Care facility leaders in every market we serve tell us the same thing: there isn't enough time in a shift to meet every need. Before starting development, we spent two years listening to these voices. Let's talk: https://enchanted.pulse.ly/qbho72ssnb #robotics #care #healthtech
RoboForce has entered a partnership with Samsung SDS to explore industrial robotics applications and potential deployments for Samsung-affiliated companies. As a founding member of Team REX, RoboForce participates in an ecosystem spanning robotics hardware, Physical AI, data, simulation, and manufacturing, and was mentioned in Samsung SDS's RX ART 2026 announcement and at REAL Summit 2026. The two sides are currently in the use-case evaluation stage and plan to move toward on-site testing and validation.
On September 12, UBTech's Liuzhou industrial humanoid robot super smart factory went into operation. UBTech calls it the world's first 10,000-unit-class humanoid robot smart manufacturing factory; it covers 14,000 m² and focuses on producing the Walker S and Cruzr series, rolling one unit off the line every 10 minutes.
Zerith Robotics showcased its Zerith V series embodied native motion models and an unmanned retail store solution at the 2026 CIFTIS, where the robot can autonomously identify, grasp, and deliver goods. Recently, multiple Zerith H1 wheeled-arm humanoid robots were deployed in Malaysia, with about 15 working days from signing to full-machine delivery; customers can conduct data collection and model development based on the Zerith DATA platform. The company is advancing the API-ization of embodied intelligence physical grasping and is expanding into overseas markets including Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Japan.
At Logis-Tech Tokyo 2026, Damon Technology launched for the Japanese market its Flying Shuttle M-series ultra-multi-chute flexible sorting solution and an embodied-intelligence humanoid robot handling solution. The former offers over 1,000 chutes, a sorting efficiency of 14,400 items per hour, and 99.99% accuracy; the latter can be installed and deployed in just 2 weeks. The booth also showcased Damon's Flash Shuttle four-way shuttle plus AMR combined system and a narrow-belt sorter system. Damon has already delivered 30+ large-scale logistics automation systems in Japan, with customers including Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, Uniqlo, and Sagawa Express.
Pudu Robotics is accelerating its expansion into the European market after IFA Berlin 2026, where it showcased its full product line spanning service delivery, commercial cleaning, industrial logistics and embodied AI, and PUDU D7 was also exhibited in Europe for the first time. Pudu's robots are already deployed in everyday settings including retail, hotels, food and beverage, healthcare, real estate and property management, industrial facilities and transportation, as the company advances a scaled and localized European growth strategy.
Speaking at the 2026 Annual Fund of Funds Forum and the 7th Lujiang Venture Capital Forum, Huako Fund founder Zhang Yang said super returns come from investing in "cognitive value" before technological value reaches consensus. He breaks returns into roughly 10x in the 0-to-1 stage, 5x to 10x in the 1-to-100 stage, and 2x to 3x after the 100 stage; multiplied together, these yield 100x. Huako invested in Zhipu in 2021 and added to its position across five consecutive rounds; Zhipu's valuation rose from several billion yuan to more than 20 billion yuan within a year. In the next stage, Huako will focus on quantum computing, controllable nuclear fusion, and robotics.
Dr. Wu Min, CTO of Elite Robots, delivered a keynote speech titled "Optically Connected Intelligence: Large-Scale Deployment of Embodied Intelligent Robots in the Optical Communications Industry" at the CIOE 2026 "Visual Perception · Intelligent Manufacturing Future — Embodied Intelligent Robot Integration Applications Forum," proposing that optical communications is the first large-scale battleground for physical AI to cross boundaries into the physical world.
The 12th session of Fudan University's Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing Lecture Series invited Su Hao, Haoqing Distinguished Professor and inaugural dean of the Institute of General Physical Intelligence, to give an academic talk. Nearly 500 faculty and students from on and off campus attended, and the event was held in a combined online and offline format for the first time.
DEEP Robotics' Lynx M20S wheeled-legged robot has entered the Tengger Desert to provide patrol and supply transport for a hundred-mu Hedysarum scoparium forest at the Alxa League Oasis Planting Center; rangers say "three days of work is done in one." The Lynx M20S reaches a top speed of 9 m/s, can carry 35 kg of supplies, withstands ground temperatures of 50°C, and has IP67-rated protection. Using a dual-light gimbal, it identifies hazards such as burrows, fallen vegetation, and damaged protective fencing. At night it patrols the forest with thermal imaging and, when it detects wildlife approaching the core seedling area, activates a loudspeaker to drive them away with sound waves, supporting 7×24 continuous patrols.
In 1921, Czech playwright Čapek first brought the word "Robot" to the public eye in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots); in 1942, Asimov wrote the Three Laws of Robotics in his novel Runaround.
During the World Robot Conference, Yunqi Capital co-hosted a themed roundtable with SEE Fund, which was included in the podcast Attent!on. Three founders—Xu Huazhe of PokeBot, Li Qiang of Quantum Dynamics, and Liu Nianqiu of Feimo Yi Technology—shared their views on world models, scaling, and deployment.
Why it matters: The three entrepreneurs approached the topic from models, hardware systems, and mobility respectively, specifically breaking down where the bottlenecks in embodied intelligence deployment lie and where they diverge on scaling efficiency.
ZhenFund released its Z News August recap, summarizing portfolio company updates: Liuxing Technology's Odin1 spatial memory module has become the default spatial cognition solution for Xuanji Dynamics' Hypertron-T01 and Hypertron-SW01 quadruped robots, with cumulative annual signed contracts exceeding 20,000 units; it supports real-time mapping, semantic memory, autonomous return, and multi-robot collaboration, targeting industrial inspection and emergency rescue scenarios.
On August 27, Tianchuang Robotics and Hexi Group's Jiangshan Zhilian Property signed a Party-building co-construction and strategic cooperation agreement, and the first nationwide RaaS service project under Tianchuang Robotics' "Million Robots on Duty Plan" landed in Hexi. Three projects—Danruo Garden, Qiaoke Plaza, and the Southern Municipal Complex—will take the lead in deploying T4-B fire control room duty robots, adopting a human-machine collaboration model of "T4-B robot + 1 certified person per shift" to handle full-process duty functions including 24-hour autonomous inspection, smoke and fire identification, alarm confirmation, false alarm filtering, and fire control host operation.
Li Xiangming, general manager of RoboTechnik's Embodied Intelligence Business Unit, gave a keynote titled "How Industrial Robots Can Break Through in the AI Era" at the 2026 Global Industrial Internet Conference held in Liaoning, proposing four breakthrough paths: reliability, ease of use, full-category plus embodied intelligence, and going global.
Skild AI announced that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has surpassed $100 million, of which $50 million was confirmed within 10 months of starting deployments. It has more than 60 paying customers, covering material handling, delivery, inspection, security, food service, and warehouse, factory, and data center scenarios; about 90% of revenue comes from manipulation tasks, with mobility accounting for 10% (of which AMR solutions account for 4%).
Why it matters: Beyond the company's self-reported revenue milestone, it also offers concrete lessons on how deployment in turn shapes model research, which is useful for understanding the relationship between real-world deployment and research.
At CIFIT, the Zhijian Dynamics booth received government and enterprise visitors and international guests, including Liu Minqiang, Director-General of the Investment Promotion Agency of the Ministry of Commerce; Yu Guangsheng, Deputy Director-General; and Tian Make, Minister-Counselor for Commercial Affairs at the Embassy of Finland in China. They discussed embodied intelligence technology, scenario applications, and industrial cooperation. Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister and delegation, multinational delegations, and customer representatives also visited in succession, with on-site demonstrations of supermarket retail and smart logistics scenarios.
At the 26th China International Fair for Investment and Trade, Zhijian Dynamics exhibited the full-scenario embodied intelligent robot i7 Pro, the full-scenario service robot iX, a modular force-controlled humanoid arm, and the Simple Claw developer platform. In the supermarket retail scenario, i7 Pro runs the full unmanned retail process from tablet ordering to product delivery; in the smart logistics scenario, it autonomously performs waybill recognition, mobile grasping, flipping and adjustment, and sorting. The company says it is the industry's first enterprise to implement WAM on the edge-side Thor.
Pudu Robotics is exhibiting at IFA 2026 in Berlin for the first time, showcasing its full robot portfolio, which also marks the European debut of the PUDU D7 semi-humanoid robot. Visitors can see live demonstrations of the PUDU D7 alongside the PUDU D5, BellaBot Pro, PUDU CC1 Pro, PUDU MT1 Max, and PUDU T600, covering capabilities such as human-robot interaction, autonomous mobility, delivery, commercial cleaning, and industrial delivery.
The Embodied Full-Stack Collaboration Special Forum of the 15th China Intelligent Industry Summit (CIIS2026) opened in Shenzhen on September 5-6, chaired by Xiong Hui, Associate Vice President and Chair Professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), and Guo Yandong, Founder and CEO of Zhidongfang Technology. The forum brings together academia and industry to connect academic research, industrial development, and scenario deployment, jointly exploring feasible paths for the large-scale deployment of embodied intelligence.
The Galbot ET1 humanoid robot from Galbot opened pre-sales on JD.com (http://JD.com) and received over 200 pre-orders within 24 hours. The cited introduction describes the ET1 as a humanoid robot positioned as a physical-world intelligent agent capable of autonomous learning. Its core includes a 100M-scale motion foundation model that can learn new movements directly through interaction with people, without motion capture or motion video, and supports real-time perception, reasoning, planning, and action in the real world.
IFA 2026 closed in Berlin, Germany, with highlights including the iRobot Roomba Duo robot vacuum concept and the Tecno Bezelless borderless phone concept. The Roomba Duo pairs the Roomba Plus 757 with iRobot's most powerful main vacuum ever, deploying the secondary unit from a lifting garage to clean narrower spaces.
The EngineAI T800 has started work at the Luxshare Precision Suzhou factory, autonomously completing the full workflow of "order receiving—navigation—material picking—delivery—material placement," achieving commercial deployment in an intelligent manufacturing scenario. The EngineAI T800 and PM01 were observed and recognized by King Abdullah II of Jordan, who asked about pricing on site and expressed the wish to order two T800 units and two PM01 units. EngineAI also globally premiered the "human-brain-inspired" embodied intelligence engine EngineAI Awaken at the 2026 World Robot Conference (WRC), and launched the "Engine Plan" ecosystem collaboration.
On August 29, Monolith held a closed-door brain-computer interface salon with various parties, summarizing several observations on where brain-computer technology stands and what it still lacks for a product leap. The article notes that technology routes have diverged into invasive electrodes, EEG, brain surface, vascular intervention, electronic skin, ultrasound, and others, and the market has not yet converged; brain data faces a data wall where quality, scale, and diversity are difficult to achieve simultaneously, and although public EEG data has accumulated to tens of TB, metadata is not standardized, and the industry has no consensus on whether to first solve acquisition or first understand existing signals.
The author argues that the future of home robots will not be a humanoid butler that does everything, but rather an AI robot brain coordinating the autonomous devices already in the home. At CES, she challenged every humanoid robot she encountered with a bottle of laundry detergent, and not one could open the cap.
Direct Drive Technology does not take the humanoid route; it uses direct-drive motors as wheel hubs and joints. In 2021 it launched "Xingtian," the world's first fully direct-drive two-wheeled legged robot. In 2023 it launched the 8-DOF wheel-legged robot "TITA," and in 2025 the third-generation modular wheel-legged robot "D1" was born, with a maximum obstacle-crossing height of 70 cm and a maximum payload of 80 kg; it can split into two machines or combine to cross obstacles, suitable for scenarios such as campus inspection and delivery.
The August robotics monthly roundup covers developments in society, business, research, and culture, including a hardware-buying trip to Shenzhen and a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory investigation into the security risks of Chinese LiDAR. A3 data shows that 8,940 robots were ordered in North America in the second quarter of 2026, worth $622 million, with unit volume up 4.3% and revenue up 21.3%. About 300 companies exhibited more than 2,000 products at the World Robot Conference in Beijing; Unitree's closing price was 460% above its IPO price before falling nearly 30% on August 28.
CASBOT advanced the commercial deployment of its robot band and showcased its embodied intelligence system capabilities in July and August: the CASBOT BAND robot band completed deliveries to the Qingdao Robot 6S Experience Store and the Beijing E-Town Robot World, and became one of the first products admitted into the national pilot for "sandbox approval" of embodied robot performances.
In its monthly spotlight column, IEEE RAS published an interpretation of China's robotics roadmap, outlining the policy trajectory from the 13th Five-Year Plan to the 15th Five-Year Plan, along with industrial achievements and remaining shortcomings.
MassRobotics surveyed members and ecosystem partners from August 17 to 23, 2026 (n=14) and added one-on-one interviews to assess the practical impact after the FCC defined "advanced robotics device" in July and added it to the Covered List. Results show sentiment splits by manufacturing footprint: companies manufacturing entirely or mostly in the United States all reported favorable effects, while companies manufacturing mostly or entirely overseas reported unfavorable effects or no impact.
OFweek published an analysis of the industry logic behind tactile sensor company PaXini's valuation crossing the 10 billion yuan threshold. After its Series B funding in March 2026, its valuation exceeded 10 billion yuan; in August it secured another 1 billion yuan in strategic financing, bringing cumulative funding to nearly 4 billion yuan. Over the past year, cumulative shipments of its self-developed tactile sensing chips surpassed 1 million units, and the GEN4 FUSE chip is based on four generations of architecture iteration.
Shinhan Investment & Securities and UMI Ventures held the "Korea-Japan Deep Tech Conference" in Tokyo on August 19, with 31 organizations in attendance, including Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, DBJ, KDDI, TEL, SMBC, and Mizuho Bank. The CEO of DeepX presented the company's AI semiconductor strategy, and the CEO of Holiday Robotics presented its physical AI and humanoid robot industry and commercialization strategy. Shinhan plans to leverage UMI's Japanese industry network to support Korean deep tech companies entering Japan and to identify investment and partnership opportunities.
Dyna Robotics announced that its robots have crossed the ROI threshold, and Din Tai Fung, a US restaurant chain with high revenue per store, will roll out Dyna robots across its store network. The company says deployments in hospitality, logistics, data centers and other scenarios will reach hundreds of units in the first half of 2027, and it shared several lessons on scaling robot deployments in a blog post.
On the evening of August 23, CCTV News aired a special report on the opening ceremony of the World Humanoid Robot Games, with CCTV focusing nearly a minute of footage on the Booster T2 robot from Booster Robotics. The event showcased 80 T2 robots autonomously changing formation in a square array, a 7v7 fully autonomous soccer match with 14 T2 robots, and a T2 autonomous powerful-shot challenge covering penalty kicks and free kicks.
Accelerated Evolution said that the World Humanoid Robot Games closed on August 26, 2026, and that its global shipments of bipedal humanoid robots have exceeded 3,000 units, with more than 2,000 units shipped so far this year.
Shihang Intelligence released the world's first ocean embodied large model, "Cangqiong CEORION," trained on a combination of real operations and simulation data; in simulation tests, its task success rate exceeded 90%, and its fine-control positioning and grasping success rate exceeded 90%. Its self-developed magnetic coupling thruster has a rated lifespan exceeding 10,000 hours, and its deployment and recovery system increases operational efficiency 10-fold. The "Orca" series robots have achieved routine integration of ship inspection and cleaning services for vessels entering and leaving ports at core hubs such as Yantai Port, and order value exceeded 1 billion yuan in the first half of 2026.
At WRC 2026, more than 300 companies in the embodied intelligence supply chain exhibited, with clear disagreements emerging across deployment scenarios, data training approaches, and robot body form factors. On scenarios, Leju and Dobot are targeting industrial and logistics warehouse settings, while Moqi argues for first entering unstructured settings such as the home to accumulate data. On data approaches, Galaxea uses almost entirely real-world data and is advancing a 1 million-hour real-data plan, while Galbot sticks with a Sim2Real simulation-based generalization approach.
Thanks to Ryan for visiting; this was a fun conversation. Key points from the quoted tweet: This episode of Peterman Pod features Sergey Levine, a top global robotics researcher and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, discussing the current state of humanoid robots, how China's robotics ecosystem compares with that of the United States, the possibility of OpenAI and Anthropic entering the robotics field, robotics research papers he recommends, and his predictions for when humanoid robots will be deployed.
The author reviews three dialogues hosted jointly by Leju and Ant Lingbo at WRC, covering whether embodiments are easy to learn, whether data is easy to use, and whether models are easy to evaluate, with 12 guests in total. Key viewpoints include that hardware is becoming a precondition for model capability, that Ant Lingbo's real-world data exceeds 100,000 hours and covers more than 20 configurations, that Noitom says about 20% of data plays a core role in model behavior, and that evaluation should guide adjustments to data distribution; on this basis, the author argues that industry attention is shifting from making a single movement to doing a task reliably and consistently.
At the 10th anniversary of KDB NextRound's Physical AI event, Holiday Robotics CEO Song Ki-young gave a keynote and live demo of the humanoid robot FRIDAY, showcasing finger joint movement and industrial actions such as operating a power drill. She emphasized that South Korea has 1,220 industrial robots per 10,000 workers, the world's leading robot density, allowing it to commercialize first and then expand to global markets. Four startups—Rideflux, Deaden Robotics, Mubin, and MediInTech—also gave IR pitches at the event.