The article notes that embodied AI financing cooled in October 2026, with 19 funding rounds totaling 4.934 billion yuan as of October 15, while monthly financing from July to September each exceeded 70 rounds, with August reaching 91 rounds and 31.323 billion yuan. Founders are anxious due to postponed IPOs, unresolved technology roadmaps, and slow commercialization.
A Philadelphia woman, Carolyn Marvin, was arrested by police on a disorderly conduct charge for blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to move out of the way. She said her protest was because delivery robots are taking jobs from human delivery workers, and video from the scene drew media attention. Delivery robots have become a common sight in Center City Philadelphia and have sparked resistance; earlier this year, a robot was kicked over in Center City.
Smart China reported on October 18 that Dongyi Technology arranged human-versus-robot badminton and table tennis matches, boxing demonstrations, and bilingual Chinese-English guided tours at the 140th Canton Fair, and showcased heavy-load transport, special inspection, and dexterous manipulation solutions at its booth, with services planned to continue until November 4.
Lianjie Embodied Intelligence Center releases its Embodied AI Industry Weekly: Physical Intelligence launches the beta version of the Pi API, providing external developers with model training and inference services; Google DeepMind launches the general physical reasoning model Gemini 4 Argon and releases a collaboration demo with the Apptronik Apollo humanoid robot, in which the model can guide the robot to complete actions such as beanbag throwing simply by watching video demonstrations.
The article argues that humanoid robots in nursing homes remain mostly exhibition demonstrations, while the equipment actually deployed in disability care areas is incontinence care, transfer, bathing, and turning-bed equipment, whose value criteria are fewer errors, reusability, and willingness of caregivers to use them.
The 2026 AI Creators Carnival will be held October 21–25 at Haidian Park in Beijing. The five-day event is free of charge, guided by the Zhongguancun Science City Management Committee, and links three venues: Haidian Park, the Zhongguancun Exhibition Center, and Chuangye Street.
Leadshine held an investor relations event, disclosing that its frameless torque motor orders in hand exceed 1 million units, monthly capacity is 150,000 units, and it is expanding toward annual output of 3 million units; the robotics business is expected to account for about 10% of overall revenue this year.
The article notes that family-office VCs are emerging as a new force in China's primary market, with family offices appearing in the funding announcements of projects such as Qianxun Intelligence, Zenbot, Wujie Zhihang, and Digua Robotics. These institutions use their own capital, their own industry knowledge, and teams they build themselves to invest directly in early-stage equity, moving down from Series B and Series C to angel and Pre-A rounds, unlike traditional family offices that act as LPs, CVCs constrained by their main business, or former entrepreneurs who raise funds to become GPs.
Day 2 of GOSIM Shenzhen 2026 concluded on October 17, with more than 2,000 developers taking part in six technical forums, four workshops, four hackathons, and project showcases. DHH unveiled the Linux distribution Omarchy, which recently merged support for 50 languages, and Alibaba Cloud became a founding corporate sponsor of its foundation.
DeepSeek released DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 on October 17, with simultaneous upgrades to its website, app, and API, and opened model weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope, focusing on improving coding, agent, and full project development capabilities.
Embodied AI brain company Gewu Tongzhi has completed an angel funding round of nearly 100 million yuan. Investors include Peak Investment, Hongfu Assets, Hangzhou Capital, Hangzhou Talent Group, a provincial-level embodied AI industrial investment fund, and several leading listed companies. The funds will mainly be used for large-scale pretraining and technical iteration of its physical inversion world model, hardware and body construction, accelerating talent recruitment and team expansion, and advancing PoC validation and real-world data collection across multiple scenarios. Maple Pledge served as the exclusive private equity financing advisor for this round.
The article examines how local governments have become the largest buyers of robots: by the end of June 2026, more than 70 embodied intelligence training grounds had been built nationwide, with 46 under construction or planned, covering 18 provincial-level administrative regions; from 2024 to June 2026, localities issued more than 40 related policies in total.
Zhuoyu Technology announced on October 15 that it had won a bulk purchase order from a national-level client for 100,000 planetary joint modules, with a contract execution value exceeding 100 million yuan; by 2027, its joint module production capacity is expected to reach 2 million units. On October 10, Aitu Technology's sewing robot manufacturing base in Taizhou, Zhejiang, began production; it is the world's first specialized manufacturing plant for sewing robots, with planned annual capacity of up to 10,000 units.
Frost & Sullivan released its "2026 Global Humanoid Robot Market Research Report." In the first half of this year, global humanoid robot sales reached 36,000 units, exceeding the 35,000 units sold in all of 2025, with market revenue reaching USD 540 million. By revenue, the top five were all Chinese companies, including two based in Shenzhen. Shenzhen Customs data show that in the first eight months of this year, Shenzhen's exports of robots listed separately by category totaled RMB 11.13 billion, up 12.2-fold year on year, with products sold to more than 120 countries and regions worldwide.
Xinjiang's first robot 9S center, invested in and built by Xinjiang Future Era Technology Co., Ltd., has gathered more than 60 robots across 25 categories, including humanoid robots, biomimetic robots, quadruped consumer robot dogs, and inspection robot dogs, and is carrying out scenario applications in fields such as cultural tourism, agriculture, industry, mining, and commercial delivery.
An article in the US bimonthly Foreign Affairs notes that China is listing embodied intelligence as a "future industry" and incorporating it into the 15th Five-Year Plan, promoting the integration of AI with robotics software and hardware. China already controls about 80% of global lidar production capacity; Unitree Robotics listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in August this year, raising nearly $1 billion in its IPO, and more than two-thirds of its quadruped robot sales go to consumer and industrial scenarios. The article argues that if embodied intelligence becomes a general-purpose technology, China's robotics supply chain will gain influence similar to that of critical minerals.
ADI has released a whitepaper, "The Race to Make AI Physical," explaining how embodied intelligence (physical AI) enables machines to perceive, decide, and act amid imperfect measurements, timing constraints, and changing environments.
Best Buy Canada has deployed 60 AutoStore robots at its distribution center in Langley, British Columbia. The system includes 50,655 storage bins, with robots traveling on top to retrieve goods and deliver them to picking stations. According to Best Buy, some operations are now up to five times faster.
Yuequan Bionics attended the 8th International Conference on Bionic Engineering (ICBE 2026) and formally joined the International Bionic Enterprise Alliance. Founder Professor Ren Lei delivered a keynote report, and Chairwoman Li Tianling was appointed deputy director of the Enterprise Committee of the International Society of Bionic Engineering. At the conference, the ISBE Beijing Exhibition Hall located at Yuequan Bionics was recognized as a science education base of the society. Professor Ren Lei said that Yuequan Bionics has achieved industrialization of a series of products including motors, artificial muscle modules, bionic dexterous hands, and humanoid robots.
Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot stands 175 cm tall and weighs 90 kg, and has autonomously completed roof rack sorting at a Hyundai Motor factory. Development lead Zach Jackowski's team collects human motion data through VR teleoperation, then trains in simulation with more than 4,000 digital Atlases for 6 hours, achieving skill sharing where "train one, train them all." Boston Dynamics is valued at over $1 billion, with Hyundai Motor holding an 88% stake.
Chen Youwen, an analyst at Zhixun Think Tank, compared two paths by which general-purpose large models are entering robotics: MicroFactory, in a single customer deployment, uses agents based on Claude Opus and GPT-6 Astra to generate control plans and dedicated programs for execution; according to the founder's own account, the robot autonomously assembled electronic products for 1.5 consecutive hours with zero operational errors throughout; Poke & Wiggle uses Claude Opus 5.5 to take over the entire process of reading papers, writing algorithms, training models, and testing on real robots, reproducing 10 recent papers.
Shenzhen Sita Robotics Technology Co., Ltd. announced the completion of an angel funding round. Investors include Huawei's Hubble Investment, a fund under Shenzhen High-Tech Investment, and Gaoxuan Investment, among others. The funding amount is in the tens of millions of RMB and will be used for product R&D iteration and commercialization expansion.
Musk said he is devoting substantial resources to developing Hagglebot, a dedicated negotiation robot for business scenarios, and believes the product could raise corporate cost efficiency by 5% or more. He estimates that, measured against global GDP, the cost savings could reach up to $6 trillion a year, and said that any company using Grok can gain an immediately quantifiable competitive advantage.
The AI Research Institute of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), together with Tsinghua University's Department of Electronic Engineering and the Embodied Intelligence Testing Laboratory, released the Embodied Intelligence Development Report (2026) on October 16. This is CAICT's third release of the report, which is divided into five parts: global trends, technology systems, application expansion, industrial ecosystem and business models, and future outlook.
SoftBank Group is considering acquiring US security services provider Allied Universal. If the deal is reached, the latter's valuation could reach about 18 billion USD. SoftBank plans to gradually introduce robots in the future through the acquisition to replace some human security positions, but the deployment of humanoid security robots may take longer.
The 2026 Gaogong Humanoid Robot Annual Conference has received registrations from more than 100 companies and will be held in Shenzhen on November 3-4 under the theme "Reconstructing the Old Order · Breaking Through Boundaries," expected to bring together 400+ upstream and downstream companies and 1,000+ industry leaders. The conference features five special sessions, including mass-production breakthroughs and the evolution of embodied brains and cerebellums, plus six roundtable dialogues. GGII's "2026 Embodied Intelligence Progress Research Report" will be released on site, and the 2026 Gaogong Golden Globe Awards will be announced on the evening of November 4.
SoftBank founder Son Masayoshi predicts that superintelligence may ultimately become 10,000 times smarter than humans, and says SoftBank will not bet on models alone but will invest across four layers at once: models, chips, AI data centers, and robotics. He disclosed that SoftBank's portfolio already includes more than 30 robotics companies, preparing for Physical AI to enter factories and other scenarios. For developers, once AI enters the physical world, acceptance testing must also cover sensor reliability, action permissions, and safe stopping; passing tests is only the first hurdle.
A team fully switched to using frontier LLMs to control robots in customer deployments over the past month. The architecture resembles a System 1/System 2 division of labor: high-level reasoning is handled by agents based on Opus and Astra, while the fast execution layer uses computer vision code written by the models themselves, which they describe as fast, editable, and reliable. LLMs also bring in-context learning and continual learning; when new situations arise, the LLM steps in and adjusts the process.
In October, EFORT will hold four international exhibitions in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; Seoul; Jakarta; and Palma. It will exhibit jointly with local partners at the first two stops and independently at the last two. Overseas revenue reached 22.57 million yuan, up 318.5% year on year, and its share of total revenue rose from 4.6% to 12.1%. Its distributor network covers 8 countries, and its products are exported to 27 countries and regions. The Seoul booth is its first concentrated showcase after signing with MiR Korea, which has been appointed to represent its full series of delta and SCARA robots. At the last two stops, it will display the newly released palletizing workstation and the Bat800-S3 delta robot.
Through AI learning, a humanoid robot has developed an uncanny, non-human running gait. After repeated testing, it did not imitate a typical human running posture but instead converged on the most efficient way, ultimately running in this posture.
SLAM is beginning to use contact information between the robot and the environment as a basis for localization, supplementing pose estimation with kinematics and foot-ground constraints when vision and LiDAR are limited. KD-RIEKF from IROS 2025 was validated on the Unitree Go2, and under its test conditions, both position and attitude estimation errors decreased when the robot moved at high speed.
Robot applications are expanding from factories to convenience stores, and retail scenarios are seen as the first stop for commercializing embodied intelligence. The original article gives no specific robot models, companies, or real-world data, and only poses the question: "Who will win this race?"
In a 100-minute podcast, Jensen Huang revealed two new growth paths Nvidia is building: charging enterprises software licensing fees of several thousand dollars per GPU per year, and a revenue-sharing model with cloud service providers that rely on its full technology stack. Both depend on the platform's installed base rather than hardware sales.
Guangzhou Yundie Technology announced the completion of a Series B+ funding round totaling several hundred million yuan. Investors include StellarS Capital, Asia Allied Infrastructure (00711.HK), Changzhe Investment, and Turing Quantum; StellarS has previously invested in ByteDance, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
The 2026 GGII Humanoid Robot Annual Conference will be held in Shenzhen on November 3-4 under the theme "Reconstructing the Old Order, Breaking Through Boundaries," and is expected to bring together more than 400 upstream and downstream companies and 1,000+ industry leaders; over 100 companies have already registered. The conference features five special sessions, including mass-production breakthroughs and the evolution of embodied brains and cerebellums, plus six roundtable dialogues. GGII's "2026 Embodied Intelligence Progress Research Report" will make its on-site debut, and the 2026 GGII Golden Globe Awards will be announced on the evening of November 4.
Recently, Beijing Diansuan, a wholly owned subsidiary of Shenhao Technology, became the second selected candidate for a certain central state-owned enterprise's intelligent computing small-cluster project, corresponding to a 40% share, or 468 PFlops of dense computing power, with a total winning bid amount of approximately 336 million yuan; another subsidiary, Shenhao Zhisuan, received a cooperation intention confirmation email from Company A and will become its computing power service provider, with a service period of 5 years and estimated service fees of approximately 333 million yuan, bringing the two orders to a combined total of nearly 670 million yuan.
From October 12 to 16, 2026, Rokae Robotics showcased its full lineup of industrial robots, flexible collaborative robots, and embodied intelligent robots at the CIIF held at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai). The Zhuxing H-series wheeled humanoid robot has 23 degrees of freedom and integrates dual 7-axis AR humanoid force-controlled arms with the Xuanhe iNex control system; on-site demonstrations included intangible cultural heritage lacquer fan making and bin handling, the latter already deployed at a Schaeffler factory. In September 2026, Rokae's 10,000th humanoid force-controlled arm rolled off the line and was delivered, and the company has established cooperation with more than 80 industry partners.
At the 22nd Asia Pacific Retailers Conference, Zhenghang Innovation released a Physical AI service solution for open retail scenarios, showcasing the H1 bipedal humanoid robot and the C1 wheeled-arm robot. The company plans to provide commercial services in 2027 and outlined a RaaS subscription model but did not disclose pricing.
During the 2026 National Day holiday, robot convenience stores opened at multiple scenic spots across the country: Galaxy General's "Galaxy Space Capsule" has covered about 200 locations in about 50 cities, and Dexmal operates more than 30 robot commercial service kiosks; during the holiday they received over 110,000 customer visits, and the flagship store's total revenue reached 150,000 yuan, nearly 5 times the per-store revenue of traditional convenience stores in the same period.
In the third quarter of 2026, Yunqi welcomed 10 new partners, and 15 portfolio companies completed new funding rounds, covering areas such as embodied intelligence, nuclear fusion, quantum computing, and brain-computer interfaces. In embodied intelligence, Pokebot received an additional USD 100 million-scale Pre-A round, Stardust Intelligence completed a new RMB 1 billion funding round, its new-generation humanoid robot T1 has begun shipping with pricing entering the RMB 90,000 range, and Zhigu Tianchu's cooking robots have achieved revenue exceeding RMB 100 million and continued profitability. In addition, Nuova Fusion completed a RMB 1.2 billion Pre-A series of funding, and Manycore Tech and MiniMax successively disclosed post-listing performance.