The JAKA Kargo wheeled humanoid robot, running the JAKA EVO embodied intelligence operating system, has been deployed for bin handling at the headlight plant and electronics plant of a leading Chinese auto parts manufacturer. Per-bin handling time dropped from 105 seconds per bin to 28 seconds per bin, nearly a 4x efficiency gain, and the robot also stacks bins five layers high and recovers empty bins by layer.
Teradyne Robotics and Sereact announced a partnership to run Sereact's physical AI platform Cortex on Universal Robots collaborative robots for unstructured tasks such as returns handling and picking in retail, logistics, and manufacturing.
Researchers at Leiden University evaluated Ryberg Healthcare's autonomous UV-C disinfection robot Omnia in a laboratory designed to emulate a hospital environment; the results, published in the peer-reviewed journal Infection Prevention in Practice, show it met the acceptance criterion of at least 5 log reduction.
Avride and Wonder are expanding their partnership to bring autonomous robot delivery to Jersey City and Hoboken in New Jersey, Arlington County in Virginia, and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, covering more merchants on the Grubhub platform. The expansion builds on a Jersey City pilot launched a year ago, where nearly 20% of local deliveries are completed by robots. The newly deployed robots use Avride's latest fully autonomous driving technology, enabling real-time route planning in complex urban environments and adaptation to sidewalk and weather changes.
Fort Robotics announced approximately $20 million in new commitments from existing investors, with Tiger Global leading about $10 million and Mark Cuban Companies participating; the round is expected to close this week.
On October 25, Stardust Intelligence held the Stardust OS Robot Hackathon finals in Shenzhen, where 17 teams took 16 apps from simulation to execution on the T1 humanoid robot within 36 hours, a 94% deployment rate. Stardust OS (AOS) packages perception, mobility, manipulation, and interaction into Meta packages and Skills, letting developers orchestrate tasks by describing intent in natural language. The champion team, "Remote Avatar," connected a mobile phone, the Stardust desktop, and the T1 real robot to complete a closed loop of multi-step tasks including scooping cat litter, watering plants, pouring water, and picking up packages.
The You Yangwei team presents three tactile manipulation results: PACE was accepted as a CoRL 2026 Oral and achieved an average success rate of 90.7% across five real-world robotic insertion tasks; ForeTac uses future tactile prediction for action generation.
China's State Administration for Market Regulation (Standardization Administration) has released the first batch of 6 national standards for humanoid robots, to take effect on April 1, 2027, covering general requirements, environmental perception, decision planning, motion control, task operation, and simulation testing. Dobot Robotics, as a participating drafting unit, took part in compiling two standards: "Technical Requirements for Humanoid Robots Part 4: Motion Control" (GB/T 48317.4—2026) and "Part 5: Task Operation" (GB/T 48317.5—2026).
Unitree Technology announced Q3 2026 operating revenue of 665 million yuan, up 69.93% year-on-year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 113 million yuan, down 17.37% year-on-year. For the first three quarters of 2026, operating revenue was 1.817 billion yuan, up 55.71% year-on-year, and net profit attributable to shareholders was 387 million yuan, up 270.54% year-on-year.
In our latest newsletter, see what Cherry did in Q3 > https://mailchi.mp/cherry/the-next-chapter-cherry-ventures-q3-update
Exotec released its "Avoid Robot Regret" report based on a survey of 250 supply chain decision-makers in the US and Canada; one quarter of respondents wish they had chosen a different automation solution, but 94% say switching suppliers would be too costly, leaving them to keep their existing systems for 10 to 15 years.
Robot lamp Lamp announced its October development progress: the main development branch has already seen 4,092 commits this month, surpassing the previous high of 1,615 in April. The project added a docs/develop.md development path that takes about 10 minutes to get started, including a simulated lamp on a laptop, Python and JavaScript SDKs, and lamp-mcp; camera images are now authorized separately per skill, and a yield detection based on servo position and load was added, with this feature off by default.
The 32-to-16 qualifying round of the first URKL Global Humanoid Robot Free Combat League has ended, with 16 teams advancing to the group stage and each receiving an EngineAI T800 robot. The qualifiers held six days of offline training at the Dasha River Cultural and Sports Center in Nanshan, Shenzhen. All teams used the T800 as their unified hardware platform, deploying code refined in simulation onto real robots for the first time, and were evaluated on basic combat moves such as getting up after a fall, navigating complex terrain, and punching and kicking. The event features a prize pool of tens of millions, and industry partner Dison Digital will provide the top 16 with motion capture experience benefits.
A team led by Elliot Hawkes at Stanford University designed the soft robotic intubation system SRIS based on the vine robot principle. In cadaver tests, 12 participants, including 8 emergency responders, received 5 minutes of training; 87% achieved successful intubation on the first attempt, with an average time of 21 seconds. Under the same conditions, video laryngoscopy had a 63% success rate and an average time of 44 seconds.
Biomechanical analysis relies on precise three-dimensional measurement of human movement. With modern biomechanical motion capture technology and motion analysis software, research teams can conduct repeatable three-dimensional motion analysis in more locations. This approach yields clearer insights and accelerates iteration.
Yobotics' humanoid robot and quadruped inspection robot appeared in the live-streamed power fundamentals module of the 2026 fourth State Grid non-electrical professional new employee centralized training class, demonstrating industrial practice of embodied intelligence equipment serving power operations and maintenance. Leveraging self-developed legged bionic and embodied intelligence technologies, its products can adapt to complex environments such as substations, cable tunnels, transmission corridors, and disaster emergency response, carrying multiple types of sensor payloads to perform equipment inspection, temperature monitoring, defect identification, and data reporting, replacing personnel in high-risk areas.
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.
In 'Exploring AI 2026,' Yang Lan interviews Booster Robotics CEO Cheng Hao about the current progress of humanoid robots. The original article does not elaborate on specific models, performance metrics, or deployment stages; it only includes a product inquiry phone number, 400-865-2028, and an email address, sales@booster.tech.
Booster Robotics has officially launched its 2027 campus recruitment, opening positions to graduating students. The original text only provides a product inquiry phone number, 400-865-2028, and the email sales@booster.tech; it does not disclose specific positions, headcount, or work locations.
Registration is open for the 2026 "Robot+" Application Promotion Series (Energy Session), co-hosted by the Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology and the Shenzhen Robotics Association. The event will be held on November 4 from 15:00 to 17:00 at Xunmei Technology Plaza in Nanshan, Shenzhen. Energy-sector robotics companies including China General Nuclear Power Research Institute, Shenzhen Guaichong Robotics, Shenzhen Ruoyu Technology, Shenzhen Yutuo Intelligence, Qiyu Innovation, and Langchi Xinchang plan to take part in product sharing, and an open networking session will be held on site to connect with parties seeking energy-scenario solutions.
Intel will hold an exchange on frontier trends and solutions for embodied intelligence and robotics on November 10, 2026, in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, capped at 100 attendees. The event will feature a live demonstration of a multi-channel GMSL real-time perception solution based on the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H (Panther Lake) platform and a 358H embodied intelligence complete-machine solution.
On October 25, the Stardust OS (Astribot OS, AOS) robotics hackathon finals, hosted by Stardust Intelligence, concluded in Shenzhen. 17 teams developed over 36 hours, and 16 apps went from simulation to real-robot testing, with a 94% real-robot deployment rate.
Toyota is advancing its humanoid robot strategy, planning to deploy 400,000 robots, backed by $6.4 billion in annual investment for factory automation. Walden Robotics, spun off from Toyota's AI robotics business, has completed a $300 million funding round at a post-money valuation of $1.1 billion, and its general-purpose robots are already deployed at Toyota's North American factories. A foundation model developed by Toyota Research Institute can convert high-level instructions into real-time physical actions and motor control; it has been used in Boston Dynamics' Atlas, and Eley, Toyota's self-developed 50-kilogram-class humanoid robot, will also run on this model.
Xiaomi has announced that its new-generation high-DOF bionic hand has completed closed-loop validation from scenario requirements to engineering design, with specifications of 21 DOF, 26-motor hybrid actuation, and 1,500-point full-palm tactile sensing. The development was based on motion-capture collection from 1,827 of 2,579 SOP steps across 16 work sections at the pilot center of Xiaomi Auto's intelligent manufacturing department. Simulation ablations show that the 17-to-21-DOF range improves average stable-grasp success rate by 15% to 38% over the 6-to-15 range.
Suzhou sandisiwei has launched NexusPickit-S1 bin-picking software, aimed at automated picking of industrial parts that have no fixed pose and are randomly stacked. It provides source code, video tutorials, and Q&A support. The software's hand-eye calibration can be completed within 5 minutes with millimeter-level accuracy. In a configuration with a KW-MINI structured-light camera and a Dobot CR5 collaborative robot arm, picking accuracy is within about 5 mm; on an i7-13700H with 24 GB of memory, the cycle time is about 1.2 s per part, and it can run in a Windows environment without a GPU.
XPeng Group's robotics business has completed a first funding round of over $900 million at a post-money valuation of $6.3 billion, led by IDG Capital with participation from Gaorong Ventures, and with Tencent and Alibaba joining as strategic investors. The funds will be used for software and hardware R&D, training and iteration of physical AI models, data collection, construction of mass-production facilities, and global commercialization. The IRON humanoid robot has 76 degrees of freedom across its body and 21 degrees of freedom per hand, carries 3 Turing AI chips, and has 2250 TOPS of on-device compute; mass production is planned for the end of 2026, with external deliveries to begin in 2027.
MicroIntelligence suspended its global offering three days before listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, AgiBot was reported to have paused its Hong Kong listing and turned to a new funding round of 1 billion to 1.5 billion yuan, and HuanDong Technology withdrew its STAR Market IPO. The article sorts queued companies by ecological niche into three categories—components, project-based industrial applications, and humanoid complete machines—and argues that the pauses correspond respectively to technical adjustments, cash flow constraints, and strategic waiting. IDC data shows that global humanoid robot shipments in 2025 were about 18,000 units, with industrial manufacturing accounting for only about 9%.
Zhaofeng Shares announced that its controlled subsidiary Zhaoju Intelligent has won the bid for the "Robotics Innovation Service Platform Project" at a bid price of RMB 299.92 million. The company said that if the project is implemented smoothly, it will help improve its embodied intelligence industry layout, but as of the announcement disclosure date, Zhaoju Intelligent has not yet signed a formal contract, and uncertainty remains.
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.
David D'Arcangelo's new book, "The Robot Goal Federation: A Blueprint for a New Era of Sports Entertainment," goes on sale on Amazon starting October 21, proposing the establishment of RGF, a governing and certification body for robot sports.
In an interview, Raphael Memmesheimer, head of the University of Bonn's NimbRo@Home team, said his team won the RoboCup 2026 best paper award for its paper "Efficient Image Annotation via Semi-Supervised Object Segmentation with Label Propagation."
US robotics AI company Physical Intelligence is in talks for a new funding round of at least $1 billion, with a post-money valuation expected at about $20 billion, a sharp rise from its $5.6 billion valuation last November. The company has no commercial revenue to date and has not mass-produced its own robots; its core focus is general-purpose robot foundation models that adapt to third-party hardware. It has iterated from π0 to π0.7 and this month launched a beta API for its robot foundation model, offering model fine-tuning and inference services.
Wika Mobile Control released the "High-Quality Dataset for Embodied Intelligence-Enabled Construction Machinery" at the 10th Xuzhou Artificial Intelligence Conference 2026, and it is now available on data repositories including Hugging Face. The first phase of the dataset has 36 million frames, covers 12 typical operation scenarios, and synchronizes five dimensions of data—vision, LiDAR, pose, force feedback, and joystick input—using a unified timestamp. Wika says real-machine data collection for excavators costs about 5,000 yuan per hour, and training a usable model roughly requires data on the order of 100,000 hours.
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.
The latest RoboTwin leaderboard shows AgiBot GO-3 Nano Preview in first place with an average success rate of 85.01%. The leaderboard mainly evaluates dual-arm coordinated manipulation and environmental generalization in complex scenarios, with assessment dimensions including target recognition, motion coordination, and adaptation to environmental changes.
Geek Park reviewed how the LingBot model series from Ant Group's embodied AI unit Robbyant has been adopted in academia, open-source communities, and industrial toolchains. Stanford's OpenWAM uses the LingBot-VA architecture as a reference implementation, and a KAIST team used LingBot-VLA as a teacher model to raise its student model's single-step inference success rate from 35.3% to 51.2%.
After 16 months of R&D, Hongqi Chain terminated its robot unmanned vending system project. The announcement said the system has not yet met the standard for large-scale commercial deployment, and the company is shifting to a 24-hour cloud-attended operation. The company previously disclosed issues including a high robotic-arm grasping failure rate, vision recognition affected by lighting, and insufficient obstacle avoidance and communication stability. Industry insiders said condensation on glass-bottled cold drinks in summer causes the robot to grip them unsteadily and drop and shatter them. A QuantumBit ROBO visit found that most retail robots only handle mobile picking, requiring staff on duty for restocking and charging. Industry insiders believe robot retail is still at the PoC stage and that replacing store staff will take another two to five years.
At its October 28 media open day, Iluvatar CoreX opened the first live demo of the Tiangai 300; third-party testing converted to a single-card overall throughput of 1.05x H200. The concurrently released IXL144 supernode integrates 144 GPUs, and a GPU+XPU heterogeneous deployment AFD disaggregation scheme reduces inference latency by 60%. The edge product Tongyang TY1200 outperforms Thor T5000 in measured performance and is the first domestic edge product to implement GPU-accelerated physics simulation based on MuJoCo-Warp.