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Nov 1Sun
  1. 36氪 · 微信公众号22

    DeepSeek completes RMB 105.5 billion Series A+ funding at over RMB 610 billion valuation; AgiBot posts nearly RMB 2 billion in first-half revenue with about 9,700 units shipped | 36Kr Global Weekly News Roundup

    DeepSeek completed an RMB 105.5 billion Series A+ funding round at a post-money valuation of RMB 615.5 billion, with CATL and Tencent as the largest investors in the round, and has completed its overseas registration procedures. AgiBot reported nearly RMB 2 billion in revenue and about 9,700 units shipped in the first half of 2026, ranking first in the industry with a 43.1% share; by the end of September, its cumulative humanoid robot output had surpassed 20,000 units.

  2. CVer · 微信公众号52

    Westlake University Establishes World Model Research Center, Yu Kaicheng Appointed Director

    Westlake University established the Westlake World Model Research Center on October 31 at its Yungu campus, with Professor Yu Kaicheng as director and Academician Jin Yaochu as chief scientist. The center focuses on world models and physical intelligence, exploring intelligent systems that integrate perception, cognition, prediction, and action. Previously, Westlake University's autonomous intelligence lab AutoLab had conducted three years of world model research, proposed the conceptual world model, and incubated Westlake Shuzhi Awomo.

  3. The Robot Report32

    Why physical AI is the next lucrative frontier

    In 2025, robotics and physical AI startups completed 1,009 deals and raised $27.6 billion, more than double the previous year's total. Genesis AI emerged from stealth with a $105 million seed round and demonstrated Eno, a wheeled robot that can enter commercial environments. Physical AI relies on multimodal perception, edge computing, simulation environments, robot foundation models, and world models, and is in the first stage of founders rushing in.

  4. 量子位58

    Westlake University Establishes World Model Research Center; Incubated Company Awomo Has Raised Over 100 Million Yuan

    On October 31, the Westlake World Model Research Center was established at Westlake University's Yungu Campus, with Yu Kaicheng as director and Jin Yaochu as chief scientist. The center builds on the Autonomous Intelligence Laboratory AutoLab, founded three years ago, and focuses on world models and physical intelligence; AutoLab shifted toward a "conceptual world model" approach at the end of 2024, building physical concept representations in latent space. Its incubated company Westlake Shuzhi Awomo was founded in early 2026 and has cumulatively raised over 100 million yuan in seed and angel rounds. Awomo ranked first in four international robotics benchmark suites.

  5. Reddit r/robotics12

    Universities use AI to teach PLC, HMI, SCADA, ROS2 and other courses; weak student foundations despite graduation raise concerns

    A graduate reported that their alma mater is pushing the use of AI to complete the design, implementation, and debugging of courses including PLC, HMI, SCADA, embedded systems, IoT, and ROS2, and that students no longer read code. More than 60% of the students in that class do not understand arrays or Python, cannot write C++ at all, and cannot answer basic math questions such as integrating acceleration to obtain velocity, yet they will still graduate. The poster asked experienced practitioners how to guide these students in rebuilding their foundations.

  6. 量子位62

    Hongqi Chain ends robot unmanned retail system R&D; convenience-store robots still can't sell independently

    After 16 months of R&D, Hongqi Chain has terminated development of its robot unmanned retail system. The company's announcement said the system has not yet met the standard for large-scale commercial deployment, and it is shifting to a 24-hour cloud-staffed operation business. An industry insider close to Hongqi said that in summer, condensation on glass-bottle cold drinks made the robot unable to grip them steadily, and it kept dropping and shattering them; it also could not reliably pick up goods in complex packaging, and operation was even harder when aisles were narrow and customers were nearby. In a robot retail warehouse visited by QbitAI, the robot only handled mobile picking, with each pick taking about 20-plus seconds, and human staff were still needed for restocking and charging. Several practitioners believe robot retail is still in the PoC stage.

  7. 钛媒体82

    The First Public Ledger for Humanoid Robots: An In-Depth Analysis on the Eve of Agility Robotics' Listing

    Agility Robotics will list on Nasdaq on November 5 via SPAC under the ticker AGLT, with a pre-money valuation of $2.5 billion and confirmed 2025 revenue of only $1.782 million, about 63.5% of which comes from related parties.

    Why it matters: Using Agility's listing filing data as a sample, it breaks down humanoid robot unit economics and RaaS contract structures, and provides transferable metric definitions.

  8. 钛媒体60

    Juqiao Industries completes 100-million-yuan Series A funding, bringing fabric electronic skin into the robot tactile sensing sector

    Shandong-based flexible fabric tactile sensing company Juqiao Industries announced on October 29 that it completed a 100-million-yuan Series A funding round, led by Ant Group, with Lingyi Venture Capital, Weihai Gangrong, and Qingdao Hexin participating. The article states that it weaves functional fibers into sensing networks, and that in September 2025 its 1,000th set of humanoid robot fabric electronic skin rolled off the production line, with customers including Unitree, Songyan Power, and Lingcifang; however, its single-point accuracy is inferior to vision-based tactile solutions, making it better suited to large-area coverage scenarios such as the torso and soles of the feet.

  9. OFweek Robotics42

    Embodied AI Secondary Development Companies: Closest to Demand, Boundaries Are Shifting

    Secondary development companies in the embodied AI supply chain are facing niche compression as robot body manufacturers expand into the application layer. Unitree opened its UniStore shared application platform in May, Leju unveiled its LeTools Skills development toolchain in October, and ANYbotics upgraded Data Navigator to Shift in October, connecting fleet tasks and inspection data to maintenance systems. Secondary development firms are diverging along software platforms, industry solutions, and terminal operations, and their long-term position depends on their own product and service capabilities.

  10. OFweek Robotics60

    Wang Xingxing Enters Hurun Rich List with 69.5 Billion Yuan Fortune; Unitree's First Post-IPO Financial Report Shows Q3 Revenue Growth Without Profit Growth

    Unitree Technology founder Wang Xingxing has appeared on the 2026 Hurun Rich List for the first time with a fortune of 69.5 billion yuan, ranking 78th. Unitree disclosed its first financial report after going public on the evening of October 28: revenue for the first three quarters 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 the third quarter, however, revenue was 665 million yuan, up 69.93% year on year, while net profit attributable to shareholders was 113 million yuan, down 17.37% year on year; R&D investment was 127 million yuan, up 249.58% year on year.

  11. OFweek Robotics36

    The stronger Astra gets, the more one question matters: Is a Chinese robot's "body" an asset or a peripheral?

    SenseTime's Astra reaches 100% on LIBERO-Long++ and 81.9% on RoboDojo; the stronger the general-purpose brain, the more easily a robot body that conforms to standard interfaces can be swapped out as a "peripheral." Using Unitree's real-machine data flywheel, Zhiyuan's 3/4 R&D investment in the large and small brains, and Galaxy General's AstraBrain-WBC 0.5 trained on 2 billion frames of motion-capture data (92.58% zero-shot motion-tracking success rate, 0.39 ms inference latency) as examples, the article proposes three criteria: depth of in-house development at the execution layer, data return rate, and scenario replacement cost.

  12. 机器人全球资讯 · 微信公众号60

    Humanoid Robots Accelerate Into Factories Across China: What Else Must They Learn to Do the Work?

    Shanghai has proposed deploying 8,000 humanoid robots into factories by 2028, while Jiangsu, Shenzhen and other regions are also advancing real-scenario training and production-line deployment; companies including SAIC and CATL have disclosed application progress. Most deployed cases are concentrated in decomposable processes such as cell grabbing and loading, test loading and unloading, and material handling and sorting. For example, AgiBot's "Nengzai No. 1" works at about one unit every 2 seconds on Buick's battery mass-production line, and Galbot S1 has entered CATL's production line to handle material handling and sorting. The article notes that entering factories still requires passing hurdles in stability, battery life and cost accounting, and cross-factory replication also requires reducing technology adaptation and system integration costs.

  13. 机器人全球资讯 · 微信公众号58

    Estun Industrial Robots Rank First in China's Industrial Robot Market for Seven Consecutive Quarters

    According to third-quarter sales data from third-party consulting firm MIR DATABANK, Nanjing Estun's industrial robots have ranked first in China's industrial robot market for seven consecutive quarters. Through the acquisition and integration of Kuzhuo, Estun has built a full-scenario product system spanning heavy-duty industrial robots, lightweight collaborative robots, and embodied intelligent robots, covering more than 30 segmented tracks including automotive, electronics, and new energy. A single production line of a leading customer deploys more than 200 robots and completed installation, commissioning, and production startup within 60 days.

Oct 31Sat
  1. The Robot Report22

    From KAIST robot beetles to Harvard robot bees: the practical value of biomimetic robotic animals

    KAIST and other institutions are developing biomimetic robotic animals such as robot beetles and robot ants to solve practical problems including rescue and detection. A cyborg cockroach at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore carries a microcomputer, gas sensors, and an infrared thermal camera, and is remote-controlled via electrode pulses; a single roach can survey about 100 square meters of rubble, but a full survey of a building would require about 500 roaches and 500 operators. A robot ant at Stanford University can carry a payload 2,000 times its own mass, grips using a gecko-inspired foot design, and requires wired power in industrial settings due to its high energy consumption.

  2. 雷科技58

    Qiyuan Robotics' 5,000th robot rolls off the line and connects to Tencent WorkBuddy

    Qiyuan Robotics completed production of its 5,000th robot on October 25, taking 35 days since the September 20 launch of the Qiyuan Q1 and Qiyuan T1, with daily capacity rising from more than 10 units to more than 200. The company says it uses a general large model plus a self-developed VLA embodied model, and improves data collection efficiency with HIL-UMI post-training technology and uses the PrimeSim world model for simulation-based inference.

  3. 深圳市机器人协会 · 微信公众号22

    FAIR plus × Guoxian Demo Hub concludes its 11th session: six projects pitch, including Saisuode, Zhidongli, Juqiang, Chaowei, Fanbote, and Yuling

    On October 29, the 11th "FAIR plus × Guoxian Demo Hub" industry-finance matchmaking event, co-hosted by the Shenzhen Robotics Association and the International Advanced Technology Application and Promotion Center (Shenzhen), concluded, with 6 emerging companies pitching and more than 20 investment institutions participating.

  4. 雷科技30

    Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit: WorkBuddy Enterprise Edition deployed in over 50 industries; the challenge for agents entering enterprises lies in cost and workflows

    At the 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, Tencent disclosed that WorkBuddy has completed 9 billion task requests cumulatively since launching in March this year; its Enterprise Edition has been deployed in over 50 industries, covering 50% of China's Fortune 500 companies and 60% of China's Top 100 companies.

  5. The Humanoid Hub40

    Zhiyuan's Peng Zhihui proposes Worken metric for robot workload

    Peng Zhihui of Zhiyuan Robotics proposed using Worken (Work + Token) to measure a robot's actual workload, with the formula: number of active robots × autonomous working hours × output efficiency. It counts only time spent genuinely executing tasks and running autonomously, with output compared against a human baseline. The metric draws on cloud computing's usage-based metering approach and is intended to shift the industry's competition from shipment volumes, units off the line, and fleet size toward work actually completed.

  6. Robotics & Automation News23

    Why automated cells are moving inspection equipment onto the shop floor

    As automated cells take on more machining tasks, more manufacturers are moving coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) next to production lines so parts are inspected within minutes of machining. International Federation of Robotics data show that global industrial robot installations reached 542,000 units in 2024, more than double the level a decade earlier, with about 4.66 million units in operation worldwide.

  7. Robotics & Automation News22

    Inaugural Global Ocean Robotics Day focuses on advances in autonomous underwater robots

    The inaugural Global Ocean Robotics Day was held on October 21, with Constructor University as one of 10 in-person hubs worldwide. The event focused on how artificial intelligence and autonomous robots are transforming ocean research and exploration. Topics covered marine AI, autonomous underwater vehicles, and ocean observation robotic systems, including mapping ocean currents using marine vehicle trajectories, simulating autonomous docking with digital twins, and underwater robot swarms. The university's Ocean Systems and Robotics research group also demonstrated several autonomous marine robots developed by the team on site.

  8. The Humanoid Hub40

    Tesla Optimus V3 to Open Preorders in December, Starting at $20,000

    Modar Alaoui, organizer of the Humanoids Summit, said Tesla plans to open Optimus preorders during or after the summit on December 1-2, and will demonstrate Optimus V3 and autonomous vehicles at the event. He expects preorders to open to the public for the first time in early December, with the first deliveries being V3; most robots will go to businesses, with only a small number reserved for consumers, and an expected price of more than $20,000.

  9. The Robot Report55

    Percepto launches Axion physical AI platform to unify inspection data analysis

    Percepto, an autonomous drone inspection company, launched Axion this week, a hardware-agnostic physical AI platform that can analyze data from any third-party drone or sensor network, marking its shift to a software-first strategy. Axion is offered as SaaS, organizes inspection data by asset, has more than 160 built-in AI models, and supports querying inspection data in natural language. Percepto said it will continue to sell and support its existing drone and hangar product lines while moving manufacturing to the United States.

Oct 30Fri
  1. 机器人全球资讯 · 微信公众号35

    [Industry Watch] From factories to daily life: robots light up Beijing's new consumer landscape

    Robots are already providing services in several consumer scenarios in Beijing, including an AI pancake-making robot at the Longfusi food street, the Xbot coffee robot at Beihai Park, the Galbot vending robot at a Qianmen subway entrance, and the Robot Flame Research Institute 2.0 restaurant in Yizhuang, covering dining, retail, and interactive experiences. In July this year, the Municipal Bureau of Commerce included embodied intelligent robots in the trade-in subsidy program, offering a subsidy of 15% of the final sale price, capped at 1,500 yuan per item; the Yizhuang robot 4S store sells more than 50 products, and the Unitree Wangfujing direct-sales store mainly promotes the Go2 robot dog.

  2. 机器人全球资讯 · 微信公众号58

    What Comes After the Robot Rental Price War: Daily Rates Fall to 1,000 Yuan as Platforms and Manufacturers Shift Toward Services and Industrialization

    Reporters visiting multiple rental companies, robot manufacturers, and platforms in Hangzhou and Ningbo found that daily rental rates for mainstream humanoid robots have fallen from about 15,000 yuan at the market's peak to 1,000–2,000 yuan, with some platforms listing trial rates of 100–200 yuan per day. At the same time, some institutions predict that China's robot rental market could grow from about 1 billion yuan to 10 billion yuan by 2026.

  3. 未来机器人网 · 微信公众号60

    Morgan Stanley surveys 94 companies: humanoid robot deployment expectations generally delayed by about one year

    Morgan Stanley released its 2026 China Humanoid Robot Survey Report, surveying 94 domestic manufacturing, industrial, and service-sector companies. 64% plan to launch pilots or formal projects within the next three years, slightly above 62% in 2025. However, deployment expectations with an end-2027 target were broadly lowered: compound robots fell from 64% to 50%, wheeled humanoids from 58% to 36%, and bipedal humanoids from 41% to 22%, with overall deployment plans delayed by about one year compared with a year earlier. 72% of surveyed companies believe the unit price for large-scale rollout should be kept under 100,000 yuan, and 82% require investment payback within 3 years.

  4. 移动机器人产业联盟 · 微信公众号25

    Revaluing Hangcha Through Physical AI: Can AI-Fork and LogiMind Unlock the Next Round of Competition in Unmanned Forklifts?

    Hangcha Group is positioning itself in physical AI with its AI-Fork full-series intelligent forklift robots and the LogiMind industrial embodied intelligence large model, and plans to launch new products at the fourth Global Dealer Conference on November 10. Global forklift stock stands at about 12 million units, while unmanned forklift penetration in 2025 is only around 2%; Hangcha aims to lower deployment barriers through environment understanding and task planning capabilities. Its technology portfolio also extends to Hangcha Guazi's latent transport robots, bin robots, and the X1 wheeled humanoid robot.

  5. 甲子光年 · 微信公众号50

    Self-Driving 'Wheelchairs' Target Younger Users: Smart Wheelchair Makers Bet on Embodied AI and Short-Distance Travel

    Smart wheelchair makers are redefining their products as 'travel robots' or home entry points for embodied AI, seeking to attract younger users with 'light autonomous driving.' Strutt's EV1 carries 20 sensors—2 LiDARs, 10 ToF sensors, 6 ultrasonic radars, and 2 cameras—enabling 360° environmental perception and 3D mapping; Xcan Mate X from Xingcan Intelligence uses a LiDAR, ultrasonic radar, and camera setup. By 2026, the sector has seen at least 9 publicly disclosed funding rounds, but buyers remain concentrated among people aged 30-50 purchasing for their parents.

  6. AI前线 · 微信公众号22

    Transformer lead author's advisor Kevin Knight speaks in China: Humans are outsourcing "thinking" to AI

    Kevin Knight, former ACL president and advisor to Ashish Vaswani, lead author of the foundational Transformer paper, spoke at the TGC 2026 conference held by Techtonic. He proposed measuring AI evolution by "long-horizon cognitive duration without human intervention," noting that models have jumped from 15-second single-turn Q&A to autonomously building software systems continuously for 10 hours. He pointed out that progress in fields relying on physical-world feedback, such as robotics and biomedicine, is constrained by trial-and-error costs, and warned that humans are outsourcing thinking itself to machines.

  7. 机器人产业应用 · 微信公众号58

    Boyin Hechuang officially opens Suzhou headquarters and joins Bosch supplier system

    On October 29, Boyin Hechuang, jointly incubated by Boyuan Capital and Galaxy General, officially opened its 10,000-square-meter Suzhou headquarters, covering the full chain from R&D, simulation testing, scenario validation, and small-batch trial production to customer delivery, and has entered the Bosch supplier system. The company says its BW10 series, equipped with the VLA model, achieves efficiency of about 800–1,000 items per hour in logistics sorting, and that BW10-Lite has been deployed in the in-plant logistics scenario at United Automotive Electronic Systems' Shanghai plant. Under its plan, the company aims to gradually raise annual production capacity to 4,000 units by 2027, and its German subsidiary is in the preparatory stage.

  8. 36氪 · 微信公众号22

    Liang Wenfeng debuts on Hurun Rich List at No. 7 with 280 billion yuan, considering whether DeepSeek should enter embodied intelligence

    DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng debuted on the 2026 Hurun Rich List at No. 7 with 280 billion yuan in wealth, leading this year's newcomers. He has recently focused intensively on the embodied intelligence field and spoken with multiple entrepreneurs, and is considering whether DeepSeek should move further into this track; options may include forming a team himself or entering through investment. People familiar with the matter said he judges that DeepSeek still lags GPT-6 in some capability dimensions, and that scaling language models alone may not be enough to support AGI competition.

  9. 36氪 · 微信公众号55

    New AI deployment policy prioritizes high-risk roles, with implementation examples from four special-purpose robotics companies

    The General Office of the State Council recently issued the Opinions on Adapting to the Development of AI Technology to Help Build an Employment-Friendly Development Model, proposing that AI be prioritized for deployment in roles facing labor shortages and in high-risk environments. The article uses projects from four special-purpose robotics companies—DEEP Robotics, Qiteng Robotics, Shihe Robotics, and Deepinfar—including power tunnel inspection, explosion-proof inspection, ship hull rust removal, and underwater inspection, to show that special-purpose robots have already been deployed ahead of others in paid operations. It also describes each company's AI exploration in embodied navigation, industrial multimodal large models, operational data collection, and underwater vision.

  10. 36氪 · 微信公众号58

    Unitree Shares Rebound Over 70%, as Valuation Logic for the Embodied AI Industry Shifts

    Dingjiao One analysis says Unitree Technology's share price has rebounded by more than 70% cumulatively in recent days, with market capitalization recovering to over 280 billion yuan. However, its first post-IPO financial report, released on October 28, shows Q3 revenue of 665 million yuan, up 69.93% year-on-year, while non-GAAP net profit was 105 million yuan, down 17.42% year-on-year.

  11. 新智元 · 微信公众号22

    Liu Feng's team proposes AI 'Robinson Test': can AI survive independently after humans are withdrawn?

    The research team of Dr. Liu Feng, author of "The Rise of Superintelligence," has exploratorily proposed the AI "Robinson Test": after providing necessary supplies, human maintenance and task instructions are withdrawn to observe whether an AI can sustain itself, expand its living space, and whether it holds a cooperative, adversarial, or neutral attitude toward humans. The test is divided into a roughly three-month nurturing period, a roughly one-month handover period, and a one-year hands-off period. Inside a physically isolated local network, batteries, servers, robots with replaceable parts, and operating manuals are left behind, and disturbances such as power outages and hard drive failures are randomly injected. Results are graded from level zero to level four, with behavior toward humans marked separately. The team says this is only a preliminary concept and still needs calibration in pilot trials.

  12. 新智元 · 微信公众号20

    Altman Reveals OpenAI's New Model: Internal Test Cracked Navier-Stokes Equations, Cost Him Two Sleepless Nights

    On a podcast, Altman revealed that an unreleased OpenAI base model, during an internal "hold-my-beer" test weekend, successively cracked multiple interdisciplinary problems, including the Navier-Stokes equations, and that he lost sleep for two consecutive nights over it. He said such breakthroughs rely on tens-of-millions-of-dollars-scale test-time compute, and predicted AI will move toward RSI, agent team collaboration, and robots building their own data centers.

  13. 维科网机器人 · 微信公众号42

    Xuanyuan's Embodied-Intelligence Special Robots Extend from Petrochemical Explosion-Proof Inspection to Urban Gas Stations

    Xuanyuan has extended its explosion-proof inspection robots, already delivered at scale to chemical enterprises such as Wanhua Chemical, to urban gas pipeline networks; the solution has been put into operation at a gas station. The robot first scans and builds a model to calibrate instrument and valve points, then automatically inspects on a periodic basis via the backend, integrating image-based meter reading, infrared thermal imaging for temperature measurement, and gas-sensor leak detection; its four-wheel, eight-drive omnidirectional chassis can pass through narrow passages and recharge autonomously. On-site data is transmitted back to the central control in real time, anomalies are flagged by the system and reviewed by on-duty personnel, and manual steps remain in risk handling.

  14. 人形大讲堂 · 微信公众号40

    Post-00s founders enter robotics: Huang Yi releases fully open-source bipedal humanoid robot RP1

    On October 26, 22-year-old Huang Yi released the fully open-source bipedal humanoid robot RP1, publishing hardware drawings, control code, training plans, and a supplier list. Among these post-00s founders, only 6 are actually building the robot body itself, while the other 10 focus on upstream areas such as world models, tactile sensors, and dexterous hands. Yang Fengyu's wheeled dual-arm robot is priced at 88,000 yuan and will first enter hotel cleaning and item delivery scenarios.