Pollen Robotics' Reachy Mini put on an NFC wizard hat and transformed into "Reachy Mini the Sorcerer," singing a Halloween song made with Suno. The video is live-action, not AI-generated, and the table can be seen shaking in the frame. The wizard hat accessory is not yet available in the store.
A team at CMU's Robotics Institute has proposed the Wiggle and Go system, in which a robot first briefly wiggles a rope or cable while an overhead camera records how the waves propagate; a computer vision algorithm then tracks the motion and estimates the object's physical properties, which are used to plan subsequent actions without repeated trial and error. The model is trained entirely in simulation, and properties are then estimated from the motion of real ropes being wiggled to improve prediction accuracy on real hardware. The research has been accepted to the 2026 Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) and will be presented next month in Austin; it is partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Why it matters: The method estimates a rope's physical properties from a single wiggle and then plans actions accordingly, offering a transferable approach to deformable object manipulation.
NASA has released the 2026 edition of its ISAM State of Play, a 368-page document recording in-orbit servicing, assembly, and manufacturing capabilities across 11 functional areas, covering areas such as robotic operations, refueling, and structural assembly. Published since 2021, the document includes only hardware that already has a ground prototype or an in-orbit demonstration; concept proposals must wait for the following year's review. The 2026 edition adds developer profiles and facility information, and is available for download on NASA.gov.
NASA has opened the "Journey to Titan" campaign, inviting the public to sign up to have their names written onto a microchip flying aboard the Dragonfly rotorcraft to Titan, along with a personalized digital boarding pass; registration closes January 15, 2027. Dragonfly is being assembled at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), with launch planned for 2028 and arrival in 2034, when it will fly to different locations on Titan to search for clues to prebiotic chemistry.
NASA's "Viaje a Titán" campaign is inviting the public to submit their names; selected names will be written onto a microchip and flown to Saturn's moon Titan aboard the Dragonfly rotorcraft, and participants will also receive a personalized electronic boarding pass.
Daimon Robotics announced the completion of a strategic funding round of hundreds of millions, led by Ant Group with existing shareholders oversubscribing, just two months after its hundred-million-yuan Series A. The company also launched its tactile-anchored world model Daimon-TWM, with parameter scale at the 10B level, capable of real-time inference on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 platform, and claims that its average success rate on contact-intensive manipulation tasks is twice that of π0.5. Daimon has also built the tactile full-modality dataset Daimon-Infinity; after the first 10,000 hours of data were open-sourced, it received nearly 5 million downloads on the ModelScope community.
Why it matters: Beyond the funding news, the original article also details the architecture and data-collection layout of the tactile world model Daimon-TWM, which helps in understanding the technical proposition of the tactile approach.
Reachy Mini is about to launch a clip-on NFC accessory that switches between characters by detecting NFC tags. Users can also create their own personalities for the robot or develop other uses based on tag detection. The accessory is currently in the testing recruitment phase, and sign-ups are available through the official list.
Pollen Robotics set up a small track in its office for a 3-lap showdown between the Reachy Mini Hoverboard and Microduck on roller skates. Microduck was piloted by Coco with a game controller, and Reachy Mini by Rémi via the Reachy Mini mobile app on iOS and Android. The race video shows which of the two robots crosses the finish line first.
Pollen Robotics has introduced three new features for Reachy Mini: a wheeled Hoverboard chassis that lets the robot move around and explore, Android and iOS mobile apps for setup and control directly from a phone, and NFC hats for switching personalities and unlocking new interactions and apps. The company says these updates offer more freedom and creative space for exploring physical AI.
Pollen Robotics (part of Hugging Face) has launched a Hoverboard two-wheel accessory for Reachy Mini, enabling Reachy Mini Wireless to move around and explore, and allowing users to drive it remotely with virtual joysticks via an iOS/Android mobile app, control its head movements, and view live video.
Pollen Robotics released a tutorial demonstrating how to install the NFC Accessories Kit in the head of Reachy Mini Wireless, enabling magnetic accessory detection with just four screws and no glue. Once installed, the robot can automatically recognize NFC accessories placed on its head, and each accessory can unlock a different personality in the Reachy Mini conversation app or trigger custom actions. The kit also includes extra NFC tags and magnets for users to create their own accessories and AI interactions.
Pollen Robotics has released the Reachy Mini Hoverboard, a compact two-wheeled mobile base that lets Reachy Mini Wireless roll and explore its surroundings.
Pollen Robotics releases the Reachy Mini Hoverboard, a compact two-wheeled mobile base that turns the Reachy Mini Wireless into a mobile robot.
CCTV Finance's "Economy Half-Hour" aired a feature on Daimon Robotics' young team, whose core members include post-95 CTO Du Yipai and post-00s product managers and algorithm engineers; 80% of the company's staff are post-90s and 40% are post-00s. Daimon builds a full-chain capability spanning "perception-data-models-deployment applications" around vision-tactile sensors, with the goal of enabling robots to sense weight, direction, and contact state after grasping. Daimon has also launched the TouchSpark innovation research program, which long-term accepts project proposals from scholars and lab teams at universities and research institutes worldwide and provides funding and research resource support.
On September 16, 2026, Nanjing University and Daimon Robotics signed and unveiled the "Nanjing University-Daimon Robotics Embodied Intelligence University-Enterprise Joint Laboratory" at Nanjing University's Suzhou campus. It is the first embodied intelligence university-enterprise joint laboratory of Nanjing University's School of Intelligent Science and Technology. The two parties will conduct joint research on directions such as robotic manipulation and tactile manipulation models, and will combine Daimon's accumulated work in tactile hardware, real-world data, and engineering validation to advance scenario validation and the translation of results. The laboratory will also carry out joint graduate training, technical personnel training, and regular academic exchanges.
Daimon Robotics was recently named to both the EY 2026 "Most Promising Seed Enterprise" list and the 2026 Forbes Asia "100 to Watch" list. The EY selection has been held 16 times in Greater China, and more than 60 companies from past lists have gone public. This year's Forbes list, themed "AI-driven innovation," selected 100 companies from 16 countries and regions across Asia-Pacific. Forbes noted that Daimon is filling the physical interaction capability gap needed for robots to advance toward general intelligence.
At IROS 2026, held September 27 to October 1 in Pittsburgh, USA, Daimon Robotics presented its full-chain physical intelligence system spanning perception, data, and models under the theme From Touch to Intelligence, centered on the Daimon-TWM tactile-anchored world model.
Topstar has launched a humanoid dual-arm robot solution for sorting irregular parts. Operators issue commands in natural language, and TOP Agent parses the tasks and coordinates visual perception, motion control, and force-controlled gripping, cutting changeover time from hours to minutes. On the hardware side, the humanoid dual arms have a rated payload of 8 kg and repeat positioning accuracy of ±0.05 mm, are equipped with a binocular vision system and a force-controlled adaptive gripping module, and support 24/7 continuous operation. The solution has completed deployment validation in the supply chain of a leading 3C brand and can optionally be equipped with edge computing and industrial large models to extend to processes such as appearance inspection.
PHYMI officially released its first robot, Sagi, on October 28. It adopts a "four-wheeled-legged humanoid configuration" combining four wheeled legs with a humanoid upper body, dual arms, and a rear box, targeting scenarios such as office delivery, community errands, and outdoor camping transport.
Why it matters: The first four-wheeled-legged humanoid robot presents a complete design approach covering configuration trade-offs, a three-layer model, and a data system, allowing comparison with existing bipedal routes to understand the choice of form.
At the 23rd Pharmaceutical Industry Ecosystem Development Conference, Atomrobot shared "The Intelligent Leap of AI + Robotics in the Pharmaceutical Industry." Wu Jiangfeng, general manager of the delta robot division, explained the practical value of AI vision, delta robots, SCARA robots, and automated production lines in processes such as material transfer, sorting, loading and unloading, and inspection and rejection. The company says it has accumulated over a thousand implemented projects in the pharmaceutical field and provides delta robots, SCARA robots, visual inspection, and flexible automated workstations for scenarios including solid preparations, sterile preparations, and pharmaceutical packaging materials.
REEMAN Robotics is developing a commercial autonomous tennis ball-collecting robot for professional tennis academies, multi-court clubs, and commercial tennis facilities, with the goal of reducing repetitive ball-collecting work and allowing coaching teams to focus on training. The product is in the development and technical evaluation stage. Development priorities include a ball-storage target of about 200–300 balls, autonomous navigation, tennis ball detection and collection, automatic charging, and court surface compatibility; these are engineering goals rather than verified mass-production specifications. REEMAN has not yet announced a confirmed launch date, final price, mass-production specifications, or sales channels.
Orbbec has signed a 10,000-unit strategic procurement agreement and reached comprehensive strategic cooperation with embodied intelligence company Daxiao Robotics. Orbbec will supply depth cameras, RGB cameras, and bodyless data collection hardware, along with supporting software adaptation and large-scale manufacturing and delivery. The equipment is used in Daxiao Robotics' robot bodies and environmental data collection system, supporting multi-view real-interaction data collection and providing a data source for embodied intelligence model training. The two parties have now entered the product delivery stage.
Seven doctoral students from Fudan University's School of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing Innovation—Pan Qiqi, Jia Chen, Zheng Boyang, Tao Zijian, Miao Wenqing, Guo Zigu, and Wang Siqi—were selected for the 2026 CAST Young Science and Technology Talent Cultivation Project Doctoral Program. The selected students' research covers areas including surgical robot configuration design and continuum path planning, haptic feedback and mechanical metamaterials, aerospace structural reliability analysis, healthy lighting and lighting human factors engineering, and human factors engineering as well as computational mechanics and artificial intelligence.
REEMAN ROBOT partnered with a German industrial technology customer to develop a mobile manipulator robot for warehouse shelf picking and material handling. The solution uses the Big Dog Chassis AMR platform with a rated payload of 100 kg, paired with a 7-DOF robotic arm with a rated payload of 5 kg and a working reach of 610 mm, as well as a vertical lifting mechanism with a stroke of 1,200 mm.
The REEMAN Big Dog wheeled AMR base is designed for mobile manipulator integration, with a rated payload of 100 kg, laser SLAM navigation, LiDAR and dual 3D cameras, and HTTP API, Android SDK, RS232, and local MQTT interfaces. Two cases show a customer integrating dual arms on the Big Dog base for a tote-handling demo, and a German industrial customer combining the base with a 7-DOF robotic arm and a 1,200 mm vertical lift mechanism for warehouse shelf picking.
At its 2026 Innovation Day, AGIBOT proposed the Worken (effective intelligent working hours) framework, which measures robots' effective output in real environments using three metrics: number of active robots, autonomous working hours, and output efficiency ratio.
Why it matters: AGIBOT announced its hardware platform, foundation model, operating system, and mass-production model all at once, giving readers a basis to judge its shift from manufacturing scale to measurable output.
A customer integrated a dual-arm mobile manipulator on the REEMAN Big Dog wheeled AMR chassis; in an 82-second demo, it completed dual-arm grasping of a blue material box, transport between workstations, and placement. The chassis has a rated payload of 100 kg, uses laser SLAM navigation, is equipped with LiDAR and dual 3D cameras for obstacle avoidance, and offers development interfaces including an HTTP API, Android SDK, RS232, and local MQTT. The video is a customer integration demo, not evidence of a production deployment or verified throughput performance.
REEMAN Rhino autonomous stacker forklifts are deployed at a food-service packaging plant in Shanxi, automatically completing pallet transport from the pickup area to the warehouse over a one-way distance of about 280 meters and a round trip of 560 meters, with a payload of about 800 kilograms per trip and roughly 64 tons of cargo moved per day based on an estimated 80 trips per day. The vehicle has a rated load of 1.5 tons and a lift height of 2.5 meters, uses laser SLAM navigation, is priced at about 11,000 USD for reference, supports automatic docking and charging at low battery, and its charging station can be relocated. On-site deployment took about 1 day, and the LiDAR mounting position was raised by 1 meter for future rack-storage planning.
AgiBot has released the embodied foundation model GO-3 Preview, built on its self-developed WRAM (World Reasoning Action Model) architecture that unifies task understanding, future state prediction, and action generation, and it ranks first on three embodied intelligence benchmarks: RoboDojo, RoboTwin, and RoboColiseum. It is planned to be fully open-sourced by the end of 2026.
Why it matters: The original article fully discloses GO-3 Preview's three-stage design of pretraining, post-training, and post-deployment learning, which can be used to understand the engineering path for scaling embodied models across their full lifecycle.
NASA University Student Research Challenge (USRC) alumnus Gavin Gardner and teammates founded AG3 Labs in 2024, specializing in drones for military training, with current monthly production capacity reaching thousands of units.
Dexmate provides a teleoperation data collection solution for physical AI model training, consisting of the full-body platform Vega 1 Pro, the half-body platform Vega 1 U, and the Omniteleop software.
NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops add the Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe open-weight speech model, support for Liquid AI's LFM3 series models, and an agent resource management feature in the NVIDIA App that allocates GPU resources.
Realbotix relaunches the Ask Aria digital AI avatar. The original text did not disclose details about the avatar's features, version number, or launch date.
Union Square Ventures announced it co-led Machenta's $40 million seed round with Creandum. Machenta's model is trained entirely on synthetic data, and a robot can begin performing a task after watching a single demonstration, without collecting real-world training data.
Realbotix has relaunched the Ask Aria digital AI avatar. The original text did not disclose details such as the avatar's specific features, version number, or launch platforms.
On October 28, HongShan announced the launch of the 'ShanYu Venture Program' together with Unitree, focused on discovering and investing in early-stage startups in embodied intelligence, robotics applications, and related upstream and downstream key technologies. The program proposes an 'engineer plus investor' investment methodology, with Unitree providing industry perspective and engineering guidance and HongShan providing capital support and post-investment services, with a focus on young teams. Unitree founder and CEO Wang Xingxing said this is a deep collaboration and natural extension of the two sides' cooperation built on a high degree of mutual trust.
Pangolin Robot showcased the Timo AI service robot, which combines smart greeting, 42-language switching, and guided tour narration. The robot is positioned as an all-in-one service solution for reception, guided tours, and translation.
Digital Huaxia's new-generation bionic robot Xia Lan R03 won the "Business Value Award" at the 2026 Forbes China Human-Machine Symbiosis Technology Intelligence Pioneer selection. The selection identifies benchmark products based on dimensions including technological innovation, deployment capability, market potential, and industry value. Xia Lan R03, built on a self-developed affective computing engine, high-precision motion control, and full-duplex wake-word-free interaction, is deployed in scenarios such as cultural tourism, health and elderly care, public services, and brand IP operations.
Digital China attended the 2026 3M China Technical Forum Annual Meeting held at the 3M Shanghai R&D Center. The humanoid robot "Xiaqi" served as a greeter and interacted with guests, while "Xingxingxia P2" gave an interactive performance. Co-founder Dai Peng gave a keynote sharing titled "Challenges and Opportunities in the Application of Embodied Intelligent Humanoid Robots" and exchanged views with 3M China's R&D team and customer team.
IPLUS MOBOT will showcase the NERA-A embodied mobile manipulation robot at Booth 6067 in the Setia SPICE Convention Centre from November 3–5, targeting high-mix, high-cleanliness precision handling scenarios in Penang's semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.