At Tesla's Q3 2026 earnings call, Musk revealed that the company is building a robot training system called Optimus Academy and plans to manufacture about 10,000 to 20,000 Optimus robots so they can generate training data through autonomous practice.
NASA has announced the Artemis III mission plan, which in 2027 will launch an Orion spacecraft on SLS with four astronauts into low Earth orbit, where they will separately dock with test articles of Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX's Starship Version 3.
In July, the FCC determined that certain foreign-made advanced robots pose cybersecurity and competition risks, and restricted imports of new models such as mobile robots and legged robots. Leaders from Vecna Robotics, Locus Robotics, and A3 will discuss the ruling's practical impact on design, deployment, and long-term support in a free webinar on October 27, 2026, at 2 p.m. ET. The webinar is sponsored by Vecna Robotics, and an on-demand replay will be provided to registrants after the event.
Vecna Robotics, Locus Robotics and A3 will hold a free webinar on October 27, 2026, to discuss the impact of FCC restrictions on imports of new advanced robots, including mobile robots and legged robots, on automation buyers. Topics will cover the types of robots affected, design, deployment and long-term support, supply chain resilience, and the questions buyers should ask suppliers. Vecna Robotics says its systems are manufactured in the United States and are not directly affected by the ruling.
Generative Bionics announced this week plans to build a multi-site Physical AI Data Factory in Italy, with the first hub covering 5,000 square meters and expected to begin operations in the fourth quarter of 2027.
Intel Capital, citing a report by Interesting Engineering, said Figure 03 walked 348 miles on a treadmill over nine consecutive days, logging 1.2 million steps in total. Figure CEO adcock_brett said the test began as a side project aimed at putting stress on the robot and exposing hardware failures, and that it tests reliability better than short demonstrations.
Dexory announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to advance physical AI in warehousing: DexoryView Storage Health integrates NVIDIA Cosmos, using foundation model reasoning to identify storage anomalies such as opened boxes, misaligned pallets, and misplaced goods.
FORT Robotics announced that it has received about $20 million in new committed funding from existing investors, with Tiger Global leading about $10 million and Mark Cuban Companies participating. The round is expected to close this week.
Citing uncertainty over the scope of the US ban on foreign-made robots, Intel applied for and received an FCC waiver allowing it to continue using certain foreign-made automated guided vehicles (AGVs) at its US chip fabs for one year. The FCC issued an order approving the request on October 22, while also allowing Intel to make specific hardware, software, and firmware changes to the robots to maintain operation and upkeep. The ban mainly targets new types of mobile robots such as humanoid robots and robot vacuums; imports of robots already approved for sale in the US are unaffected.
The 140th Canton Fair (70th anniversary) set up a service robot zone in its Phase 1 "Advanced Manufacturing" program, with cleaning and delivery robots running live demonstrations along the exhibition hall corridors, alongside humanoid platforms, dexterous hands, wearable exoskeletons, and inspection robots for hazardous environments. International procurement teams no longer focus only on scripted demos; they are now assessing whether robots can reliably handle full-shift commercial and industrial workloads. More than 11,000 exhibitors at this session are manufacturing enterprises including national-level specialized and sophisticated SMEs, and 64% of exhibitors use industrial internet or AI solutions.
At the "2026 World Physical AI Conference and Partner Ecosystem Conference" hosted by Unitree Robotics, Wang Xingxing said the ChatGPT moment for embodied intelligence could arrive as early as 2027 or 2028, and proposed a "double 80% standard": completing 80% of tasks in 80% of unfamiliar scenarios using only voice or text instructions.
Kardex has expanded its AutoStore automated storage and picking system services in Canada; over the past five years it has deployed dozens of systems locally, involving thousands of robots and millions of bins. The company says its AutoStore deployments can increase picking throughput by up to 300%, reduce footprint by up to 80%, achieve 99.9% picking accuracy, and go live in as little as six months from contract signing.
Tesla's operating profit in the third quarter of 2026 halved year over year to $720 million. Ahead of the earnings call, Musk confirmed that the boards of Tesla and SpaceX have each formed special committees to evaluate a merger. The two companies have a combined valuation of about $3.5 trillion.
HardTech interviewed multiple investors and FAs to map how local state capital is entering the embodied AI sector and how the landscape is diverging. IT Juzi data shows that in the first half of 2026, domestic embodied AI financing events exceeded 300, up 137% year on year, with disclosed totals reaching 93.5 billion yuan; state capital participated in 42% of large deals. Interviewees said state capital typically lets market-based institutions set prices first and then follows in. After Unitree's listing, its market value halved, and tightening of the 18C rules has weakened IPO expectations for second- and third-tier players; financing pressure may be released in a concentrated way after November 2026.
Former OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil announced that his AI scientific research startup Warp Sciences has emerged from stealth, completing a $215 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a post-money valuation of $865 million. The company plans to use AI, robotics, and automated laboratories to help pharmaceutical companies screen molecular variants in drug development; the team currently has about 20 people and is already equipped with hardware including robotic arms and AI chips.
At the CEIC exhibition, embodied AI robots demonstrated progress from single actions to multi-step tasks, relying on cloud-edge-device collaborative scheduling: motion control and safe obstacle avoidance stay local, task understanding and complex planning are handled by the edge or cloud, and super nodes accelerate multi-chip collaborative inference through high-bandwidth interconnects. At the CGC conference, GCC released 10 industry consensus outcomes, 9 group standards and technical specifications, and awarded AIDC certification to 14 intelligent computing data centers under the first batch of 7 organizations, with a cumulative IT power scale of about 1.45 GW.
Dema Technology announced a plan to issue convertible bonds to raise no more than 701.515 million yuan, to be used for five directions including expanding core components for intelligent logistics equipment and building an intelligent logistics equipment and embodied intelligence system R&D center. Of this, 230.7756 million yuan is planned for the embodied intelligence system R&D center, about one-third of the total fundraising, to carry out full-stack technology R&D for embodied intelligence robots aimed at the logistics industry, and to concurrently develop new logistics equipment products such as the M-series ultra-many-compartment sorting system and the V-Bot vertical two-way vehicle.
Keda Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. has submitted a listing application to the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with Huatai International and Guoyuan International as joint sponsors. This is its second filing within the year. According to the prospectus, proceeds will be directed toward strengthening technical advantages in its two business segments—power equipment and energy storage, and robotics—AI enablement, expansion of sales networks and production capacity, and R&D in key AIDC equipment and quantum technology integrated with power grid equipment.
LPP, a Polish apparel group, is partnering with Hai Robotics through its logistics subsidiary to deploy more than 1,500 shelf-climbing warehouse robots at a new e-commerce warehouse in Tczew, northern Poland, the largest deployment of its kind for Hai Robotics to date. Beijing-based humanoid robotics company Songyan Dynamics is reported to have confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO, aiming to raise several hundred million US dollars, with a listing possible as early as 2027.
At the 2026 iFlytek 1024 Developer Festival, Lingdong General released the iFlyBot-WAM industrial world action model and the LindenBot-Harness execution organization system, and debuted the LDU environmental data collection solution. The LDB embodied intelligence general-purpose robot has obtained CR certification and EU CE-MD market access, and in B2B warehouse picking has validated an operational path covering autonomous movement between shelves, recognition of goods in different poses, and flexible grasping. Its data collection, training, and inference robot LDT had previously completed validation in small-item feeding scenarios.
According to Bloomberg, Beijing robotics company Songyan Dynamics has confidentially filed a Hong Kong IPO application, planning to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially list as early as next year. The company completed a nearly 1 billion yuan Series B round in March this year, led by CATL-affiliated Chendao Capital, has completed nine funding rounds in total, and has completed its conversion to a joint-stock company. On the product side, it has formed two major series, bipedal humanoid and bionic humanoid, including the N2, which is 1.2m tall with 18 degrees of freedom, and the E1, which is 1.36m tall, as well as the personal robot Bumi Xiaobumi, priced at 9,998 yuan.
On October 23, Unitree Technology (688836) sealed its 20cm limit-up, with total market capitalization returning above 250 billion yuan, and cumulative gains of more than 54% over the past 6 trading days. The article attributes this rally to nine government departments promoting the implementation of embodied intelligence in the commerce sector, the approval of the first six national standards for humanoid robots, and the signals on mass production, small physical AI models, and computing power clusters released at the World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference on October 22.
The World Model Ecosystem Partnership Track, specially established by the 5th Pazhou Algorithm Competition, has entered the finals stage and is scheduled to conclude in mid-November, focusing on two tracks: the human-centric world model and autonomous driving for unmanned mining transport. The human-centric track requires models to infer, from video options, the human behaviors that cause state transitions in household scenes, with a 30-to-1 selection in the preliminary round and a 10-to-1 selection in the finals, and each team is limited to two A800 GPUs for inference; the intelligent driving track uses real multimodal datasets provided by Tage Zhixing to assess detection, segmentation scoring, and safety, efficiency, and path completion.
On October 20, Schaeffler's Taicang embodied intelligence robot digital factory opened, with 5 ROKAE Zhuxing H series wheeled humanoid robots participating in the intelligent assembly line for tasks including bin handling, parts sorting, press-fitting and screw assembly, functional testing, marking and packaging, producing joint module components including actuators for next-generation humanoid robots.
Why it matters: The original text provides the specific processes and technical configuration of complete machines entering a mass-production line, helping readers judge the current usable boundaries of wheeled humanoid robots in real manufacturing scenarios.
SpaceX's superintelligence business revenue reached $7.56 billion in Q3, about 52% of total revenue. Newly deployed compute pays for itself in under a year at current prices. Anthropic rents all of Colossus 1's compute, and Google has been paying $920 million per month for computing capacity since October.
At the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference, Unitree Technology founder Wang Xingxing judged that as soon as the end of this year or next year, users may be able to use a single voice command to have a Unitree humanoid robot independently complete household tasks such as tidying a room.
FORVIA and Great Wall Motor recently formally signed the Global Strategic Cooperation Framework Agreement, extending their cooperation from China to key global markets. The cooperation areas cover innovative R&D, manufacturing excellence, supply chain resilience, sustainable development, and talent development. The two parties will support Great Wall Motor's international growth and accelerate the global rollout of safer, smarter, and more sustainable mobility solutions.
Unitree Technology held the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference in Hangzhou. Founder Wang Xingxing said in a speech that physical AI may see a major breakthrough within one to three years, and said GPT-6 Astra enabled Unitree robots to complete painting and Go-playing experiments under zero-training conditions. He also announced Unitree's in-development Physical AI Robot Self-Evolution V1 system, which lets AI agents write code autonomously, test and train in simulated environments, and validate in real environments, forming a continuous iteration loop; he hopes Unitree robots can enter ordinary households by the end of this year or next year.
FANUC and Hitachi announced a strategic partnership on September 30, under which Hitachi will provide AI technology and FANUC will provide industrial robots to jointly validate and commercially deploy Physical AI. In the validation phase, Hitachi's Ibaraki-area factories will serve as Customer Zero, allowing AI to continuously learn on real production lines the shop-floor rules for grasping parts of different shapes and for setup changes during product changeovers. From fiscal 2027, the partners will jointly expand to global customers in nine industries, including semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and shipbuilding.
ByteDance has chosen to enter the embodied intelligence track with an infrastructure positioning, not building robot bodies but instead laying out physical AI data supply. Zhang Yiming is personally supervising a real-time spatial video generation large model, expected to launch as early as October, used to generate simulated visual data that conforms to physical laws; Seed Robotics, originally led by Li Hang, has been merged into Zhou Chang's management scope, combined with multimodal interaction and world models to achieve a technical closed loop and data reuse.
On October 22, the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference was held in Hangzhou. In his keynote speech, Unitree's Wang Xingxing judged that for embodied intelligence to pass the ChatGPT moment, the core challenge is not whether the model is smart enough, but the alignment between the input and output of AI models and real robots.
JD.com plans to create 100,000 robot repair technician jobs over the next 5 years, promoting the transition of frontline personnel such as couriers, and has reached after-sales maintenance cooperation with nearly 100 robotics companies including AgiBot, DEEP Robotics, and EngineAI, while launching the JoyRobocare brand for the European market.
At the 2026 AWS Automotive and Manufacturing Industry Summit, Ozgur Tohumcu, AWS Global General Manager for Automotive and Manufacturing, said physical AI is moving from proof of concept into production environments, and agentic systems are beginning to actually execute tasks rather than only displaying data.
A delegation from the UAE National Experts Program - Artificial Intelligence (NEP-AI) recently visited Shanghai for an exchange with Aihuanshen Technology, focusing on enterprise sovereign intelligence and intelligent city operations. Aihuanshen Technology introduced its enterprise-grade AI operating system Agentrix, demonstrated applications in intelligent office work, business decision analysis, and intelligent urban governance, and shared research progress on world behavior models. The two sides jointly explored pathways for supporting industrial development and organizational operations with secure and controllable intelligence capabilities.
Kazakhstan is moving from AI infrastructure planning to deployment. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang visited Astana on October 23 and announced an investment in Kazakhstan-founded startup Higgsfield AI.
An official from the Ministry of Commerce's Department of Consumer Promotion briefed on China's consumer market in the first three quarters of 2026, noting strong demand for green, smart, and health-related products. According to Ministry of Commerce big data, in the first three quarters, sales on key platforms of smart glasses rose 1.1 times, exoskeleton assist devices rose 46.4%, embodied intelligent robots rose 22.6%, and organic food rose 6.4%. Separately, data from the China Automobile Dealers Association showed that the retail penetration rate of new energy passenger vehicles reached 67.0% in September.
DEEP Robotics has updated its prospectus: revenue in the first half of 2026 was 259 million yuan, up 117.67% year on year, but net profit attributable to shareholders showed a loss of 8.81 million yuan. In 2025 the company sold 2,531 quadruped robots, 377 wheeled-legged robots and 1 humanoid robot; in the first half of 2026 humanoid robot sales rose to 6 units, generating 2.79 million yuan in revenue.
FoST Future Narrative published an analysis of the financing and commercialization landscape in the AI 3D sector: as of the end of September, three companies founded by people born in the 1990s—VAST, Meshy, and Yingmou—had raised a combined total of over RMB 8 billion within half a year. VAST raised over RMB 5 billion in half a year and reached a valuation of USD 2 billion; Meshy completed a USD 400 million financing round in July 2026 at a post-money valuation of USD 1.5 billion, and its ARR surpassed USD 100 million at the end of September.
DeepSeek is reportedly raising about 100 billion yuan (approximately $15 billion) in a new funding round, with Tencent and CATL as the largest investors; the funds will go toward model training, computing infrastructure, and talent recruitment. Tesla's Q3 GAAP net income was $787 million, down 43% year over year, with 486,532 vehicles delivered. Tencent customer service said WeChat has been adapted for Apple's foldable phone iPhone Duo, and WeChat Input Method has also been updated to version 4.0.0 with full adaptation.
KION GROUP AG has lowered its fiscal 2026 guidance because orders in its industrial trucks and services business fell short of expectations, and has postponed its mid-term earnings target, originally planned for achievement by 2027, to after 2027. The group expects 2026 revenue of EUR 11.45 billion to EUR 11.75 billion and adjusted EBIT of EUR 815 million to EUR 875 million, both below previous forecasts. Preliminary third-quarter revenue was about EUR 2.835 billion; the formal report is scheduled for release on October 29.