Maxtronics has partnered with the "Dessine Moi la High Tech" association to bring the NAO robot into a pediatric oncology ward, where it regularly takes part in ward interaction activities. While accompanying the children, NAO also brings parents warm and relaxed moments. Maxtronics said it hopes to support the association at its own scale and create more meaningful moments of interaction for children in hospitals.
Vita Power announced that the Vbot Super Robot Dog has integrated with the AI Agent OpenClaw, with OTA rollout beginning today; all beta users can select "Lab" on the main screen of the "Vbot" App to converse with the robot assistant.
Skild AI announced the official opening of an office in Bengaluru, India, its first international expansion beyond California and Pennsylvania in the US. The company aims to build an "omni-bodied" general-purpose brain that lets any robot perform any task; it chose Bengaluru to recruit robotics engineers and AI scientists and to strengthen the infrastructure for large-scale real-world deployment.
At the Beijing TV Spring Festival Gala, RealMan's RealBOT wheeled folding robot used remote teleoperation to open a refrigerator, take out soy sauce, pour soy sauce, and stir dumpling filling; it was the only company among the participating recording enterprises to complete on-site work via remote teleoperation. Its integrated joint module has an MTBF of 50,000 hours, opening the refrigerator door requires an instantaneous torque of about 14 kilograms, pouring soy sauce relies on visual guidance and high-frequency posture correction to achieve zero spills, and mixing the filling is controlled by a remote "isomorphic arm" that records data to feed back into training models for the remote operation network (GLN).
General-purpose embodied intelligent robotics company Wujie Dynamics announced the completion of an over 200 million yuan Angel+ funding round, with existing shareholders Sequoia China, Linear Capital, and Hillhouse Venture Capital increasing their investment, and new institutions including Shenzhen Capital Group and Innovation Works joining. A third round is nearing completion, and cumulative funding will reach 800 million yuan.
Why it matters: The original article disclosed specific progress including the funding scale, shareholder structure, and a self-developed computing platform, which can be used to assess this new company's resources and pace of implementation.
In a 2026 Chinese New Year message, the president of Kabaiyi announced the company's three-year strategic development plan for 2026-2028, setting a goal of achieving over 10 billion yuan in revenue from core business products by 2028. The company will stabilize core business products such as automotive cables and high-speed copper cables, accelerate expansion into overseas markets including the Americas and Southeast Asia, and leverage the advantages of its Shanghai operations center to strengthen talent management. The company also announced it will quickly enter the two new tracks of robotics and commercial space and break through core technologies. These are all company planning goals that have yet to be realized.
RoboScience has announced the completion of a Pre-A funding round of several hundred million yuan, led by Puhua Capital, with participation from Fortune Capital, Changshi Capital, Hong Kong Huike Innovation, and Tianqi Capital, while existing shareholders including China Merchants Venture and Zero One Venture continued to increase their investment. The funds will mainly be used to deepen its core VLOA large model technology.
People's Daily reported that Dobot Technology's humanoid robot sold popcorn at a cinema in Shenzhen K11 mall, working 14 consecutive hours in a single day, completing over 1,000 cups per day on average with zero errors throughout. The robot carries a self-developed end-to-end model that integrates visual perception, language understanding and motion generation, and can autonomously diagnose deviations and replan its actions. Dobot says the self-development rate of its robot's key components exceeds 90%, and that it has achieved mass-production delivery in multiple complex industrial scenarios.
IPLUSMOBOT will hold live demonstrations at Booth C704 at Smart Factory + Automation World 2026, March 4-6 at Coex in Seoul.
IPLUSMOBOT will participate in Automation Expo South, held March 12-14, 2026, at the Chennai Trade Centre in Chennai, India, at booth B24, showcasing the FOLA DN1416 AGV and EMMA 400K AMR.
Apptronik announced the completion of a $520 million Series A-X extension round; combined with its oversubscribed $415 million initial Series A in 2025, the total exceeds $935 million, bringing cumulative funding to nearly $1 billion.
Why it matters: The official press release provides first-hand information such as the financing structure and valuation multiples, which readers can use to understand the pace of Apptronik's mass-production expansion and its capital backing.
IPLUSMOBOT will take part in Automation Thailand 2026 from March 11-13 at BITEC in Bangkok, booth D121. On site it will showcase the EMMA 400L lightweight AMR (rapid deployment within 1 hour) and the EMMA 400K standard AMR (400 kg payload, fast charging, all-day endurance), and will offer localized solutions for Southeast Asian factory layouts and tropical climates, targeting the electronics, automotive, food processing, and logistics industries.
Yunqi Capital released a research report analyzing the capability gains and deployment boundaries of embodied intelligence in manufacturing and logistics scenarios relative to traditional industrial robots. Traditional industrial robots can reach 80–150 cycles per minute, while current VLA end-to-end execution remains at the 10–15 cycles per minute level, making it difficult to meet sub-millimeter precision requirements. Among deployment directions, inspection is one of the most practically feasible, material handling has the greatest potential for scale, and precision assembly has the highest barrier; the viable form is Agent architecture scheduling plus vertical-domain operation model execution.
Qiongche Intelligence announced the completion of a Series A funding round of several hundred million yuan. Investors include Puhua Capital, C Capital, Sea Limited, Prosperity7 Ventures, and multiple other overseas industrial parties and domestic institutions. The funds will be used for embodied brain R&D iteration and multi-scenario commercialization.
Why it matters: The report covers the funding amount, investor composition, and commercialization progress, which can be used to assess the capital and implementation pace of the embodied brain sector.
Mentee Robotics has released a teaser for the Mentee Bot V3.1 humanoid robot, disclosing full specifications: 175 cm tall, 70 kg in weight, 1.5 m/s speed, up to 25 kg payload, and 40 degrees of freedom.
From February 2 to 4, 2026, at the invitation of the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Bureau, Dobot (DOBOT) appeared at the APEC PPSTI visit and exhibition event at Haixinsha in Guangzhou. On site, it showcased the DOBOT Atom humanoid robot autonomously selling popcorn, the Rover X1 quadruped robot dog, MagicianE6 AI automatic painting, and the CRA collaborative robot safety skin solution. Its robot products have covered more than 100 countries and regions worldwide, with shipments exceeding 100,000 units.
FieldAI describes the autonomous deployment of its Field Foundation Models (FFMs) with Boston Dynamics' quadruped robot Spot on construction sites, requiring no GPS, cloud connection, prior maps, or pre-planned routes, and able to carry out inspection, mapping, and monitoring tasks around the clock. The article states that over the past two years this has covered construction sites in Asia, Europe, and North America, cutting customers' inspection and documentation time by more than 90%, with data able to flow into BIM and digital twin systems, and several pilots having expanded into fleet-level deployments.
Humanoid has released KinetIQ, a proprietary AI framework for end-to-end unified orchestration of humanoid robot fleets in industrial, service, and home scenarios; a single system can control robots with different body and end-effector forms.
Wandercraft co-founder and CEO Matthieu Masselin argues in an article that humanoid robots should aim for "human-machine compatibility" rather than "looking like humans." The company's robots kept a headless design when deployed at the Renault factory, with cameras initially located on the lower abdomen and now moved between the shoulders; the company is developing end effectors and manipulation capabilities for its next-generation product. He believes de-anthropomorphizing can reduce psychological friction and speed up deployment.
Linear Capital released Linear Quarterly, reviewing the progress of portfolio companies over the past quarter in financing, products, partnerships, and industry recognition. On financing, Wujie Dynamics completed a 300 million yuan angel round, Digu Robotics completed a B round of several hundred million US dollars, and White Rhino's cumulative financing for the full year of 2025 exceeded 100 million US dollars.
Singapore robotics company Strutt officially launched the Strutt ev¹ smart everyday vehicle at CES 2026; the product previously won a CES 2026 Best of Innovation Award. The ev¹ features the evSense sensing system, which combines LiDAR, cameras, time-of-flight and ultrasonic sensors for 360-degree environmental perception, and supports Co-Pilot/Co-Pilot+ assist modes, Pathfinder autonomous navigation, and Waypoints natural-language command navigation based on a large language model.
Singapore robotics company Strutt announced that Super Early Bird pre-orders for its smart everyday vehicle ev¹ opened on December 5, and the company will officially launch the product on January 5 at CES 2026.
Strutt held the Strutt Day technology showcase, giving media and partners their first hands-on experience with the STRUTT ev¹ and building momentum for its official debut at CES 2026.
Strutt's first product, the ev¹ smart personal mobility vehicle, won the Best of Innovation Award in the CES 2026 Vehicle Tech & Advanced Mobility category. Strutt says it is the youngest company to win in this category, and the award coincides with its 2025 Red Dot: Luminary design award.
Strutt Inc.'s personal mobility product Strutt ev¹ has received both the Best of the Best and Luminary honors from the Red Dot Design Concept Award; the Luminary is awarded to only one project each year.
Strutt founder Tony Hong was interviewed by CGTN America at CES 2025, introducing the personal mobility product Strutt ev¹. The product is equipped with two LiDAR units at the front, enabling 360-degree environmental perception, building a map of the surroundings and detecting obstacles and cliffs to avoid or navigate around them.
Strutt will appear on Channel News Asia (CNA) on December 10. Ahead of this, a CNA film crew visited its Singapore headquarters, where founder Tony shared the mission to build the smartest, safest, and easiest-to-use personal mobility products. The team demonstrated an early engineering prototype of the Strutt ev¹ on site, showcasing the core platform technologies Quad-drive System and evSense intelligent driving.
Strutt announced that it will globally debut its first smart mobility product, Strutt ev¹, at CES 2025. Strutt is a team of smart product experts focused on advanced sensing, autonomous driving, and hardware design, aiming to address population aging and urban environment adaptation issues and to save users time and effort.
Linear Capital reposted LatePost's interview with Tashi Intelligence founder Chen Yilun, who laid out a technical path that differs from the mainstream: he rejects the VLA architecture that grows an action head on top of a VLM, and instead develops its own AWE (AI World Engine), aiming to represent physical quantities such as time, space, and force; it has also abandoned teleoperation data collection in favor of a self-developed collection device combining a wearable glove and a first-person-view camera.
Why it matters: The interview systematically presents technical judgments and a data approach that differ from the mainstream VLA path, giving readers a basis for understanding the specific grounds of the divergence in embodied AI approaches.
LimX Dynamics announced the completion of a $200 million Series B funding round. Investors include Stone Venture, Oriental Fortune Capital and other institutions, as well as strategic industry investors such as JD.com and Zhongding Group, while existing shareholders including Shangqi Capital and NIO Capital continued to increase their investment. The company said it will increase R&D and market investment, focusing on three major capabilities: body hardware, cerebellum foundation models, and an embodied Agentic OS, and mentioned the TRON 2 multi-form embodied robot and the LimX COSA embodied intelligent agent OS system released in the past two months.
Why it matters: The funding was officially announced by the company itself, with specific investors listed and the three major technology directions the funds will be invested in as well as recent product background explained, making the information complete and verifiable.
MBZUAI and Minerva Humanoids announced a two-year strategic research partnership framework to develop next-generation humanoid robots for safety-critical scenarios in the energy sector, with the goal of reducing the need for personnel to enter high-risk areas such as refineries. Research directions include multimodal perception foundation models, computer vision and reinforcement learning, and digital twin simulation for pre-deployment validation; robot autonomy spans from teleoperation to fully autonomous execution. MBZUAI students will join the joint project team to take part in R&D and testing.
RobCo announced the close of a $100 million Series C round, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Exor's Lingotto Innovation, with participation from Sequoia Capital and others.
Why it matters: The original article provides the use of funds, business model, and background on key customers, giving readers a basis to understand this industrial robotics company's expansion path.
Wandercraft announced the appointment of Permobil CEO Chuck Witkowski to its board of directors as the company shifts from technological innovation to global commercialization. Witkowski has more than 20 years of leadership experience at medical device companies and has led Investor AB-backed Permobil since 2019, managing a global team of 2,000 people.
Fauna Robotics has released Sprout, its first humanoid robot platform, shipping the same day in a Creator Edition aimed at developers, researchers, and creators building embodied intelligence applications.
Why it matters: The company has released an official lightweight humanoid platform for developers, detailing its safety design approach, configuration list, and SDK capabilities, which can help readers assess its usability in shared-space scenarios.
On January 27, 2026, Fauna Robotics launched Sprout, a humanoid robot platform positioned for human living spaces such as homes, schools, and offices, rather than factory environments. Sprout is 3.5 feet tall, lightweight, soft to the touch, and moves quietly, with no pinch points or sharp edges. It has an expressive face that can convey intent, with a focus on physical safety and social approachability.
DeepWay completed a Pre-IPO funding round with total proceeds of 1.177 billion yuan, led by Puhua Capital with participation from ABC Impact, Sunwoda, Lenovo Capital and others; the funds will mainly be used for the operation and development of the group's core business.
Figure AI has released Helix 02, extending control from the upper body to the entire humanoid robot and enabling continuous, integrated autonomous tasks combining locomotion and manipulation. It adds a new System 0 whole-body controller, trained on over 1,000 hours of human motion data and simulation-based reinforcement learning, which outputs joint commands at 1 kHz via a 10M-parameter network, replacing roughly 109,504 lines of hand-written C++ code; System 1 connects head-mounted vision, palm cameras, fingertip touch sensing, and proprioception, outputting whole-body joint targets at 200 Hz.
Why it matters: The original text provides details on Helix 02's architectural layers, training data, and demonstration tasks, allowing readers to understand the specific implementation approach for full-body autonomous control.
At year-end, Linear Capital and its founder and CEO Wang Huai received industry awards from several institutions. Wang Huai was named to Global Entrepreneurship Week's "2025 Angel Investors TOP30," CVSource's "2025 Best Early-Stage Investors TOP50," and Jiazi Guangnian's "Early-Stage Tech Catchers TOP30."
The Hunan Provincial Department of Education recently announced its 2025 project approval list, and the "Optoelectronic Perception and Intelligent Agent Collaborative Control Laboratory," led by Changsha Institute of Technology and jointly applied for by Proxima Technology, was approved. The laboratory focuses on three directions: high-performance optoelectronic semiconductor devices and testing, perception and target recognition in complex environments, and collaborative control of mobile robots. Proxima Technology will provide technical validation and scenario application support to help move results from the laboratory to industry.
Proxima Technology was selected for the Hunan SME Digital Transformation Typical Cases (2025) list announced by the Hunan Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology, with its "'Dual Middle Platform - Multi-Application' Empowering Advanced Computing Enterprises' Digital Transformation Project," appearing as a representative enterprise in the electronic information industry. The company says the architecture connects data links and integrates security capabilities into operational processes, improving the efficiency of robot product R&D and production and protecting key data; it will explore the application of agent technology in multiple areas in the future.