At the October 29, 2026 AgiBot Innovation Day, AgiBot proposed for the first time the Worken (effective intelligent work hours) metric for measuring a robot's effective workload, and released its third-generation hardware architecture AHA3, the heavy-duty embodied robot Genie G2 Max, and the embodied intelligence operating system Lingqu OS 1.0.
According to an incomplete tally by the CMR Industry Alliance and the New Strategy Mobile Robot Industry Research Institute, more than 20 companies' wheeled humanoid robots have entered factories for application deployment, testing and validation, and scenario cooperation. In the first three quarters of 2026, 178 new AGV/AMR products were launched globally, with composite products leading at 91, of which more than 80% are wheeled humanoid robots. The article notes that factory testing, scenario validation, routine deployment, and bulk procurement are different stages; tasks have expanded from handling and sorting to quality inspection, press-fitting, and screw assembly, but a threshold remains between short-term testing and long-term production.
At its 2026 Innovation Day, AGIBOT proposed the Worken framework, which measures a robot's effective intelligent working hours in real environments by multiplying three factors: the number of active robots, autonomous working hours, and output efficiency ratio.
Google offered $10 million to buy the internal records of bankrupt airline Spirit Airlines, including about 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, to improve AI models. AI data company micro1 announced it will spend $1 billion over the next 12 months to buy or license operational data from enterprises and build reinforcement learning environments. Mathematicians are paid about $5,000 per question to supply AI with high-difficulty benchmark questions, and about 91% of Mercor's $614 million in first-half revenue came from foundation model companies.
Several industry figures told HardKr that the turning point for embodied AI funding came in September this year, and NE Times statistics show that funding in the sector fell 40% in September compared with August. Three leading institutions have tightened investment, one FA said the embodied projects it received recently have halved, and some founders are facing fundraising obstacles. The article also reviews the fundraising model of assembly-style startups that drives up valuations, and mentions that Unitree's share price has fallen more than 60% from its peak after listing, and that progress in foundation models such as GPT-6 Astra is eroding the technical moats of embodied-brain companies.
On October 8, a business registration change took place at Shanghai Daxiao Infinite Robotics, adding new shareholders including Muxi Digital Intelligence under Muxi and Geely Chuangxiang No. 20, a Geely Capital-affiliated entity; registered capital increased to 182 million yuan. Daxiao Robotics centers on the Kairos world model, and has already piloted a wheeled-arm lift robot at a Kunlun Haoke convenience store, completing product recognition, picking, transport, and packing. The article's analysis says Muxi values validation of domestic GPU software stack compatibility with world models, while Geely uses the investment to fill gaps in world models and robot manipulation capabilities, but taking a stake does not mean purchase orders or an exclusive partnership have been formed.
At NEPCON ASIA 2026, Elite Robots is showcasing solutions including phone gluing and tightening, flexible screw fastening, memory module insertion and removal inspection, visual inspection, and large-model grasping, turning its booth into a miniature electronics production line. The phone gluing and tightening robot uses ±0.02mm repeat positioning accuracy and millisecond-level force control response to keep gluing accuracy within <±0.1mm and a single-station cycle time of <10 seconds; the memory module insertion and removal inspection robot combines ±0.03mm repeat positioning accuracy with flexible force control and is suited to Class 5 cleanrooms.
The RV-135, the first model in Nabtesco's RV series of precision reducers for industrial robots developed in 1985, has been selected by the National Museum of Nature and Science of Japan as a 2026 "Important Historical Materials for Science and Technology (Future Technology Heritage)" and has completed registration. The model uses a unique structure combining a cycloidal mechanism with a planetary gear mechanism, achieving low vibration, a high reduction ratio, compact size and light weight, high rigidity, and high precision, contributing to improvements in industrial robot performance at the time.
Qiyuan Robotics announced it has rolled out 5,000 units and disclosed its Physical AI technology roadmap: a GPT-type large model serves as the S2 slow brain for high-level planning, while its self-developed VLA acts as the S1 fast brain to execute tasks such as folding clothes and tidying desktops. Its newly proposed Hil-UMI collection paradigm achieved data collection efficiency 5.63 times that of conventional real-robot HG-DAgger in a desktop-tidying experiment. The team believes general large models are a public resource, with the moat lying in the robot body, high-quality data, and the training loop, and says consumer household chores need task completion rates above 95% before they meet commercialization conditions.
Data from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) shows that North American companies ordered 10,989 robots worth $723.5 million in Q3 2026, with order volume up 24.8% year over year and order value up 26.1%, making it the strongest quarter of the year.
Zhejiang Zhaofeng Co.'s controlled subsidiary Zhaoju Intelligent has won the bid for the "Robot Innovation Service Platform Project" at a bid price of approximately 300 million yuan. Zhaoju Intelligent is a joint venture established by Zhaofeng Co. and Leju Robotics, engaged in the R&D, manufacturing, and sales of robot ball screws, roller screws, and automotive steering and braking screws. Several of Zhaofeng Co.'s screw products have entered the customer sampling stage, with some models passing performance tests and moving into small-batch trial production, while cross roller bearings for embodied intelligence have achieved batch delivery. In June, the company planned to raise no more than 1.4 billion yuan, of which 1.104 billion yuan will be invested in an industrialization project for high-end precision components for embodied intelligent robots and automotive smart driving.
Jujiao Industry announced the completion of a hundred-million-yuan Series A funding round led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders Lingyi Venture Capital, Weihai Gangrong, and Qingdao Hexin continuing to follow on. The funds will be used for large-scale mass-production delivery of fabric electronic skin, R&D into tactile and multimodal perception, and expansion of application scenarios. The company said that in September 2025 its 1,000th set of humanoid robot fabric electronic skin rolled off the line, that its factory has an automotive-grade capacity of 200,000 units and a production yield of 95%, and that it has more than 400 customers.
A Robotics Row team in Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh, is raising $750,000 in pre-seed funding for a water tank inspection robot. It already has two municipal utility pilots and a working prototype, but local backers are scarce. The founder used the articuler CLI to shortlist about 40 angels with industrial or robotics operations backgrounds; about one-third are in Pittsburgh or Cleveland, and the rest are on the East and West Coasts. The core dilemma: local investors can see the robot in person, while coastal investors write bigger checks but first ask whether the team will move to the Bay Area.
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.
Changying Precision reported revenue of 16.453 billion yuan for the first three quarters of 2026, up 21.78% year-on-year, with a net loss of 66 million yuan, down 114.16% year-on-year. Its embodied intelligence and emerging technology hardware business generated revenue of 419 million yuan, up 532.67% year-on-year, but accounted for only 2.5% of total revenue and has not yet contributed enough profit. The company's approximately 60,000-square-meter factory at its Shenzhen robot intelligent manufacturing industrial park has been put into use, and its Yibin embodied intelligence components southwest base is also operational.
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.
WeRide disclosed that its subsidiary JingShuo Technology has received a Pre-A round of tens of millions of USD co-invested by Jiayu Capital, the HKSTP Venture Fund, Sirius Capital, and others, marking the first external capital introduced since its founding; the round is still in progress. JingShuo Technology builds data and model infrastructure with its WorldEngine data platform and self-developed world model GENESIS-Robotics, and currently has 100+ customers and ecosystem partners, with order backlog in the billions of yuan and annual revenue growth exceeding 100%.
Standard Robots will exhibit at the 2026 World Internet of Things Expo, held from October 30 to November 1, 2026, at the Wuxi Taihu International Expo Center, at booth A3-09. The company will exchange views with visitors on the application of robots in real industrial scenarios and explore further deployment possibilities.
Swancor Advanced Materials reported revenue of 1.209 billion yuan in the first three quarters, with net profit attributable to shareholders from its main business of 63.5181 million yuan, up 4.91% year on year. R&D spending reached 384 million yuan, up 1,182.01% year on year, of which 360 million yuan went to robotics R&D.
The State Administration for Market Regulation released the first batch of 6 national standards for humanoid robots, effective April 2027. Dobot, as a drafting participant, focused on two core standards: motion control and task operation. Dobot said it will use real engineering data from production lines to formulate capability descriptions and verification requirements in the standards.
Qiyuan Robot has integrated with Tencent WorkBuddy. Users can issue instructions in natural language, and WorkBuddy interprets the intent and breaks down the tasks, which Qiyuan Robot executes using its environmental perception and motion capabilities, forming an interaction chain from task understanding to robot execution. Tian Hua, CEO of SWANCOR and Qiyuan Robot, shared this progress on the cooperation at the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit.
On October 23, the 10th 'Two Weeks, One Chain' Greater Bay Area robot full-industry-chain supply-demand matchmaking event, hosted by the Artificial Intelligence (Robotics) Administration of Longgang District, Shenzhen, and co-organized by the Shenzhen Robotics Association, was held at the Longgang District Robot 6S Store, with the theme of robot exterior components and intelligent manufacturing. Yunhai Zhidong proposed a brushless motor solution for the cargo compartment opening of delivery robots, shortening opening time from 6 seconds to 3 seconds, with noise below 60 decibels and cost reduced by 15%; Dongguan Huanya Model used vacuum casting and low-pressure injection to achieve small-batch manufacturing at the hundred-unit level, shortening delivery cycles by more than 70% and reducing costs by 40%-60%.
Shenzhen LaborX Technology Co., Ltd. (LaborX) is a full-stack industrial embodied intelligence company wholly incubated by LK Group, building a three-part in-house system of the LaborX OS industrial system, a wheeled mobile manipulator robot, and a high-precision force-controlled dexterous hand.
On October 26, the first demo day of the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) "Source Innovation Program" was held at the Zhongguancun International Technology Trading Center. Five projects were unveiled: Linjie Core Technology, Lingshu Qizhi, Zhangliang Chang Technology, Cangqiong Jizhi, and Qianxiangliang Technology, covering directions including 3D self-selecting V-RRAM chips, neuromorphic embodied intelligence, Hamiltonian world models, physical intelligence in extreme environments, and unified world models of surface physical environments.
Intel will hold an Embodied Intelligence and Robotics Frontier Trends Exchange on November 10 in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, limited to 100 attendees, showcasing a multi-channel GMSL real-time perception solution based on the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H platform and a 358H embodied intelligence complete system solution.
In the 50 days since GPT-6 Astra was released, the embodied AI industry has conducted intensive evaluations and discussions around it, and general-purpose large models have begun directly taking over robot operation. Tests by SenseTime and several institutions concluded that Astra is basically capable of completing embodied tasks, but still has a clear gap from practical use in real environments, underperforming in millimeter-level contact, dynamic control, and response speed. The article also reviews industry uses such as using Astra directly for policies, reviewing VLA actions, building simulation environments, and data annotation, as well as chain reactions including cooling financing and major companies stepping up data collection.
Why it matters: It reviews evaluation results, company reactions, and industrial chain changes in the embodied AI industry within 50 days of GPT-6 Astra's release, presenting the differentiated landscape after general-purpose large models entered robot operation.
The article reviews the commercialization paths of over 20 underwater robotics companies, noting that their core is selling work orders rather than hardware, with customers paying based on sea trial passage and operational results. Shihang Intelligence completed an A round of over 1 billion yuan in June 2026, with orders exceeding 1 billion yuan in the first half of the year, and launched a full-ocean-depth platform from 0 to 10,000 meters and the registered "Cangqiong" ocean embodied model. The article analyzes three tracks—work-class ROVs, ship cleaning, and scientific research inspection—and mentions incremental space in Middle East and African markets with a compound annual growth rate exceeding 14%.
Unitree Technology released its Q3 2026 financial report: third-quarter operating 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. Revenue for the first three quarters was 1.817 billion yuan, up 55.71% year on year; net profit attributable to shareholders was 387 million yuan, up 270.54% year on year; non-recurring net profit was 349 million yuan, down 18.78% year on year.
At the 2026 Agibot Innovation Day launch event, Agibot disclosed that its revenue for the first half of 2026 was close to 2 billion yuan, and cumulative output of its general-purpose AI robots reached 20,000 units. The event also claimed that Agibot holds a 43% share of the global humanoid robot market. For comparison, Unitree Technology disclosed the previous day that its revenue for the first three quarters of 2026 was 1.817 billion yuan, up 55.71% year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 387 million yuan, up 270.54% year on year.
Unitree Technology disclosed its 2026 third-quarter report on the evening of October 28. Third-quarter revenue was 665 million yuan, up 69.93% year on year; revenue for the first three quarters was 1.817 billion yuan, up 55.71% year on year. Q3 net profit attributable to shareholders was 113 million yuan, down year on year; the company said this was mainly due to increased share-based payment, R&D, and operating investment. R&D investment in the period was 127 million yuan, nearly 20% of revenue.
Tesla plans to use Optimus humanoid robots to plug and unplug charging cables for Robotaxi as a transitional solution before wireless charging is deployed. Currently, Robotaxi still requires staff to charge manually at Supercharger stations; the Cybercab supports only Supercharging and has a hidden NACS port inside its rear bumper. Tesla has already planned a Robotaxi charging hub in Austin equipped with 80 wireless charging units. Optimus has just started early production at the Fremont factory, with first deliveries to enterprise customers planned for 2027.
LimX Dynamics' Beijing company opened a new site on October 28 at the Zhongguancun (Haidian) Embodied Intelligence Innovation Park, and the Beijing team will take on more core R&D tasks. The Beijing company will serve as a strategic anchor in the north, focusing on building three centers: embodied brain R&D, talent and industry-academia-research, and industrial ecosystem collaboration. It will continue to upgrade the humanoid brain system COSA and embodied VLA capabilities, refine fully autonomous long-horizon tasks, and ensure real-world scenario validation. The park has already gathered more than 50 companies across the industrial chain, and LimX Dynamics, as one of the first "Digital-Intelligent Sharing" entitlement companies, will leverage park resources to accelerate technology iteration and scenario validation.
At the 2026 World IoT Expo (Wuxi), Galaxea is presenting three major embodied applications: a healthcare scenario deployment in partnership with Kunshu Xingqi, a robot front warehouse with on-site ordering and multi-robot collaborative autonomous picking and packing, and floor exercise champion Kengo taking on high-difficulty moves. The expo runs from October 30 to November 1 at Wuxi Taihu International Expo Center, Hall A3-03.
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.
Qiyuan robots have been integrated with Tencent WorkBuddy. Users issue commands in natural language; WorkBuddy understands the intent and breaks down the task, while Qiyuan robots perceive the environment and execute it, forming an interaction chain from task understanding to robot execution.
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.
Unitree Technology's share price has rebounded by more than 70% over 12 days, with total market value recovering to over 280 billion yuan. JPMorgan raised its target price from 300 yuan per share to 995 yuan per share. Its first post-IPO financial report, released after market close on October 28, showed Q3 revenue of 665 million yuan, up 69.93% year on year, but non-GAAP net profit of 105 million yuan, down 17.42% year on year, and R&D investment of 127 million yuan, up 249.58% year on year.
The article reviews AGIBOT's moves in recent months: it publicly introduced a nine-person core partner lineup, launched a Hong Kong IPO, and after completing a new funding round reached a valuation of 50 billion yuan. It also took a controlling stake in SWANCOR Advanced Materials for about 2.1 billion yuan, while spinning off subsidiaries including Mifeng, Critical Point, Qingtianzu, AGIBOT KuoTuo, Zhiding, and Yuansheng Wotu, which was established in October.