Stial has been selected for the 2026 Digital Trade · Top 100 Chinese Companies Emerging in Globalization list hosted by Cyzone. The evaluation covers five dimensions: depth of global footprint, product competitiveness, business scale, compliance and stability, and brand awareness.
Leiphone visited vision-based tactile vendors including Daimon, Yimu, Weitai, Qianjue, and Moliang, reviewing the principles, product specifications, and deployment scenarios of this technology route and responding to doubts such as "a camera plus silicone is easy to replicate." The article notes that domestic vendors have reached frame rates in the hundreds of Hz, thicknesses in the 3 mm range, and that multiple products offer IP65 or higher protection; Daimon proposed the VTLA architecture and open-sourced 10,000 hours of tactile data, but cost, consistency and durability, and how to integrate tactile data into model training remain hurdles the industry has yet to clear.
Frost & Sullivan released the 2026 Global Humanoid Robot Market Research Report: global humanoid robot sales reached 35,000 units and revenue reached USD 500 million in 2025; in the first half of 2026, sales reached 36,000 units and revenue reached USD 540 million, with half-year revenue exceeding full-year 2025 revenue.
A hotel supplies company in Jiangsu used the Hefei Banyitong (MiMA) MC12 stand-on three-way stacking forklift to convert an ultra-narrow-aisle high-bay dense storage facility. The forklift has a rated load of 1.2 tons and maintains full load capacity through a 5.5-meter lift; its three-stage full-free mast offers a standard lift height of up to 9 meters. Fork side-shift plus 180° rotation linkage reduces the required net aisle width to just 1.65 meters, and a crosshair light and fork camera system reduce blind spots. A magnetic-navigation automated driving mode is optional.
Unitree Robotics showcased the GD01 manned mecha at the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo. It is about 3 meters tall, weighs about 500 kilograms with a passenger, can switch between bipedal and quadrupedal modes, and is priced from 3.9 million yuan. Staff said there have been many inquiries but no sales yet.
Citing IDC data, AGIBOT said global humanoid robot shipments in H1 2026 approached 25,000 units, up 432.1% year on year. AGIBOT shipped more than 8,600 units, about 35% of the total, ranking first globally. The company's cumulative output reached 20,000 units by September, and it deployed more than 300 robots at Chimelong Spaceship in Hengqin in partnership with Chimelong, while another 100 AGIBOT X2 robots entered Gujia (SZSE: 002403) stores. IDC expects global shipments to exceed 750,000 units by 2030.
Why it matters: The original text provides IDC's H1 shipment data and AGIBOT's actual deployment scenarios, which help readers understand the latest landscape of humanoid robot commercialization.
Agile Robots and Hitachi have formed a co-creation partnership to bring Physical AI into real factories and commercialize it. Hitachi provides Physical AI technology, system integration capabilities, and over 110 years of manufacturing and operational technology experience, while Agile Robots provides robotic arms, mobile robots, the Agile ONE humanoid robot, and the AgileCore software platform.
On the afternoon of September 24, Municipal Party Secretary Qin Weiguo visited Feidong County for a research visit, touring Youibot, an industrial mobile manipulator robot company, to learn about its product R&D, scenario applications, and market promotion. He encouraged the company to strengthen core technology breakthroughs and build benchmark application scenarios. Youibot has built an embodied intelligence architecture of "one brain, multiple forms" and has deployed over 800 real industrial scenario projects, serving more than 400 enterprises in over 30 countries and regions. By 2024 revenue, it ranks first in global market share for industrial mobile manipulator robots.
Anhui Forklift Group is driving its transformation through new energy, intelligent manufacturing, and smart logistics: sales of electric forklifts exceeded 190,000 units in the first half of 2026, accounting for more than 70% of sales, and the world's first 55-ton lithium-battery forklift fills a domestic gap in large-tonnage lithium-battery technology. Its 5G smart factory was selected in 2025 as a "Excellent-Level Smart Factory" by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and its new Hengyang plant uses dozens of AGV robots to achieve unmanned material delivery.
Yifei Technology exhibited its first humanoid robot, Hongjun, and the Lobster wafer robot at the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou from September 23 to 27. Hongjun demonstrated electricity meter assembly on site, featuring a 7-DOF single arm, a 0.6-meter reach, a 5 kg peak payload, and repeat positioning accuracy of ≤±0.05 mm, and is equipped with the self-developed YiBrain multimodal industrial embodied large model; Lobster meets the ISO Class 1@0.1μm cleanliness standard and has entered SMIC production lines. The company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in May 2026, with overseas revenue up 318% year on year.
Professor Zhang Tao, Dean of Tsinghua University's Institute for Embodied Intelligence and Robotics, delivered a lecture titled "Embodied Intelligence Empowers Everything" at the Tsinghua Humanities Forum. He described three major characteristics of embodied intelligence—generality, interactivity, and autonomy—and noted that key technologies still need to be breakthroughs, including multimodal embodied large models, environmental perception, dynamic planning and control, and dexterous bodies.
AGV Network rounds up the top ten highlights in the AGV/AMR industry this week. Zhuoyi delivered 4 narrow-aisle forklifts to a European hardware customer, enabling parallel full-pallet and piece-picking zones; Heli Yufeng's three-way unmanned forklift AGV appeared at the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention, with its dense storage solution able to increase storage capacity by 30%–50%. KION Group signed a strategic cooperation with Zhejiang Humanoid to advance humanoid robots from trade-show demonstrations to real-world industrial logistics scenarios.
Guo Yandong, founder and CEO of AI² Robotics, delivered a keynote titled "Physical AI: From Intelligent Leap to Scaled Productivity" at the 2026 Yuelu Conference, appearing alongside Unitree as representatives of the robotics industry. Guo proposed that embodied intelligence must pursue coordinated development across models, hardware, and scenarios as a "trinity," and said AI² Robotics is advancing brain-inspired architecture research, which he claims can make robot task execution many times faster than OpenAI's GPT-6 while reducing reliance on cloud models and token calls.
IEEE Spectrum released this week's robotics video roundup, including the Skydio F10 fixed-wing drone using a robotic arm for autonomous launch and recovery, a look back at the Honda P2, Unitree's biomimetic dexterous hand starting at $6,500, and 19 Unitree humanoid robots performing alongside 120 dancers at the WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 opening ceremony on September 22.
Advancing embodied AI together. See Astribot and partners bring AI research into real robot tasks. AI that grows through practice. Meet us at #IROS2026 to discuss collaboration. 📍 Booth #921 | Pittsburgh 📅 September 27–October 1 #Astribot #PhysicalAI #AI_Robot #Manipulation
In 2025, the global market for magnetic levitation planar robots reached nearly 1 billion USD. These robots use electromagnetic field forces to achieve contactless precise displacement and multi-degree-of-freedom control, offering advantages such as high positioning accuracy and fast response. Their applications cover cell sorting and vaccine filling in biomedicine, wafer handling and CMP in semiconductor manufacturing, as well as consumer electronics and food processing. Chinese companies have already developed independent R&D capabilities for core components, with Panshi Technology and Zengguang Intelligence among the main players. With policy support, industry growth is expected to accelerate.
Zerith Robotics appeared at the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei, showcasing embodied intelligence data, the Zerith V series action models, robot bodies, and unmanned retail applications. Its "grab anything" demonstration achieves autonomous judgment and grasping for small, flexible, transparent, and reflective objects, and its robot shops have been deployed at 20+ locations, with plans to expand to 300–500 within the year. In the 2026 first-half rankings released by MIR DATABANK in the third quarter of this year, Zerith ranked 13th in humanoid robot production and 14th in shipments.
The finals of the 2026 Second Tsinghua "Sci-Tech Innovation Cup" Entrepreneurship Competition were held on September 19. A total of 12 projects in the startup and growth groups won first, second, and third prizes, with the growth group first prize going to Shouyi Technology's embodied intelligence data collection infrastructure project. This edition drew 268 registered teams from 101 universities, an increase of about 62% over the previous edition, and 75% of the projects were led by people with master's or doctoral backgrounds. The first edition had 165 participating projects, and its winning projects have raised nearly 400 million yuan in cumulative financing.
At the 2026 China Private Enterprise Investment and Financing Fair held in Tianjin on September 22-23, Atom Robots presented its judgment that "industrial technology goes down, embodied intelligence comes up" at two forums. The company has focused on high-speed industrial robots for 13 years, with cumulative shipments exceeding 10,000 units and service to more than 1,000 customers, and its parallel robots rank first in market share among all brands; its Tianjin Haihe Dairy packaging project won the 2025 Tianjin Science and Technology Progress Award First Prize. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, it will focus on advancing three major directions: intelligent cleaning robots, space robots, and full force-controlled humanoid arms.
Nearly 30 companies in the XbotPark ecosystem are exhibiting collectively for the first time at IFA Berlin, with products spanning home robots, robotic lawn mowers, energy storage, health, and companion categories. IFA CEO Leif Lindner said the center of gravity of technological innovation is shifting toward China; his assessment echoes changes in the exhibitor mix, with more than 1,000 registered exhibitors from mainland China and Hong Kong at this year's show, accounting for 38% of exhibition space.
On September 20, Youibot presented multi-form robots under its "One Brain, Multiple Forms" architecture and industrial embodied intelligence solutions at the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei. On site, 4 Xifeng humanoid robots and 1 mobile transport robot, powered by the FabriX industrial embodied intelligence large model, collaboratively completed a full real-world demonstration of material flow at an industrial line-side warehouse.
The article analyzes the trend of warehouse inventory drones moving from PoC to multi-warehouse replication, noting that their core value lies in increasing the frequency of inventory data generation rather than simply replacing manual labor. It lists different technology routes including Corvus One, Switzerland's Verity, Gather AI, France's EYESEE, Germany's doks. innovation, Singapore's Infinium Robotics, and the US's B GARAGE, as well as Corvus's application data in cold chain, lights-out inventory counting, and audit compliance scenarios.
The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court issued a bankruptcy announcement in late August, formally placing Yinghe Robotics, which had raised over 600 million yuan and drew investment from Meituan and ByteDance among others, into bankruptcy proceedings; for the full year 2025 it reported revenue of only 4.33 million yuan and a net loss of nearly 67 million yuan. In less than a month afterward, Zhicheng Dynamics faced a creditor petition for bankruptcy reorganization, and Shenlan Robotics' bankruptcy liquidation entered the final stage of public notice of employee claims.
Inno Angel Fund's August report shows that more than 30 Inno Angel-backed companies completed new rounds of financing totaling over 5 billion yuan. Among them, Pokey Robot completed a Pre-A round in the hundreds of millions of US dollars, Xinghuan Fusion completed an 880 million yuan A++ round, and Lingyu Intelligence completed a Pre-A round in the hundreds of millions of yuan.
The Embodied Intelligence and Intelligent Computing Development Forum of the 2026 AI Computing Conference (2026AICC) was held in Beijing on September 21, hosted by Tsinghua University's Institute for Embodied Intelligence and Robotics, under the theme "Breaking Through the Critical Point of Human-Machine Symbiosis." Scholars including Zhang Tao and Zhao Mingguo of Tsinghua University, along with representatives from companies such as Lingyu Intelligence, Shouyi Technology, and Qianjue Technology, shared results on directions including clinical applications of embodied intelligence, brain-inspired approaches for humanoid robots, data infrastructure, and world models. The forum built an exchange platform for industry, academia, and research, promoting the engineering and deployment of embodied intelligence technologies.
The AI for Industry Challenge, organized by Intrinsic with Open Robotics, Foxconn, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, and Universal Robots, has ended. 5,000 developers from 115 countries participated, with a prize pool of $180,000.
The Shanghai stop of EngineAI Robotics' URKL City Tour Challenge was held in Baoshan, Shanghai, on September 19. The T800 "White Eagle" team swept both the afternoon and evening matches. The event was upgraded to multi-robot combat, with T800 achieving dual-robot observation fusion and dynamic role allocation through distributed multi-robot collaborative perception. It also showcased moves such as the "carp flip," "dragon-like footwork," and "airborne knee strike" for the first time, demonstrating an end-to-end fully autonomous AI loop from perception to motion execution in an offline setting with thousands of people.
The fourth semifinal of the 2026 Jiangsu New Consumption Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, hosted by Oriza Holdings, recently concluded in Nanjing. A total of 120 projects presented their pitches across the four semifinals, and the qualifying projects will gather in Suzhou in October for the finals. Since its launch on June 8, the competition has collected more than 1,100 valid projects across four tracks: consumption plus artificial intelligence, specialty consumption, health consumption, and the integration of commerce, culture, tourism, and agriculture. Of these, 136 came from outside the province and 17 from overseas, and university youth entrepreneurship projects accounted for more than 40 percent. Oriza Holdings, guided by the concept of empowerment upon registration, provides services spanning scenarios, capital, platforms, talent, and incubation carriers to help projects move from the competition stage to the market.
Chinese robot exports are shifting from single hardware exports to technology output and solution empowerment. In the first half of this year, China's industrial robot exports reached 6.29 billion yuan, up 18.6% year on year; Tianjin Wangyuan Technology's AI-driven pool-cleaning robot WYBOT S3 covers more than 60 countries and regions, and Tianjin Tianxing Technology's new dual-arm robot is priced at about 27,000 yuan, with orders scheduled through the end of the year. Companies still face challenges in overseas compliance certification and building local service networks.
Atom Robots is participating in the 2026 Tianjin International Machine Tool Exhibition, held September 16-19 at the National Convention and Exhibition Center (Tianjin) Phase II, showcasing heavy-load collaborative robots, high-speed SCARA robots, and MINI delta robots, aimed respectively at heavy-load operations, continuous mass production, and sorting of small components. Building on its accumulated delta robot technology, the company provides self-developed controllers and vision process software, and is developing embodied intelligence software solutions that integrate large models, machine vision, and force-sensing perception, serving machine tool supporting applications as well as the new energy, 3C electronics, pharmaceutical, and food industries.
Four XMAN-L1 humanoid robots from KEENON Robotics joined dancers on September 10 to complete the Cyber Stage opening performance at the CCTV Finance event during the 2026 Bund Conference in Shanghai, demonstrating motion control and multi-robot synchronization capabilities. The performance combined the Shanghai Conservatory of Music's "Yin Chao" AI music generation model with BIRENTECH's Bili™ 166L computing platform. In a dialogue, CEO Li Tong said embodied intelligence needs patient capital and emphasized safety compliance and commercialization.
A third-party technical report, "GPT-6 Astra as an Embodied Policy," co-authored by Galbot researchers, was open-sourced less than two weeks after GPT-6 Astra's release, testing its performance as an embodied policy in the RoboDojo and RoboLab simulation environments.
Chen Yilun, founder and CEO of TARS, spoke at the September 17 'Meet the Future in Shanghai: Multinational Enterprises' Shanghai Tour' promotion event, saying embodied AI cannot stay in the lab and must go onto real production lines to face the harshest testing. He reviewed TARS's three-stage leap in Shanghai across foundation models, hardware, and large-scale deployment: its self-developed AWE embodied AI foundation model won a 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference 'SAIL Star' award, its self-developed 21-degree-of-freedom quasi-direct-drive DexHand dexterous hand, and the A1 robot received a Guinness World Record in March 2026.
The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and the Hangzhou Research Institute of Xidian University jointly hosted the "Tiangong Kaiwu · Smart Convergence Hangzhou" 2026 Global Embodied Intelligence Developers Conference (GEADC 2026) and the Embodied Intelligence Training Camp (Seventh Session) from September 16 to 17.
What other failure modes exist? Quoted tweet key points: The blogger is friendly toward Figure but points out that its success rate is 237/420 (under 60%), and that failing half the time cannot count as "doing real useful work." Doing useful work = generalization + reliability.
Agentic Robotics — where AI agents design and fine-tune robot control systems — is being applied in real-world scenarios to improve e-commerce parcel sorting.
DeepBlue Robotics, the robotics subsidiary of DeepBlue Technology, has officially entered bankruptcy liquidation proceedings, and the Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court has accepted the case. The administrator's public notice shows employee claims exceeding 23 million yuan, numerous contract disputes and overdue debts, and assets insufficient to cover all liabilities. The article notes that its exhibition demonstrations were disconnected from real delivery capability, its diversified expansion spread resources thin, and it relied on financing without positive cash flow, and views this as a sample of the robotics industry's bubble clearing out.
D-Robotics announced the completion of a $400 million Series C funding round, led by Mirae Asset, with participation from Meituan Strategic Investment, multiple government investment platforms, and existing shareholders. The funds will be used to strengthen the full-compute-range product lineup of Sunrise chips and to build an end-to-end software platform spanning data collection, model training, simulation validation, and inference deployment.
Why it matters: The original text provides specific figures including the funding size, lead investor, chip shipment volume, and customer coverage, which can be used to assess the commercialization progress of the embodied intelligence infrastructure sector.
On September 9, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and other departments released the eighth batch of 11 new professions, and "Embodied Intelligent Robot Application Technician" (occupation code 4-04-05-16) was officially added to the national occupational list. The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center led the technical support work, including job research, argumentation on occupational boundaries, and drafting of application materials, with the Chinese Institute of Electronics as the proposing organization.
Why it matters: The original article outlines the definition of the new profession, its boundaries with similar occupations, and its main tasks, so practitioners can use it to understand the job profile and the direction of future occupational standards.
Wandercraft announced the official US commercial launch of its personal exoskeleton Eve, calling it the first FDA-cleared self-balancing personal exoskeleton that does not restrict the neurological level of spinal cord injury, allowing users to stand and perform daily activities hands-free without crutches. The access process includes clinical evaluation, a physician's prescription, individualized customization, and training; Medicare covers it under HCPCS code K1007, NSM supports delivery through more than 180 locations, and it is backed by a 16-participant training study published in JoVE.
Why it matters: The original text is an official announcement of Eve's US commercial launch, explaining its crutch-free self-balancing capability and the access, reimbursement, and training process, so readers can understand the product's positioning and path to real-world adoption.