory assistance and personalized recommendations.
Researchers from Tohoku University and VISTEC have developed a robot that learns to walk by observing stick insects, mastering diverse terrains in under an hour. The approach uses adversarial inverse reinforcement learning to capture general principles rather than fixed gaits.
Researchers at North Carolina State University developed a soft ring robot that jumps continuously under constant infrared light, using geometric design and photoresponsive materials instead of electronics. This physical intelligence approach enables self-resetting and diverse locomotion modes, offering a new path for miniature soft robots.
Global military research is exploring humanoid robots for combat, but they remain in engineering validation phase. Despite China's supply chain advantages, challenges in reliability, endurance, and cost keep humanoids from deployment, with dual-use conversion driving progress.
SuperMap Software stated that its spatial intelligence base does not directly support 3D data acquisition for embodied robots, clarifying its role in the robotics ecosystem.
SuperMap Software announced that its spatial agent, SuperMap AgentX, provides core spatial intelligence capabilities for robotics and unmanned equipment, enabling spatial perception, analysis, task planning, and multi-machine collaboration.
The narrative that robotaxis and humanoid robots will soon dominate households faces three challenges. Both industries are evolving from hardware ownership to service-based models, where the real value lies in the embodied AI infrastructure.
A Chinese medical team has performed the world's first AI-ultrasound-robot-guided intervention for congenital heart disease, marking a new phase where AI assists in core surgical decisions. This signals a shift in medical robotics from mechanical precision to intelligent, real-time navigation, with potential to improve accuracy and the dissemination of expert care.
Astribot's SmoothRL framework enables robots to learn and improve during real-world execution. Tests show success rates soaring from 39% to 94% in dynamic tasks, marking a shift toward continuous post-deployment improvement.
XPeng Motors announced the official launch of its robot production line, where the world's first advanced general-purpose humanoid robot completed automated assembly and walked off the line autonomously.
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.
AXIS is a browser-based data engine for robot manipulation, providing 207 tasks and over 50,000 trajectories collected via teleoperation. Pretraining with AXIS improves π0.5 on LIBERO-Plus from 83.9 to 88.8 overall accuracy.
Unitree announced that its UnifoLM-X2-1.0 model enables the world's first real-time world-model-driven fully autonomous humanoid robot combat. The model overcomes bottlenecks in instant planning, decision-making, and dynamic interactive execution, achieving high dynamics, strong interaction, real-time prediction and planning of the future, and fully autonomous combat. Unitree said this validates the fundamental feasibility of large-scale deployment of world-model-driven humanoid robots.
LimX Dynamics will showcase its Oli robot and join a panel discussion at YOLO Vision 2026 in Shenzhen on September 13. The session, 'Embodied Vision AI: Robotics in the Real World,' runs from 14:10 to 14:30 at Shenzhen Bay Culture Square. Ticket discount code LIMX50 offers 50% off.
China's aging population has created a huge shortage of caregivers, prompting the use of embodied intelligent robots. A training center in Qingdao is using 217 robots to master the delicate 'sense of proportion' required for elderly care.
A wave of funding has hit deep-sea robotics startups founded by Harbin Engineering University alumni. The sector is buoyed by government policy and a market estimated at 1.5 trillion yuan, with investors betting on industrial-scale products.
At IFA 2026, key players unveiled robot mowers with robotic arms that can remove obstacles and perform tasks beyond mowing. The industry is shifting from standalone devices to integrated smart-yard ecosystems.
Dobot Robotics appeared on Day 2 of the event, presenting Pandabo and LUMO. Pandabo opened the runway with lifelike movement and AI interaction, while LUMO closed the show with a dynamic humanoid finale. The performance was picked up by BBC's on-site coverage.
Wang Xingxing, founder of Unitree Robotics, proposed two 80% thresholds as the quantitative tipping point for embodied AI. He expects this level of generalization to be achieved within 3-10 years, with the key challenge being alignment between AI models and the physical world.
Despite a 508% surge in humanoid robot shipments in 2025, home penetration remains minimal. Companies are shifting from closed development to open-source platforms to tackle the 'tunnel period' of high costs and data gaps.
Mech-Mind Robotics showcases its embodied AI 'Eye-Brain-Hand' system for laser marking. It distinguishes similar cylindrical parts, uses a second vision check to locate marking positions, and plans collision-free robot trajectories. Reported visual positioning accuracy is ±0.5 mm, with adaptability to multiple production scenarios.
Robot concept stocks surged on Tuesday, with Siling Intelligent Drive touching the 20% daily limit and several other firms hitting limit-up earlier, reflecting strong market enthusiasm for automation.
Aishida's stock jumped over 20% in two consecutive sessions, prompting the company to issue an unusual trading activity notice, clarifying that the rally is driven by market hype over its embodied AI robot venture, which has yet to contribute real profits.
Galbot has introduced RoboGesture, a system enabling humanoid robots to listen, respond, and gesture with meaning. The company says the listen-respond-gesture loop closes in about 2 seconds, advancing natural human-humanoid interaction. The system is described as semantically aligned, real-time, and safety-aware. It was presented at Poster Session 2 in ExHall on September 10, from 16:30 to 18:30 CEST.
Unitree lost RMB 230 billion in 13 days, yet still trades 251.7% above issue. Why the anchor held, and six flags to check.
Researchers at the University of Queensland have developed 'Paraborgs' — cyborg cockroaches equipped with cameras or spring-loaded injectors that can be steered remotely. In tests, the insects navigated a course and successfully injected a target 72% of the time, suggesting potential for future disaster response.
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.
Li'ang Robotics, a Chinese startup specializing in navigation control and embodied AI, has completed a strategic funding round worth tens of millions of yuan, with investment from Laifude.
LimX Dynamics announced zero-shot deployment of LightOrigins' open-source vision-language navigation model LightNav-0 on its Oli and TRON 2 platforms. The deployment enables real-world person following and instruction-based object search, supporting open models and platforms for developers.
At the 2026 Zhejiang Quality Month kickoff, the Yangtze River Delta G60 cities released a joint initiative to build collaborative quality standards for the embodied intelligence industry. The move aims to foster a coordinated ecosystem across the upstream-downstream chain and drive high-quality development.
Noetix Robotics shared a tech-reveal video asking how its robots' synchronized formation passed a real-world test, and said it would break the process down.
Apptronik congratulates CEO and co-founder Jeff Cardenas on being named to Austin Business Journal's 2026 Power Players list. The company highlights Austin as the ideal hub for humanoid robotics and credits Cardenas with positioning the city at the center of the physical AI revolution.
Sanctuary AI shared a video recorded at the Humanoid Robot Forum during Automate 2026. Co-Founder and Chief Engineering & Operations Officer Olivia Norton explains why touch and force feedback are critical for dexterous manipulation, especially when objects are occluded or outside a robot's field of view.
Led by China with eight countries, ISO 18646-5 is the first global benchmark for legged robots. Why legs, why now, and what this ruler cannot measure.
Shenzhen has issued a 2026–2028 work plan to accelerate high-quality development of its intelligent robot industry, with specific measures to support financing and listing for local companies.
Li'ang Robot, a Shenzhen-based embodied intelligence startup, has completed a strategic financing round of tens of millions of yuan from investor Laifude Technology. The funds will support R&D in navigation controllers, lightweight AMRs, and embodied composite robots.
Figure said it is targeting the initial deployment of 100,000 GPUs in Barstow, Texas, during the second half of 2027.
Figure announced a partnership with Nscale to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin Platform. The company is committing $3.5 billion initially, with plans to scale beyond $6 billion. Figure said bringing a robot into every home demands compute at an unprecedented scale.
At its semi-annual briefing, Moore Threads confirmed supply chain readiness and announced the successful end-to-end training of a 236B MoE model and embodied AI models like RoboBrain2.5 and EvoPhys-World on its MTT S5000 cluster.
AGIBOT has open-sourced AGIBOT WORLD 2026 Theme 3: Reinforcement Learning, a real-world dataset for embodied AI. It includes 14 real-world tasks and 11,430 trajectories, capturing successes, failures, and human corrections, with fine-grained annotations for progress, mistakes and interference.
PaXiniTech, after showing its lineup in Beijing, is bringing its full portfolio to Pittsburgh, covering tactile sensing and real-world embodied AI applications. It will also host the PaXini Global Embodied Ecosystem Night 2026 · Pittsburgh during the conference, expecting over 200 industry, academic and investment leaders and in-person partner gatherings.
Noetix Robotics marks a major milestone for its Robot Bumi, expressing excitement and telling the robot to keep going, saying this is only the beginning.
Agility Robotics' CTO Pras Velagapudi discusses 'islands of automation' in factories, the manual gaps between automated steps, and why humanoid robots should be deployed there first. The company shared the comments with The DeepView.
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.
Dreame Technology will present over 100 products across 16 categories at IFA 2026, including the first public showcase of its ECHO-series home service robot and three physical AI technology pillars.
In a new post, Agility Robotics highlights Digit's generalized manipulation, noting that rearranging objects of various sizes, weights, and grips is the same skill Digit uses on warehouse floors to handle mixed loads and changing layouts.
Agility Robotics describes how Digit uses generalized manipulation to handle objects of varied sizes, weights, and grips, enabling it to rearrange an entire room's contents as well as manage mixed loads and shifting layouts on real warehouse floors.
Dobot Robotics will bring new robot faces and embodied AI to IFA 2026 in Berlin. From September 4 to 8, visitors can meet the DOBOT robot family and see embodied AI in action at Messe Berlin, Hall 25, H25_151. More show participants will be revealed on site.
The China Embodied Intelligence Tier 1 Industry Alliance has been formally established, initiated by Xingyuan Zhi and Lingxin Qiaoshou, with over 20 companies across the supply chain joining as founding members.
LimX Dynamics' TRON 2, combined with ZINOVA's Tool Intelligence, tackles increasingly complex construction workflows. In a scaled-down tilt-up construction demo, @ZiNovaLabs explores an innovative robotic configuration, performing tasks such as formwork assembly, multi-layer rebar placement and tying. TRON 2 is a modular, extensible embodied platform for multi-tool, multi-step tasks across large workspaces.
The robotics industry saw major funding rounds, humanoid robot developments, and new AI models in August 2026. This article lists the top 10 most-read stories from The Robot Report.
Sanctuary AI highlights its approach to custom end-of-arm tooling, from low-DOF grippers to vacuum tooling, to optimize performance and throughput. The company says its robotic hands will add fine manipulation for complex tasks.
RoboBusiness 2026 will feature a keynote panel on physical AI in production robots, with leaders from Amazon Robotics, Teradyne Robotics, and Cobot. The session will explore real-world AI applications, from perception to fleet optimization, and how to build reliable, scalable AI systems.
A $399 duck: $1M in 7 hours, 10,000 pre-orders in 5 days, a Chinese chip stock at its limit-up. How Microduck redrew the physical AI entry ticket.
Noetix Robotics published a tech reveal explaining why synchronized robot formation is more complex than it appears. The company notes that while it sounds simple, the actual execution is challenging, and shares a demonstration via the post.
In a promotional post, Galaxea Dynamics highlights its LEMO platform as more than just dual robotic arms, calling it the starting point for embodied AI. The company presents LEMO as a one-platform, out-of-the-box solution that enables faster creation, emphasizing its role in accelerating robot development.
According to Frost & Sullivan, China's massage industry market reached 536.2 billion yuan in 2024 and is projected to reach 676.9 billion yuan by 2029, despite being a niche in the capital market.
Zhipingfang announced that its general-purpose intelligent robot AlphaBot 2 has officially entered a bar in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong, offering cocktail-making and interactive services to customers.
The third phase of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei New Energy Vehicle and Robotics Investment and Financing Innovation Salon was held in Beijing Yizhuang, focusing on new energy vehicle supply chains, robotics, embodied intelligence, and industrial intelligence.
Research suggests that robot companions with animal-like or anime-style faces and voices have greater emotional appeal to users. These findings could inform the design of social robots to enhance user engagement and acceptance.
Beijing Keling, a subsidiary of Kuaishou, has signed agreements with the National AI Industry Investment Fund and Charoen Pokphand Robot to receive capital injections. The funding will support the company's growth in the AI and robotics sector.
Researchers have developed a quadrupedal robot that mimics the agile movements of dogs and other four-legged animals, enabling it to jump and squeeze through tight spaces at high speed. This breakthrough brings robots closer to matching the agility of their biological counterparts.
PaXini GEEN 2026 in Beijing gathered government leaders, industry pioneers, investors, researchers, and ecosystem partners to explore embodied AI's next steps and accelerate its real-world deployment.
Noetix Robotics explains how it makes a group of robots move in sync, noting countless rounds of testing and tuning in the process.
A new brain study finds that people become more suspicious of expressive humanoid robots when they make errors. The research, published in Science Robotics, shows that oxytocin levels rise but are linked to distrust, and that expressive errors are processed as social violations.
Luoshi Robotics released its first interim report after listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, showing revenue of RMB 415 million, up 135.8% year-on-year, and a swing to profit with adjusted net income of RMB 18.4 million.
LimX Dynamics released EP.04 of its TRON Camp 2026 documentary series. It shows students bringing a humanoid robot to life on Day 1 and over five days advancing from simulation to real hardware, validating, deploying, and tuning algorithms on real terrain. The camp officially closed, with a promise to return next year.
ZOOMLION introduces its embodied intelligent robot, featuring millisecond-level response, flexible movement, and advanced AI computing. The robot supports autonomous decision-making, intelligent learning, and scenario adaptation.
Booster Robotics shared a video on X demonstrating a robot that follows a person's movements, highlighting its motion-control technology.
The XGO-mini2SW from Hong Kong-based Luwu Intelligent is a wheel-legged quadruped robot designed as an open-source embodied AI development platform. It features a Raspberry Pi CM5, supports reinforcement learning with Sim-to-Real workflows, and offers an optional robotic arm for manipulation tasks.
This article examines the roles of centralized and decentralized power architectures in swarm robotics, discussing their trade-offs in coordination, fault tolerance, and communication. It highlights real-world applications from Amazon and Ocado, and explores emerging hybrid models that combine both approaches for optimal performance.
AGIBOT shipped the most humanoid robots and won 46 medals, yet carries roughly one-sixth of Unitree's value. Inside the mismatch.
The 2026 World Robot Conference showcased agricultural robots that can pick crops, patrol fields, and explore underwater, signaling their move from concept to practical deployment. Driven by labor shortages and efficiency demands, these robots are accelerating toward real-world farming applications.
Who took gold at Beijing's second World Humanoid Robot Games: a roundup of the winning robots and what the scores reveal.
Chinese robot makers' interim results reveal strong revenue growth but persistent losses, with the entire industry betting on embodied AI as the next growth driver.
A new study suggests that a humanoid robot's social expressiveness can backfire when it makes mistakes. While expressive robots are initially trusted more, they may experience a steeper loss of trust after an error compared to neutral robots.
RoboSense showcases its MARS Intelligent Manufacturing Base, featuring 100% automation, an annual production capacity of 4 million units, and one digital LiDAR produced every 8 seconds.
Chinese embodied-AI startup PsiBot has secured over $100 million in new funding, with industrial investors including Ningbo Tuopu Group and Lens Technology. The funds will support research on embodied world models, human-operation data collection, and deployments in logistics and advanced manufacturing.
China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced plans to accelerate the deployment of embodied AI in key sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, and public safety, using real-world training and pilot bases to drive technology iteration.
Global markets rebound as Nvidia surges on strong earnings, while Trump escalates trade tensions and SoftBank moves to control 1X, a humanoid robot maker.
The U.S. National Science Foundation announced a $90 million investment over five years to establish three new Science and Technology Centers, each receiving $6 million annually. One center, led by UT Austin, will focus on human-robot co-adaptation, while the other two will tackle turbulence and genomic intelligence.
Li Auto has hired Liu Yu, a veteran expert in world models, to lead its new Embodied Behavior Department, reporting to Zhan Kun. Liu brings 8 years of experience in autonomous driving from major tech and auto companies.
Hugging Face's new Microduck robot, a bipedal singing machine, learns tricks via reinforcement learning and will ship before Christmas. Pre-orders sell one every four seconds.
At the closing of the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, Lingxi Zhiyong's robot completed sub-millimeter assembly tasks autonomously, ranking top three nationally. The company's CONWAY model and ROSS Harness architecture improved effective output by 3.6 times.
Researchers have developed a six-legged robot that learns to walk by imitating the gait of a stick insect. The work demonstrates how insect-inspired control systems could lead to more adaptable and efficient robots.
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.
The third episode of LimX Dynamics' TRON Camp 2026 documentary follows participants as they teach TRON 2 a dual-arm flower-arranging task, illustrating how VLA models connect perception, language, and action.
Galaxea Dynamics' robot-powered micro-fulfillment center autonomously identifies, picks, packs, and delivers items across tens of thousands of SKUs. The company says the system handles orders from start to finish without human intervention, demonstrating embodied intelligence in a real-world retail workflow.
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.
Jianzhi Robotics announced a Series A funding round led by physical AI company Momenta, with existing investors following on. The funds will accelerate development of data-driven physical AI infrastructure.
Galbot is accelerating the deployment of embodied AI robots in industrial settings, backed by substantial funding. The company's mobile manipulation robots aim to bring flexibility to production lines beyond traditional fixed automation.
Henggong Precision reported H1 2026 revenue of 723.5 million yuan, up 37.37% year-on-year, with net profit attributable to shareholders surging 57.03% to 103.69 million yuan. The company is focusing on embodied intelligence as a new growth driver.
Bedrock Robotics has deployed fully autonomous excavators on construction sites in Texas and Nevada. The retrofitted machines aim to address labor shortages, improve safety, and reduce cost overruns.
Hangzhou Danhong Technology reported H1 2026 revenue of RMB 136 million, up 2.53% YoY, with its embodied AI robot business generating RMB 10.03 million in new revenue.
Booster Robotics has shared a clip of its robot performing a nutmeg and scoring a goal in a football-themed demonstration, highlighting the machine's agility and motion control capabilities.
PaXiniTech wraps up its PaXini Lounge event, highlighting continued discussions on tactile sensing and embodied AI. The company teases upcoming collaborations and invites followers to revisit highlights.
DangHong Technology reported steady H1 2026 revenue growth, with its embodied AI robot business contributing initial revenue. The company is shifting from technology development to commercial deployment.
LimX Dynamics demonstrated its TRON 2 robot equipped with Wuji Hand 2 dexterous hands handling traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy work. The robot performs picking, weighing, grinding and packaging of herbs. The omnidirectional base allows the hands to work freely, while precise gripping and dual-arm force control enable mid-air operations. The company highlights this as a step forward in embodied AI through hardware-software synergy.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced plans to develop emerging pillar industries such as aerospace and intelligent robots over the next five years, while also nurturing future industries like embodied AI and brain-computer interfaces to drive economic growth.
Jianzhi Robotics announced a Series A round led by Momenta, with existing shareholders also investing. The funds will advance its data infrastructure and embodied AI initiatives.
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.
Agility CEO Peggy Johnson discussed physical AI demand on Bloomberg, highlighting Digit's deployment across nine customer sites with more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation.
Figure said it is on a path to 100x and committed to spending over $1B on data and compute in the next 12 months. The company also said Index lays the groundwork for ordering robots as a service, progressing from human helpers today to robots doing everything in the future.
Figure introduced Index as the largest useful robot training dataset in the world and published a detailed write-up. The write-up explains how Index addresses the data problem for training general-purpose robots.
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.
Figure has taken its real-world data collection pipeline out of stealth. Over the past four months, the company built a Figure-exclusive system to collect data at higher throughputs, addressing a gap in scaling general-purpose robots.
Figure AI unveiled an index and robot training dataset, committing over $1 billion over the next 12 months. The platform boasts 44,000 weekly active users contributing to the data.
Figure came out of stealth with Index, the largest and most diverse robot dataset to scale general purpose robots. The company reported 264,000 app downloads and 16 million uploaded videos to date.
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.
Skild AI found that current VLA models must be post-trained with 50-100 hours of data collection and fine-tuning to match the accuracy of S1, which achieves the same with just one example of prompting.
Skild AI highlights S1's behavior: it does not simply replay video demonstrations, but uses common-sense understanding to withstand perturbations, improvise after mistakes, and sometimes execute tasks with more precision than the human demonstrator.
Skild AI says S1 is a step-change improvement over conventional VLAs: it matches language-prompted VLA performance on known tasks, and exponentially outperforms them on novel tasks as pre-training scales. The company sees this as a path toward scaling laws for robotics.
Skild AI explains that S1 learns new tasks in a manner similar to a language model: given a video demonstration as a prompt, it generates robot actions to accomplish the task in any environment and embodiment.
Skild AI recounts the first time S1 flipped a pancake. The team initially assumed the skill was in pre-training data, but a full search found no examples. S1 inferred the out-of-distribution task from a single video prompt.
Skild AI says its AI system can be taught extremely long-horizon tasks over 10 minutes long. By composing skills learned in pretraining or creating new ones, it makes coffee, pots a plant, fries pancakes, and more, covering tasks never seen during pretraining.
NVIDIA introduces the Jetson Orin Nano 2, an entry-level edge AI computer that doubles inference performance and cuts power consumption by 40%, enabling developers to build robots, drones, and vision systems.
Booster Robotics released behind-the-scenes footage showing 80 robots transitioning from individual movements to a synchronized formation, highlighting multi-robot coordination technology.
NEURA Robotics details the requirements for deploying robots in real-world settings, including physical environments that mirror real operations, capturing experienced workers' methods, and a pipeline to validated models. The company highlights the NEURA Gym as an in-house facility where all these elements are in place, enabling robots to be trained for specific use cases.
XPeng's Q2 revenue grew 8% to 19.74 billion yuan, but net loss widened to 1.24 billion yuan, missing market expectations. Meanwhile, its robotics arm's valuation surged to 43 billion yuan, highlighting a strategic shift.
AGIBOT and Chimelong Group partner to create the world's first embodied intelligence theme park, expanding robots into entertainment, hospitality, and immersive experiences.
Dreame Technology addressed market concerns by confirming adjustments to some exploratory businesses while reaffirming stability in core operations and the continued rollout of its four main business directions.
On August 24, three Chinese EV startups—Xpeng, Leapmotor, and NIO—announced moves into embodied AI robotics. Xpeng's robot unit secured over $900 million in first-round funding, valuing it at $6.3 billion.
Shengshu Tech's founder Zhu Jun proposes a five-level roadmap for general world models, with the company covering the first three levels. His team's Motubrain model scores 96.1 on the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark and adapts to new robot platforms with just 50-100 human demonstrations.
Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center showcased its NAVIAI robot matrix and multi-scenario generalization achievements at WRC 2026, spanning industrial, commercial, household, and data collection applications. The company demonstrated cluster operation, retail automation, and teleoperation data collection, highlighting the integration of world models and embodied models in its SPIRE system.
Physical AI is moving into agriculture and construction equipment, addressing skilled labor shortages. Companies like Agtonomy are partnering with OEMs to embed intelligence into tractors and machinery.
Leapmotor and XPeng released their H1 2026 earnings on August 24, showing diverging trends. XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng also disclosed significant progress in the company's robotics business.
Black Sesame Technologies showcased its SesameX multi-dimensional embodied intelligence computing platform at WRC 2026, targeting the robotics market. The platform offers a full range of computing power from 0.5T to 1000T, with three core modules for service, industrial, and humanoid robots.
Mojia Robot GM Zhang Guibin says about 70% of automotive and embodied robot technologies overlap, and the industry is moving from showcasing tech to real-world deployment. Chery's systematic capabilities give Mojia a competitive edge.
At Beijing's second World Humanoid Robot Games, robots beat the human 100m record (9.39s), quadrupled entrants, and rewrote the rules on autonomy. What the scoreboard really measures.
XPeng's robotics arm secured over $900 million in its first equity funding round, led by IDG Capital with participation from Hillhouse and strategic investors Tencent and Alibaba, valuing the unit at over $6.3 billion.
At an all-hands meeting, NIO CEO William Li announced that Ren Shaoqing, the head of autonomous driving, has founded an independent company focused on physical AI foundation models and embodied intelligence. NIO will make a strategic investment and collaborate with the new venture.
He Xiaopeng, CEO of XPeng, has also taken on the role of CEO for the company's robotics business, aiming to accelerate robot mass production and commercialization by leveraging the group's full-stack self-developed software and hardware capabilities.
Xpeng Robotics completed its initial funding round of over $900 million, valuing the company at over $6.3 billion and setting a new record for single-round private equity financing in China's embodied intelligence sector.
XPeng Robotics completed its first external funding round, raising over $900 million at a valuation exceeding $6.3 billion. The investment, led by IDG Capital with participation from Gaorong Ventures and strategic backing from Tencent and Alibaba, sets a new record for single-round private equity in China's embodied AI sector.
PaXiniTech showcased its latest innovations at a recent event, featuring live demos and hands-on interactions demonstrating embodied perception for real-life robots. The company hinted at a next stop while wrapping up the current showcase.
Beijing Weifan Intelligent Technology has raised over 100 million yuan in a Seed+ round to advance its brain-inspired edge computing chips for robots. The funding will accelerate productization of its BrainOS and OmniRT toolchain, with backers including CICC Capital and humanoid robot maker Songyan Dynamics.
Xpeng's robotics unit has completed its first funding round of over $900 million, achieving a post-money valuation of over $6.3 billion. The round was led by IDG Capital with participation from Gaorong Ventures, and strategic support from Tencent and Alibaba, while XPeng remains the controlling shareholder.
LimX Dynamics released the full TRON 2 VLA stack on GitHub and Huggingface. The demo shows active-vision sorting where the robot distinguishes bananas from apples, performs pick-and-place with head movement for target location. The open-source approach cuts model development from three months to two hours.
XPENG Robotics raised over $900 million in its first funding round, valuing the company at over $6.3 billion and setting a new record for single-round private equity financing in China's embodied intelligence sector.
XPeng Robotics secured over $900 million in its first funding round, led by IDG Capital with participation from GSR Ventures and strategic investors Tencent and Alibaba, reaching a post-money valuation of over $6.3 billion. The funds will accelerate mass production and physical AI development.
AGIBOT and Chimelong Group have entered a strategic partnership to create the world's first embodied intelligence theme park, bringing robots into entertainment, hospitality and immersive experiences. AGIBOT said the deal marks another step in its journey from advancing robotic intelligence to enabling large-scale deployment in the physical world.
PaXiniTech wrapped up a five-day exhibition in Beijing, showcasing its latest innovations and engaging with global innovators on robotics and embodied AI.
AGIBOT G2 took 1st place in both the Library and Emergency Scenario Challenges at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games on August 23.
Galbot's G1 robot won the Gold Medal in the Home Scenario Competition at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games, achieving fully autonomous operation, fastest time, and highest score.
An introductory guide to China's embodied AI industry: what embodied AI is, the five-layer value chain, five coordinates for 2026 (policy, capital, production, listings, consolidation), and a practical method for reading the industry. China accounts for 97% of humanoid robot shipments worldwide and raised RMB 93.5 billion (~$13B) in the first half of 2026.
Galbot's humanoid robot showcased tennis skills at a live event, demonstrating serves, forehands, backhands, lobs, drop shots, and extreme saves. It played singles, doubles, and even 1-robot vs 2-human matches. After falling, it got up and continued. Over 100 consecutive rallies set a new world record, marking a milestone for embodied AI.
At WRC 2024, Zhongqing Robotics CTO Li Lixiang introduced the company's full-stack embodied AI roadmap and launched EngineAI Awaken, a brain-inspired engine. The system integrates WAM and VLA models, achieving over 98% success rate in long-horizon tasks with just 2 hours of deployment and fine-tuning.
At WRC 2026 in Beijing, Galaxea Dynamics expressed gratitude to global partners for an evening of conversations and shared vision for embodied AI. The company looks forward to future collaborations.
Galbot robots achieved the world's first live autonomous humanoid robot tennis match, competing against human athletes at the World Humanoid Robot Games. The company calls it the AstraTennis moment, marking AI's entry into the physical world a decade after AlphaGo.
China's dexterous hand sector raised RMB 25 billion in H1 2026 yet no standard hand exists: three routes, three 'No. 1' claims, and a $6B valuation target still unclosed.
At WRC 2026, Octopus Dynamics unveiled its 'Brain-Hand-Data' embodied AI system, integrating SYNWorld foundation model, OctoH-Hand dexterous hand, and OctoSense data solution to enable physical AI deployment.
At WRC 2026 in Beijing, DEEP Robotics (booth C220) is showcasing its full range of embodied AI products and six industry-ready solutions. The company emphasizes 'practice is the sole criterion for testing robots.'
At the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Bremen, international experts praised China's rapid advancements in AI research and applications, particularly in robotics and large language models, placing it among global leaders.
A German professor's 5-year robot build contrasts with a Chinese factory's 15-minute assembly, highlighting how rapid manufacturing and faster learning are reshaping humanoid robotics.
PaXini Tech unveils its latest sensing-to-execution technologies, including a next-gen multidimensional tactile sensor, an omnimodal embodied AI data collection system, and the world's first tactile sensor for robotic soles. These innovations target high-density perception, precise motion capture, and bipedal robot plantar sensing.
SpaceXAI has expanded the availability of its Grok robot, adding support for SuperGrok Plus, Cursor Pro+, and Cursor Teams plans.
Galbot announced ET1, a learning-capable agentic humanoid robot powered by AstraBrain-Agent, at WRC 2026. ET1 can perceive, understand, think, and act in the physical world, and is performing live at the event, learning and adapting through interaction.
Unitree G1 teardown: a RMB 41,574 bill of materials with 66% in joints. How China cut humanoid prices from RMB 593,400 to RMB 9,998 in three years.
At the 2026 World Robot Conference, experts urged the industry to build a shared ecosystem, emphasizing open-source standards and unified technical foundations to overcome challenges like data silos and resource waste.
China's market regulator announced that the second phase of its quality chain enhancement initiative will expand to cover embodied AI robots, solid-state power batteries, and other emerging sectors.
At this year's World Robot Congress, the competitive focus shifted from robot bodies to their 'brains,' with leading firms doubling down on intelligent control systems. Robot designs also diversified beyond bipedal forms to include wheeled and mobile platforms.
At the 2026 World Robot Conference, Pudu Robotics' Wu Xiang unveiled two products and discussed the collaboration with JD.com, emphasizing that scene-based applications will determine the winner in the next phase of robot competition.
Jensen Huang's daughter, Minshan Huang, visited Dobot's booth at the 2026 World Robot Conference to observe joint innovations in physical AI. She leads Nvidia's Omniverse and robotics product marketing efforts.
At the 2026 World Robot Conference, Moore Threads founder Zhang Jianzhong said embodied intelligence is approaching a 'ChatGPT moment,' with AI computing clusters inevitably scaling from thousands to hundreds of thousands of GPUs.
ATDev is developing an autonomous wheelchair with a robotic arm to help power wheelchair users with daily tasks. The company, part of the ARPA-H-funded RAMMP program, focuses on shared autonomy and aims to get regulatory approval within five years.
A German National Academy member and IEEE/AAAI Fellow explains why home robots are the hardest build in embodied AI: world models, touch, and a silent market. Full transcript included.
In a new @ScienceMagazine paper, Agility's co-founder Jonathan Hurst argues that humanoid hardware should not be treated as a commodity; get the physics wrong, and no amount of AI can compensate. He emphasizes the importance of mechanical design for physical AI.
The day after Unitree's record IPO, founder Wang Xingxing took the WRC 2026 stage to define embodied AI's first quantifiable threshold: 80% of unfamiliar scenes, 80% of tasks.
At the 2026 World Robot Conference, Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center launched Tiangong Omni, a new open platform for humanoid-native embodied intelligence, and made Pelican-VL 2.0 commercially available with enhanced agentic capabilities for long-horizon tasks and tool use.
At the 2026 World Robot Conference, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing predicted that embodied AI may reach a ChatGPT-like tipping point in 2-3 years, or up to 5-10 years, based on a robot's ability to autonomously complete 80% of tasks in unfamiliar environments.
At the 2026 World Robot Conference, Beijing Yizhuang announced a plan to mass-produce 100,000 embodied intelligent robots and develop 1 million key components, aiming to lead the human-robot integrated society.
A new 250 million yuan embodied intelligence fund has been registered in Henan, with Zhongqin Robot and Henan Strategic Emerging Industry Fund as investors.
Sanctuary AI Co-Founder Olivia Norton explains why the final few percent of performance are the most challenging yet crucial for deploying Physical AI in industrial environments, recorded at the Humanoid Robot Forum during A3 Automate 2026.
Mech-Mind Robotics and nearly ten partners are demonstrating the 'Eye-Brain-Hand' embodied intelligence system at Automation Taipei 2026. The solutions cover bin picking, machine tending, generalized picking, and precision assembly, showing strong generalization across parts and environments to advance intelligent manufacturing.
PaXiniTech officially opened its showcase in Beijing, making the global debut of its newly launched products and full-stack embodied perception technologies. The week will feature keynotes, workshops, and the latest robotics innovations. The company's team is on-site to engage with researchers, industry leaders, and enthusiasts.
All 100 officially selected WRC 2026 exhibits, mapped by category: humanoids, quadruped robots, dexterous hands, core components and three industry reads.
PaXiniTech makes global debut of new products in Beijing, showcasing full-stack embodied perception tech. Day 1 draws buzz, team on show floor.
Minglue Technology ventures into embodied intelligence, partnering with Hikrobot to showcase commercial service, industrial logistics, and intelligent patrol solutions at the 2026 World Robot Conference, demonstrating AI-robot integration in real-world operations.
Accelerated Evolution unveiled its T2 platform at the 2026 World Robot Conference, claiming it as the highest-compute bipedal humanoid platform and demonstrating swarm intelligence capabilities.
A robot school in eastern China uses a humanoid guide to showcase its mission of training future mechanical workers. The initiative reflects China's broader push to integrate humanoid robots into the workforce to address labor challenges.
China's A-share indices fell on Tuesday, with the Hangzhou Bay ETF Nanhua rallying over 9% while robotics ETFs dropped more than 9% amid a broad market retreat.
On August 19, the A-share market saw a sharp morning decline, with the ChiNext Index falling nearly 5%. Robot and semiconductor stocks led the drop, while coal and banking sectors gained.
China's embodied AI boom traces a 40-year relay: state labs built the roots, startups sprinted to market, and Unitree's RMB 60.99B IPO set the valuation anchor. Five drivers, three leaders, one system.
FORT Robotics, a safety tech provider for autonomous machines, announced plans to go public via a SPAC merger with Newbury Street II. The deal values the combined company at over $500 million and will fund expansion of its physical AI safety platform.
AGIBOT welcomed King Abdullah II of Jordan, demonstrating its A3 humanoid's Arabic interaction and group dance, and G2's autonomous loading/unloading in smart manufacturing. The visit included exchanges on embodied AI's potential.
The Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center has released a 'co-evolution theory' practice path, emphasizing synergy among intelligent algorithms, hardware, and development toolchains to transition humanoid robots from demos to large-scale use.
LimX Dynamics will exhibit at WRC 2026, Booth C316, from August 19-23 at Beiren Etrong International Exhibition & Convention Center, Beijing, showcasing real-world applications in intelligent manufacturing and embodied AI.
Xiaomi announced that its MiMo-V2.5 model ranks first in weekly calls on OpenRouter, and its robot team won two championships at CVPR and ICRA 2026 workshops.
Jiateng Robot, a leading supplier of industrial embodied intelligent mobile chassis, has completed a strategic funding round of tens of millions of yuan. Led by listed company Hertan, the investment will accelerate product development and market expansion in the embodied AI sector.
Generalist, a robot learning startup, uses human demonstration data to train models that can quickly adapt to various cobot systems. The approach, originating from the UMI research paper, enables real-time recovery and rapid deployment in industrial settings.
WRC 2026 (Aug 19-23, Beijing): 300+ exhibitors, 150+ debuts, 71 side events, 6,000+ teams. Complete schedule and five storylines worth watching.
Shangwei New Materials' first half-year report after Zhiyuan Robot's takeover shows revenue growth but stagnant profits, while its robotics business still has no revenue. The stock rebounded after an initial dip on the report's release.
LimX Dynamics' TRON 2 robot demonstrates a closed-loop autonomous inspection workflow in a real municipal utility tunnel, covering mapping, navigation, multi-level inspection, anomaly response, and autonomous docking/charging. Equipped with an autonomous mobile manipulation kit, it adapts to complex spatial structures.
Intermittent swimming, inspired by natural bout-and-glide behavior, can significantly improve the energy efficiency of fish-like robots. A new study using the ZBot platform reveals that this gait reduces energy consumption across speeds and offers a validated control strategy for underwater robots.
Galaxea Dynamics will attend the World Robot Conference 2026 in Beijing from August 19–23. The company will showcase embodied AI applications for productivity and future living at Booth 210, Hall C.
Guotai Junan Securities initiated coverage on Luoshi Robotics with a 'Buy' rating, citing strong sales growth of embodied AI robots as a key driver for the company's high performance.
AGIBOT will host its Partner Conference at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh on September 2. The conference will cover AGIBOT's latest humanoid robotics and embodied intelligence products, regional partnerships, and localized deployment in the Middle East. The event will take place in Hall 4, RECC Malham.
AgiBot is evolving from a hardware-focused robotics company into an AI company that integrates robots, foundation models, and data platforms. The article analyzes how embodied AI competition is shifting from manufacturing capabilities to learning capabilities, with data becoming a key differentiator.
MIFeng Technology, a one-stop physical AI data service provider, has raised hundreds of millions of yuan in a new funding round led by China Telecom. The capital will be used to build embodied intelligence data infrastructure and expand its MEgo series production.
China's embodied AI raised RMB 96B in a year. Now the test is spending: Unitree profits on tiny R&D while UBTECH lost RMB 4.2B. Who spends well?
Shangwei New Materials reported a net loss of 167 million yuan in H1 2026, with revenue up 2.4% to 803 million yuan, as its robot business faced pressure during a strategic shift to embodied AI.
Shangwei New Materials reported a first-half net loss of 167 million yuan despite a surging stock price, attributing losses to heavy R&D spending on consumer embodied AI robots. The company targets a sevenfold increase in robot revenue by 2028.
Humanoids lead WRC 2026's announced lineup. A complete guide to the biped vs wheeled form-factor war and what it signals for embodied AI.
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.
Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson told @WSJ that the key to advancing robotics is to focus on the problems robots solve, not just what they can do. She discussed the importance of starting with real-world problems and building technology backward, and the need to get robots out of the lab.
The 2026 World Robot Conference will be held in Beijing, showcasing how embodied intelligence is moving from lab experiments to practical applications as China leads the global robotics market.
Zhiyang Innovation announced plans to raise up to 904 million yuan via a private placement to fund embodied intelligence and other projects. The issuance targets no more than 35 investors, with pricing at least 80% of the average stock price over the prior 20 trading days.
China's embodied AI sector raised over 93.5 billion yuan in H1 2026, up five-fold year-on-year, as robots accelerate into factories, per CCTV Finance.
PaXini launched the PXCap Pro five-finger data collection glove for embodied AI. It features omni-modal, multi-source sensing fusion with fingertip and palm tactile arrays, 0.1N tactile force sensitivity, 1% FS repeatability, and a 165° wide-FOV wrist camera that captures hand manipulation and hand-object interaction details.
The author shares insights from the Imperial Robotics Summer School, focusing on a project to enable robots to interact with multiple people simultaneously. The experience highlights the complexity of multi-party human-robot interaction and the importance of interdisciplinary research.
LimX Dynamics shared the first episode of its TRON Camp 2026 documentary, showing how participants started with the simple goal of getting hands-on with a real robot and ended up winning. The film details the iterative process from simulation to real hardware, including data collection, position adjustments, and motion refinement.
Mech-Mind Robotics showcased its embodied AI-powered 'Eye-Brain-Hand' system for handling black thin sheet metal parts in projection welding. The robotic platform accurately picks and positions parts, adapts to different types, and uses dual-robot coordination for continuous, collision-free operation, boosting production efficiency.
Light Origins, founded by a ChatGPT core contributor, has raised tens of millions of yuan in a Pre-A round led by Guoke Investment to advance embodied AGI technologies.
Sanctuary AI released a failure recovery montage showcasing its production-ready Physical AI. The company explains that traditional automation fails in non-repeatable real-world environments, while its AI helps robots adapt, reduce manual intervention, and maintain throughput.
The 2026 World Robot Conference will be held in Beijing from August 19-23, marking the 11th year of the event. With China leading in industrial and humanoid robots, the conference focuses on embodied intelligence moving from labs to real-world applications.
68 WRC 2026 exhibits, from joint modules to humanoids: actuation, tactile sensing, dexterous hands, data training, complete robots. A guide to China's embodied AI supply chain.
A data collection training ground in Hefei is teaching robots everyday household tasks through thousands of hours of practice, paving the way for Chinese robots to enter global markets.
The ω-0 model, developed by NTU, PKU, HKUST(GZ) and BAAI, enables humanoid robots to perform complex home tasks with an 81.8% success rate. It integrates vision, language and action in a unified representation, outperforming existing baselines.
Pony.ai has incorporated a new technology company in Foshan with a registered capital of 20 million yuan, covering intelligent robot R&D and AI applications.
Menlo AI unveils Asimov 1, an open-source humanoid robot for developers priced at $20,000. The DIY kit requires over 100 hours of assembly, but offers full transparency with CAD files and schematics available on GitHub.
Tencent announced significant increases in AI compute procurement, while Westlake Robotics, a general-purpose embodied intelligence company, completed Series A funding.
In a new @ScienceMagazine paper, Agility co-founder and Chief Robot Officer Jonathan Hurst argues that AI alone cannot repeal physics; physical AI requires correct physical foundations. The article highlights the importance of embodiment in making robots truly useful.
Honor has launched the world's first Robot Phone, with prices ranging from 9,999 to 12,999 yuan. The device integrates robotics and AI technologies to redefine user interaction.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have developed RoboDojo, a unified benchmarking platform for evaluating robotic manipulation across simulated and physical environments. The platform, created with collaborators from nearly 20 universities, including UC Berkeley and Tsinghua, aims to standardize assessment in embodied AI research.
Unitree's RMB 60.99B IPO at 219x P/E gives China's embodied AI its first public valuation benchmark. What the price demands, and who it measures.
At an unnamed event, 471 students from 108 countries and regions participated in the Team Challenge. As co-organizer and exclusive embodied robotics platform provider, Galbot supported teams in deploying solutions on the Galbot G1.
West Lake Robotics has completed a Series A funding round of nearly 100 million RMB, led by Haiyuan Capital. The funds will be directed towards research on a unified large model for humanoid robots and the establishment of an embodied intelligence talent cultivation base.
Daimeng Robotics has secured hundreds of millions of yuan in a new funding round led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders increasing their stakes. The company, known for its tactile dexterous hands, is now pivoting to a broader vision-tactile sensor platform and focusing on tactile world models.
Humanoid robots could revolutionize manufacturing, with the market projected to reach $370 billion by 2040. However, design complexity requires integrated software like Siemens Xcelerator to streamline development and stay competitive.
Unitree Robotics, dubbed 'China's first embodied AI stock', began its IPO subscription on August 10 with strategic investments from two state-owned energy giants, China National Petroleum's昆仑资本 and Southern Power Grid's产融控股.
LimX Dynamics announces that its TRON 2 code, model, and dataset are now fully open-sourced, available on GitHub and Hugging Face.
Ant Group has led a multi-million yuan funding round in embodied AI startup Damon Robot, marking its latest move in the robotics sector. The company has previously invested in several other robot firms.
LimX Dynamics releases the core stack of its TRON 2 VLA demo for autonomous clothes folding, including an embodied AI data platform, open datasets, and open-source code. Researchers can now focus on algorithms rather than hardware integration.
Unitree's GD01 manned mech, featured on TIME's cover, marks a shift from mobility-focused robots to versatile intelligent platforms. It signals the next phase of China's robotics industry, where creating real value becomes the competitive differentiator.
Chen Yonghai, former product vice president at XPeng Group, has joined Zhongqing Robotics as Chief Operating Officer, reporting to CEO Zhao Tongyang. He previously held roles at Amap and XPeng.
The Yijing X9, a product of the Dongfeng-Huawei full-stack collaboration, reveals its interior featuring the HarmonySpace 6 cockpit. It integrates MoLA 2.0 architecture, a trillion-parameter end-to-end AI, and an AMS in-cabin sensing system for proactive safety.
West Lake Robotics, an embodied intelligence general brain company, announced the completion of its Series A round, less than a month after the previous close. The company raised a total of 500 million yuan across four rounds in six months, with investments from Sequoia, Xiaomiao Langcheng, and Henan Investment Group.
Kong Tao, former head of ByteDance's robotics team, has reportedly joined Xiaomi in 2025, bringing several former colleagues. He now leads a team developing foundation models for robots within Xiaomi's robotics division, which has about 200 employees.
Acorn Robotics has completed its angel round financing, co-led by China Merchants Group Ventures and NIO Capital, with Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund participating. This follows a seed round of nearly 100 million yuan in March, bringing total funding to several hundred million yuan within four months.
Kong Tao, former head of ByteDance's robotics team, has joined Xiaomi to lead its robot foundation model team, bringing several former colleagues. The team operates under high secrecy within Xiaomi.
A new study finds that people are more suspicious of humanoid robots that make errors, especially when the robots are expressive conversation partners. The awkwardness of such robots leads to a decline in trust and an increase in wariness.
RoboBusiness 2026 will bring together industry leaders to reflect on the past two decades and explore the future of robotics. Keynote speakers Rodney Brooks, Jonathan Hurst, and Ken Goldberg will share insights on technologies and challenges shaping the next 20 years.
LimX Dynamics wrapped up its TRON Camp 2026, a five-day event where participants tackled VLA and locomotion challenges and demonstrated their work on real robots.
Kaiwang Data, a full-chain AI data infrastructure company, has secured over 100 million yuan in strategic funding, with leading embodied AI firms such as Self-Model and Zhiyuan as first-time strategic investors. This move highlights the growing scarcity of high-quality physical-world training data as a bottleneck for the industry.
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.
Five Chinese embodied AI startups, including Zhiyuan Robotics, jointly invested in an AI data company, reflecting a 'capital-for-time' strategy to secure critical data resources while still fundraising.
Wang Xingxing, chairman and CTO of Unitree, said the rollout of electronic skin technology will accelerate as embodied AI models mature and humanoid robots enter human society. The company will continue advancing the technology based on hardware readiness, supply chain progress, and product iteration.
Unitree's CEO says humanoid robots are in early pilot stage, with cost and technology being key bottlenecks for large-scale adoption.
Unitree Robotics CTO Wang Xingxing believes Chinese companies can take an early lead in humanoid robots, driven by rapid R&D progress and AI large models that enhance robot capabilities.
Mech-Mind showcased its 'Eye-Brain-Hand' embodied AI system for industrial tasks, where a robot identifies reflective metal parts and performs picking and gluing with ±0.5 mm accuracy.
Unitree Robotics has priced its Shanghai STAR Market IPO at RMB150.80 per share, issuing 40.45 million shares. DeepSeek's developer, Hangzhou DeepSeek AI Basic Technology Research, received a strategic placement of 933,900 shares worth about RMB141 million, subject to a 36-month lockup.
X Square, an embodied AI startup, is reportedly preparing for a Hong Kong IPO, with market sources indicating a confidential filing. The company has seen rapid growth, fueled by its advanced technology and multiple funding rounds, reaching a valuation exceeding RMB 20 billion.
A childlike robot named Robin is helping young patients in US hospitals by chatting, playing, and even persuading them to eat. Deployed in about 30 facilities, it reduces anxiety and frees up healthcare staff.
AMD unveiled its comprehensive robotics portfolio at Advancing AI 2026, including the Ryzen AI Embedded X100 chip, Kria AI SOM, and development platform, aiming to compete with NVIDIA Jetson. The company emphasizes an open ecosystem and long-term supply commitment to attract robotics developers.
Ommo Technologies, a spatial intelligence company, has raised tens of millions of dollars in a Series A funding round to advance its permanent-magnet positioning system. The technology enables robots to track their own 6DoF position even in occluded or confined spaces, with sub-millimeter accuracy, and is initially applied in medical navigation and embodied AI.
DPVR has partnered with a robot experience store in Qingdao to deploy its RoboPilot teleoperation and data collection solution. Using the E4 VR headset, users can control real robotic arms and dexterous hands in real time, while the system gathers data for embodied AI training.
Shoucheng Holdings has established a 3.5 billion yuan fund focused on physical AI, targeting robotics and embodied intelligence. This follows the IPO approval of its portfolio company Unitree Robotics, reinforcing Shoucheng's strategic push into the hard-tech sector.
Agibot launches the LinkCraft Creative Contest, inviting everyone to direct humanoid robots with a no-code platform. The competition features four tracks and a million-yuan prize pool.
German startup Nucleus deployed humanoid robots to real factory lines in under 90 days, selling hourly labor instead of robots. By combining human oversight with AI agents, they are collecting real-world data to build a moat in embodied AI.
Sanctuary AI was included in Manufacturing Today's roundup of companies applying Physical AI to manufacturing, highlighting its role in moving the technology to the factory floor.
UBTECH's new wheeled industrial humanoid Cruzr Y1 is automatically depalletizing and storing raw materials at an automotive parts factory, demonstrating the company's swarm intelligence technology.
Zidongliang Robot has secretly filed for a Hong Kong IPO. The company plans to unveil its third-generation robot in Q4, backed by its proprietary world unified model architecture.
PokeBot, a Chinese embodied-AI startup, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in a pre-A round led by Shunwei Capital and Matrix Partners. The company is developing household robots for tasks like clothes folding and cooking, with a recent demo showing autonomous mapo tofu preparation in nine minutes.
Galaxea's open-source VLA model G0.5 ranks first on RoboDojo with an average score of 20.23, including 28.25 in precision and 44.12 in long-horizon tasks.
Ding Yan, co-CTO of embodied AI company Luming Robot, has resigned after less than 280 days. His departure highlights a broader trend of executive churn in China's embodied intelligence sector, as technical routes and business models remain unsettled.
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.
Ant Digital Technologies signed a framework agreement with Hubei Big Data Group's data development company to jointly build AI infrastructure, including a Token Factory and embodied intelligence data collection projects.
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.
The second World Humanoid Robot Games will be held at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval from August 22-26, featuring expanded official events including table tennis, tug-of-war, and freestyle boxing. Athletes range from autonomous vision and decision-making in table tennis to synchronized tug-of-war and action-capture-controlled boxing.
The 2026 World Robot Contest will open in 27 days, featuring over 10,000 competitors from 20+ countries. Key events include the Coexistence Robot Challenge, BCI Brain-Controlled Robot Contest, and Youth Robot Design Contest, showcasing cutting-edge embodied AI and brain-computer interface technologies.
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.
PokeBot, a Beijing-based embodied intelligence startup founded by Tsinghua professor Xu Huazhe, announced a nine-figure Pre-A round led by Shunwei Capital and GGV Capital, with Xiaomi and other investors following. The company, which focuses on household manipulation tasks, has reached unicorn candidate status within five months of inception.
Pasini, a unicorn in embodied AI with a valuation exceeding 10 billion yuan, has officially moved its headquarters from Shenzhen to Beijing's Haidian District. The move is part of a strategic adjustment to enhance R&D and data compliance, while its Shenzhen industrial base remains operational.
COOWA Tech, with 50PB of physical world data and 10,000+ robots in operation, has appointed a leading roboticist to drive its world model into profitable applications. The new chief scientist will enhance COOWAM, the company's dual-layer architecture, to close the loop from data to commercial value.