Optimus 2.5 is handing out snack packets at CoRL in Austin. It is teleoperated. I chatted with Tesla engineers at the booth. They couldn't reveal any details, but one of them said we'll soon see some cool autonomous demos.
Packsize and Swisslog Logistics have formed a partnership to incorporate packaging automation into overall warehouse automation design, helping customers design, sequence, and implement fulfillment systems. The two companies say the joint solution reduces touches, eliminates waste, and increases throughput, and has already been deployed in multiple global projects, integrating on-demand custom packaging, ASRS, fulfillment systems, and orchestration. Packsize emphasizes that packaging equipment is a strategic control point affecting the ROI of warehouse automation investment, not an end-of-line ancillary investment.
After ALVEST Group acquired EasyMile, it integrated EasyMile, TractEasy, and TLD's existing driverless business into TLD Robotics, which was formally established in September 2026.
Humble Robotics announced it has closed a $51 million Series A round led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners. The company has raised a total of $75 million in less than a year since its founding.
Mina and the team begin shipping Stream today! We're very proud to support @sandbar and can't wait for everyone to try it. 💙
Hanwha is in talks to invest $50 million in KAIST-incubated quadruped robot company LionRobotics, while LIG Nex1 has taken a controlling stake in Ghost Robotics and Hyundai Rotem is partnering with Rainbow Robotics.
London, UK-based robotics startup Rogue Cortex has exited stealth, raised about $4.5 million in venture capital, and launched a hardware-agnostic software development kit (SDK), ready-made robotics applications, a developer program, and a customizable drone development platform.
Honda has partnered with Base 11 and Freelancer to launch the $10,000 "Automation for Good: The Advanced Manufacturing Challenge," seeking human-robot collaboration ideas for factories from US residents aged 18 to 26. Registration closed on October 31.
ANYbotics has begun delivering its ANYmal X quadruped robot to industrial customers for autonomous inspection in potentially explosive environments such as oil, gas, and chemicals. Equinor and DSM-Firmenich are the first customers to receive it.
Comau and Automha jointly showcased integrated food and beverage automation solutions covering production, packaging, warehousing, and distribution at Cibus Tec 2026 in Parma, Italy, also integrating Invent's software capabilities.
EDGE Sound Research has raised a new $2 million round led by Stormbreaker Ventures, bringing its cumulative funding to $9 million, to expand its sound-based perception technology into robotics and physical AI.
SWANCOR announced a stock trading risk warning, stating that revenue from its consumer-grade embodied intelligent robot business accounts for a low proportion of total revenue, and it cannot yet predict the impact on 2026 revenue and profitability. In the first three quarters of 2026, the company's operating revenue was 1.209 billion yuan, down 5.51% year on year, with a net loss attributable to shareholders of 422 million yuan. As of November 6, 2026, the company's price-to-earnings ratio was 1,767.36 times, significantly higher than the average trailing P/E ratio of 19.57 times for the chemical raw materials and chemical products industry over the past month.
Schaeffler held the 2026 Schaeffler China Automotive Technology Symposium in Suzhou, showcasing over 500 products and more than 10 test-drive vehicles. Under four themes—vehicle control, chassis and body, powertrain, and energy management—it presented its system capabilities. This was its first such symposium in China since merging with Vitesco Technologies. Schaeffler is also positioning itself in humanoid robotics with R&D and production of key subsystems and core components, scenario-based training, and data services, and is expanding into the low-altitude economy through eVTOL and eCTOL-related technologies.
In an announcement on abnormal stock trading fluctuations, Jingu Co., Ltd. stated that its embodied intelligent robot structural parts business currently accounts for an extremely low share of revenue and profit, and is not expected to have a significant impact on the company's performance in the short term. The company also cautioned that there is certain uncertainty regarding the business's capacity for large-scale production, delivery, and commercialization.
At the MSIT-NVIDIA AI Startup Partnership Forum, NVIDIA announced an investment in Korean AI interconnect company Point2 and plans to make additional investments in Motif Technologies, RLWRLD, and Upstage. RLWRLD develops robot foundation models for humanoid and industrial robots, supporting five-fingered dexterous manipulation such as precisely inserting parts, tightening nuts, and sorting parts from a moving conveyor belt. These investments cover the full AI stack, from infrastructure and models to robotics applications.
In 2025, China's flexible collaborative robot market reached nearly 1.5 billion yuan, up more than 20% year on year, and is expected to reach 4.5 billion yuan by 2031. Each joint of a flexible collaborative robot has a built-in high-precision torque sensor, enabling native force control at multiple points throughout the robot; these robots are used in consumer electronics, automotive manufacturing, new energy, healthcare, shipbuilding, and other fields. The SR series flexible collaborative robots launched by Rokae adopt full-joint force control technology and have been applied in automotive assembly and electronics manufacturing.
The IPO channel for the humanoid robotics industry is rapidly narrowing: the A-share and Hong Kong listing windows are essentially closed, and the backdoor listing route is also difficult to pursue. After Zhiyuan Robotics acquired control of Shangwei New Materials, Shangwei New Materials announced in October 2025 that Zhiyuan has no backdoor listing plan within the next 3 years. The closure of exit channels has sharply increased financing difficulty; over the past two months, quoted prices for secondary sales of old shares in the embodied intelligence sector have generally been only 65% to 80% of the previous round's valuation. In the first half of 2026, China's embodied intelligence-themed investment and financing reached 172 deals totaling 109.174 billion yuan, but financing activity fell rapidly after September.
At its Q3 2026 results briefing, Kinco stated that its robot industry sales revenue in the first three quarters of 2026 was 424 million yuan, up 65.29% year on year, and its share of the company's operating revenue rose to 56.55%. The company's products include low-voltage servo systems, servo modules, frameless torque motors, joint module drivers, and robot-specific human-machine interfaces, and it has covered leading customers at home and abroad.
In the second half of 2026, as embodied intelligence funding cooled, Maxinsights, Jingshuo Technology, and Jianzhi Robotics completed a $30 million seed round, a several tens of millions of dollars Pre-A round, and a $100 million A+ round, respectively, within ten days. None of the three companies builds complete robots; their core teams have backgrounds in autonomous driving data closed loops, and they enter data supply through a global collection network, a data platform spun off from WeRide, and a multimodal collection production line, respectively. The article points out that data volume does not equal data value, and long-term competitiveness depends on data production and cross-embodiment reuse capabilities.
At 7:37, the Yunyao-1 28 satellite was launched successfully, carrying the Atom space robot aboard.
The Chaoyong AI editorial team compares China-US paths in embodied intelligence, arguing that China leads in complete-machine cost, supply chain, and shipment scale, while US companies enter the physical world through general-purpose models. The article cites cases including Qianxun Intelligence's Moz1 maintaining a plug-in success rate above 99% on a CATL PACK production line, the HOST framework from Zhiyuan (Variable) achieving an average success rate of 62% across 50 desktop tasks, and Physical Intelligence negotiating a funding round of over $1 billion. It proposes that cross-embodiment and cross-task success rates, customer repurchases, and whether model revenue can be independent of hardware delivery are the key criteria for judging the value of brain companies.
REEMAN completed on-site deployment of the Fly Boat factory delivery robot (AMR) at a large garment factory in Dongguan in about half a day, and configured multiple pickup and drop-off points. The robot has a rated payload of 300kg and actually carries about 200–250kg per trip (including a custom rack of about 80kg). It lifts the rack with a 10cm autonomous lift, navigates via laser SLAM, travels about 150m per loaded trip, and performs 70–90 tasks per day on average. Workers trigger deliveries via a physical one-button call button. Reference price is about USD 5,780, depending on configuration.
In late October, Unitree Robotics and Sequoia China announced the joint establishment of the "Shanyu Innovation Program," focused on discovering and investing in early-stage startup projects in embodied intelligence, robotics applications, and related upstream and downstream key technology fields. The article, citing Unitree's Q3 financial report, noted that its revenue was 665 million yuan, up 69.93% year on year; net profit attributable to shareholders was 113 million yuan, down 17.37% year on year; and R&D investment in the first three quarters was 263 million yuan, up 191.48% year on year.
On November 6, US Eastern Time, humanoid robotics company Agility (AGLT) closed down 14%, falling below the $10 issue reference price, after rising 2.22% against the trend the previous day. The SPAC listing had a redemption rate of 61.5% among existing shareholders, and the shortfall was filled by a $201 million PIPE led by Foxconn; selling pressure emerged after the backstop funds were absorbed. The article compares Figure AI's valuation of about $39 billion, Unitree Robotics' market value of 100 billion RMB, and Agility's listing valuation of about $2.5 billion, arguing that the secondary market is shifting toward pricing based on orders and delivery schedules.
PetroChina Group's Kunlun Manufacturing and Kunlun Capital signed an agreement with Unitree Robotics and Beijing Fanjie Intelligence to establish a joint venture focused on industrial embodied AI robot solutions. The PetroChina side will hold a combined 60% stake, while Unitree and Fanjie Intelligence will each hold 20%. The public notice period runs until November 13.
At its TOPS DAY 2026 Global Open Day, Topstar launched Star, a full-size industrial bipedal humanoid robot. The robot stands 172 cm tall, weighs 72 kg, has a dual-arm payload of 10 kg, and features 7-axis humanoid arms with cross-axis wrists.
Kassow Robots, Joytek, Bosch Rexroth and Reply have jointly developed an automated kitting system for automotive manufacturing that combines a Joytek AMR carrying two Kassow KR1018 seven-axis collaborative robotic arms with a unified control architecture.
The ARM Institute announced last week that its member consortium has expanded to more than 500 organizations across the U.S., encompassing thousands of experts. The institute works with the consortium and the U.S. government to advance U.S. manufacturing leadership through the adoption of robotics and AI; members have participated in hundreds of technology projects and supported initiatives such as RoboticsCareer.org. The 10th annual member meeting will be held November 17-19 in Pittsburgh, with registration closing November 13.
Robia and Jojo, humanoid robots developed by Pakistani engineer Syed Osama Aziz using locally manufactured parts, work as food servers at The Sicilian restaurant in Karachi; upon reaching the table, customers must take the food themselves or staff assist with serving. The robots were developed by his robotics company Cobot, with some electronic components imported from abroad, and currently lack visual recognition capability. Aziz plans to add camera image processing in the future so the robots can recognize faces and remember customers' previous orders.
Kinetix AI's SMASH high-dynamic humanoid table tennis system was exhibited at the Hang Seng Bank booth at HKFW 2026, where players from the Hang Seng Academy played matches against it. The original article did not disclose metrics such as the system's degrees of freedom, battery life, or match success rate.
On November 8, the 10,000th personal robot from Shangwei New Materials' Qiyuan Robotics officially rolled off the production line. Previously, the 5,000th unit rolled off the line on October 25; within 14 days, cumulative output rose from 5,000 to 10,000 units, achieving 10,000-unit-scale mass production.
Newcomer has partnered with venture capital firm Felicis to launch the Emergent list, in which founders of companies such as Runway, ElevenLabs, Glean, and Fireworks AI nominate 29 AI startups worth watching, covering 8 tracks: software development and delivery, Agent Infra, Personal Agent, enterprise automation, AI4S, AIGC, embodied AI, and industrial services.
The 2025-2026 China Mobile Robot Biennial Innovation Awards has officially announced its shortlist, divided into a robot body category and a supply chain category, with selections based on technical indicators, application data, customer feedback, and expert review. The final award results will be revealed at the dinner of the 2026 (9th) Mobile Robot Industry Development Annual Conference, which is scheduled to be held in Hangzhou from December 9 to 11, 2026.
After interviewing several frontline investors and heads of investment and financing at world model companies, QuantumBit found that financing in the world model sector cooled markedly in the second half of the year, with only a handful of projects that top funds are willing to back, and the window for raising money on concepts has narrowed. Data from Cailian Press's Chuangtoutong shows that in October there were only 5 primary-market financing events related to physical AI and world models, a marked decrease from before. Capital is concentrating in teams with existing research track records, such as Inverse Matrix, Wuyuan Technology, Ziran Yizhi, LiberAI and Ant Lingbo, and announcements lagging behind actual deals has also created the illusion that the market is still hot.
At the ninth China International Import Expo (CIIE), Linde Material Handling exhibited the compact pallet-handling robot L-MATIC, which demonstrated an automated workflow in unmanned operation. L-MATIC weighs 850 kg and has a load capacity of up to 1.2 tons; it features an ultra-narrow body design with built-in laser navigation and a multi-sensor fusion scheme. On site, a "threading the needle" segment, in which a thin steel wire at the front of the fork passes through a small-diameter ring, demonstrated positioning and control precision. Linde also presented KION's multimedia interactive software system, which can automatically generate suitable logistics solutions based on customer operating conditions and logistics needs.
At CeMAT ASIA 2026, Aipula New Energy exhibited four product lines: AGV smart chargers, lithium-battery smart chargers, OBC onboard chargers, and integrated heavy-truck DC charging piles, offering full-scenario charging solutions for AGV/AMR and new-energy industrial vehicles. The AGV smart chargers support brush-plate ground charging, side charging, tail-plug, and wireless multi-structure configurations, cover voltage levels from 24V to 300V, and achieve conversion efficiency above 95%. Its charging terminals have cumulatively been deployed more than 500,000 units worldwide and are operating at customer sites including Heli, BYD, LiuGong, XCMG, Sany, and Hangcha Intelligent.
The WeChat Pay smart operations robot made its in-store debut at Guangdong 7-ELEVEN's 2,000th store (at Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters campus), handling greeting, shopping guidance, and ordering; customers scan to pay themselves after choosing. The robot is built on Tencent Hunyuan, using the model's multi-turn dialogue and Agent capabilities to assist with daily store sales, payment collection, and operations, and features Tencent Tianlai inside audio to hear users clearly in noisy environments.
The first CMG World Robot Mount Tai Climbing Competition opened in Tai'an, Shandong, with nearly 90 teams competing on a real mountain course from Hongmen to Zhongtianmen featuring 3,100 steps and a 600-meter elevation gain. In the main humanoid robot race, the Zhishen Lingyue team won in 27 min 26 sec, and the same team also took the "Brave the Peak Award" in the challenge segment with 55 min 34 sec. The legged robot race champion was the Beijing Lingyi Technology team (43 min 41 sec), and the legged robot load-bearing race champion was the Lingsi Intelligence Lingshi team (400 points, 1 hr 51 min 29 sec).
NASA announced a series of Moon Base contracts and mission updates, covering commercial robotic cargo delivery, the nuclear-powered rover PROMISE, launch and orbital transfer services, and lunar surface infrastructure.
Robot integration is enabling mid-sized manufacturers to achieve high-precision production with compact, low-cost solutions, without overhauling the entire production line. Torneria Novoletto uses the SCHUNK R-C2 automation concept, combining gripping components with robot loading and unloading.