Swiss industrial robotics company ANYbotics announced that ANYmal X, a quadruped autonomous inspection robot developed for explosive hazardous environments, has begun customer deliveries, with the first customers including Norwegian energy company Equinor and Swiss company DSM-Firmenich.
Humanoid robot output is expected to grow from about 20,000 units in 2025 to over 100,000 units in 2026, but demand for lead screws has not yet scaled up, while the price anchor has already fallen to the 400-500 yuan range. Shuanglin Co. announced mass-production pricing of 499 yuan for its C3-precision planetary roller screw, and Wuzhou Xinchun's fundraising investment calculation uses 500 yuan per set with a unit cost of 318.77 yuan, corresponding to a gross margin of 36.25%, close to the levels of HIWIN Technologies and Nanjing Craft.
Schaeffler disclosed in Q3 that its humanoid robot backlog has grown to about €400 million, with 5 customers already in mass-production cooperation and sample orders reaching 83. The author therefore judges that the mass-production inflection point lies not in complete-machine shipments but in component suppliers' customer structure and expansion of procurement categories. The article also mentions that joint modules at Schaeffler's Taicang embodied-intelligence factory have entered the mass-production validation stage, and suggests watching the delivery timeline and revenue recognition schedule to be disclosed on November 3.
Leadshine reported revenue of 1.909 billion yuan and net profit attributable to shareholders of 299 million yuan for the first three quarters of 2026, up 46.77% and 86.8% year on year, marking its seventh consecutive quarter of positive growth. It avoids Inovance's main PLC battleground and focuses on frameless torque motors, joint modules, and dexterous hands for humanoid robots. In 2025, it delivered more than 120,000 frameless torque motors, and by the end of the first half of 2026, its order backlog exceeded 1 million units. Its core robot components have entered the supply chains of 80% of mainstream domestic humanoid robot makers, but cooperation with Tesla and Huawei remains at the preliminary communication and prototype testing stage.
Unitree released its Q3 2026 report, its first earnings report since going public. Cumulative revenue for the first three quarters was 1.817 billion yuan, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 387 million yuan, up 270.54% year-on-year. Single-quarter revenue was 665 million yuan, up 69.93% year-on-year, but net profit attributable to shareholders was 113 million yuan, down 17.37% year-on-year. R&D investment in the first three quarters was 263 million yuan, up 191.48% year-on-year; the company said this was mainly due to increased R&D and computing power investment in embodied intelligence and embodied large models.
Neura Robotics and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) opened the TUM RoboGym near Munich Airport, an investment of about €17 million covering more than 2,300 square meters, of which about €11 million comes from Neura, with an initial planned operating period of three years.
The creator published a 20-minute full build log of the ESP32-S3 desktop robot Pamk, covering the process from changing the initial sketch to a cube shape and designing a custom PCB costing about 25 euros (integrating ESP32-S3, I2S microphone and amplifier, screen, USB-C) to assembly and 3 magnetic shells. Pamk currently has no wheels or actuators, and the author says V2 plans to add motors/actuators. The video has French voiceover and English subtitles.
A University of Toronto engineering team has developed a flexible foot pad for the one-legged hopping robot Hopcopter, enabling it to hop on difficult terrain such as sand and ice. By enlarging the contact area, using a spherical joint that tilts with the terrain, a rubber band for return, and short spikes on the bottom for grip, the pad reduces takeoff error by up to 66%, improves efficiency by up to 64%, and cuts cross-terrain performance variation by 84%. The related paper was published in Advanced Intelligent Systems; the team's next step is to develop autonomous navigation, targeting scenarios such as search and rescue, pipeline inspection, and mining area inspection.
ANYbotics has launched ANYmal X, a quadruped inspection robot it describes as designed for explosive environments, and has begun deliveries to oil, gas, and chemical customers including Equinor and DSM-Firmenich.
CASIVIBOT, the industrial embodied inspection robot from CASIVIBOT, showcased its Z1-Lite motor stator model and Z1-SE hard material model at the 26th China International Industry Fair. The Z1-Lite targets mass-production inspection of micro motors, completing loading and unloading, defect detection, and automatic sorting in one station, with 5-micron inspection precision and 5 seconds per part; the Z1-SE relies on a self-developed few-shot visual inspection engine to identify chipping, scratches, dents, and dirt, with 7-micron inspection precision and 20 to 35 seconds per part.
NVIDIA and Agile Robots launched the Agile ONE SN humanoid robot reference platform at GTC Berlin, integrating Isaac GR00T and Jetson Thor, with plans to release it in early 2027.
Huaray Technology exhibited new machine vision and AMR products and solutions at the Shenzhen Electronics and Semiconductor Exhibition and Machine Vision Exhibition held October 27-29. On the vision side, the exhibits included a 65MP CXP large-area-array camera, a 5MP short-wave infrared camera, a 16K 256-level TDI line-scan camera, and the R5000Pro series AI smart code readers, covering processes such as wafer AOI inspection, scribe-line positioning, and micro-crack detection.
At this year's CIIF, the competitive focus of robot core component companies shifted from single-point specifications to stable delivery: Kunwei Technology, Xinjingcheng Sensors, Junduo and others expanded from force-tactile sensing to full-spectrum coverage; dexterous hand makers such as Zhongke Guiji, Dahuan and Yinshi emphasized industrial-grade lifespan and continuous operation capability; Huiling Technology's eHand-6 is priced at 2,999 yuan and the eHand-20 at 9,999 yuan. GGII forecasts that domestic dexterous hand sales will reach 70,200 units in 2026, up 265.63% year on year, but most customers are still in the proof-of-concept stage.
Estun won a 19.4574% stake in its controlling subsidiary Estun Jiangsu Intelligent through a public listing transfer, at a transfer price of about 211 million yuan, raising its shareholding to 69.608%. Under the plan, it will subsequently also acquire a 3.7834% stake from the state-owned enterprise mixed-ownership reform fund and a 21.6193% stake from the General Technology High-End Equipment Fund, bringing its shareholding to 95.0107% once all is completed. This is Estun's second subsidiary equity consolidation this year; in August, its subsidiary had just acquired collaborative robot maker Estun Cobot's 100% stake in an all-cash deal for 487 million yuan.
Guangdong robotics industry chain lead company Topstar disclosed its performance for the first three quarters of 2026: industrial robot orders totaled about 10,000 units and shipments about 8,600 units, while revenue from its industrial robot and automated application systems business reached 1.028 billion yuan, up 88.83% year on year. Overall revenue was 1.969 billion yuan, up 16.68% year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders was 146 million yuan, up 196.38% year on year. The company has submitted an application for a Hong Kong listing and disclosed embodied intelligence products including Xiaotuo and Xingzai, as well as the GMU-400E humanoid robot component machining solution.
The fifth installment of the Dexterous Hand in Practice series explains the FOC control chain from three-phase current to joint torque. The material provides only the title and does not give specific control stages or implementation details.
Gu Yue Ju released "Dexterous Hand Practice 03," on how two transmission methods, tendon and linkage, convert motor rotation into finger flexion. The material provides only the title and summary, with no specific structural parameters or implementation details.
The reasons for the high cost of dexterous hands can be broken down into three aspects: mechanical structure, drive scheme, and sensor configuration. From a practical perspective, the article analyzes how these three types of configuration affect the design and price of dexterous hands, helping readers understand their cost composition.
A UCLA and UC Davis team published in Science Robotics a fully polymer micro flying robot weighing 185 milligrams that uses electrostrictive polymer films to directly drive flexible conical wings, with no mechanical transmission. In tests it can generate lift about three times its own weight, take off autonomously at an average speed of 40 centimeters per second, and still resume flight after being hit by a fly swatter or pressed under a load about 11,000 times its own weight. The current prototype is powered through external wires; the team's next steps are to improve steering and landing control, increase payload, and advance onboard power, control electronics, and sensing toward autonomy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A teardown of the Zmotor humanoid robot linear actuator shows a stator, rotor, and inverted planetary roller screw (IPRS) integrated within its 32 mm body. The content is presented as a teardown video and does not provide load, stroke, or measured performance data.
XPeng Group Vice President Gu Jie said the solid-state battery for the XPeng IRON robot has rolled off the line in small-batch production, and the robot is currently in the pre-SOP stage. At its 2025 Tech Day, XPeng announced that IRON will be the industry's first to use an all-solid-state battery, and the company plans to achieve large-scale production of high-level humanoid robots by the end of 2026, with the robots gradually entering XPeng stores and commercial scenarios worldwide from 2027 to handle shopping guidance, explanation, and other services.
This study proposes a dual-UAV payload transport framework that uses a custom compact force sensor at the cable anchor point to measure interaction forces, with static and dynamic tests evaluating its linearity, hysteresis, repeatability, and crossload. Control uses a cascade structure: inner loops handle vehicle stabilization, while outer loops compensate for the measured forces, validated in simulations and indoor experiments under position uncertainty. Payload-drop and constrained-space tests compared with literature-based distributed methods show improved stability, coordination, and disturbance rejection.
EgoThumb is a fully open-source, vision-driven supernumerary robotic thumb that uses a visual imitation learning policy to map first-person images from a palm-facing camera directly to continuous joint positions, enabling autonomous grasping and holding assistance. Its compact dual tendon-driven finger relocates the actuation unit to the forearm to reduce distal weight and support precise active joint control. The authors state that the design generalizes across different users and environments, that both hardware and software are open-sourced, and that the paper has been accepted to IROS.
Researchers propose an electric-field induction motor whose rotor is made of discrete circuit elements between a finite number of conductive vanes, overcoming the limits of a single continuous material in resistivity, permittivity, and circuit characteristics. This macroscale motor uses circuitry on the rotor surface to emulate the "deep bar" rotor design of magnetic induction motors, providing higher torque over a wide speed range. The study completed the analysis, design, and demonstration of the motor.
This paper investigates two passive geometric approaches to reduce the acoustic signature of a flapping membrane wing and validates them on an exemplary wing. After optimizing the venation layout based on a dynamic snap-through model of the membrane wing, experiments measured a reduction of up to 8 dB in the stroke-reversal snap noise; an additive trailing-edge fringe inspired by hummingbird feathers further reduced the broadband swoosh by 3–4 dB without loss of lift. The paper notes that engineered wings are 15–30 dB louder than the animals they imitate.
This paper proposes a hybrid discrete-continuous multi-objective bilevel framework for the structure-actuation co-design of all-electric heavy-duty robotic manipulators: the upper level optimizes geometry and actuation topology, while the lower level searches for feasible configurations of motors, gearboxes, and screws for each joint. A system-level coordinator selects actuator packages based on hardware mass, co-design cost, and loss-aware supply energy, and feeds the resulting actuator masses back into the robot model until mass consistency is reached.
For the high-school remote-control division of the 2027 NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge, a study presents an integrated, reproducible design assessment of a four-wheel educational rover: 10.919 kg, 215 mm wheels at 200 RPM give a theoretical rolling speed of 8.105 km/h, and the nominal motor specifications are insufficient to demonstrate compliance with the 8 km/h design ceiling.
The research team proposed Torch-Hand, a humanoid dexterous hand featuring an all-linkage transmission architecture with 21 degrees of freedom, including 5 DOF in the thumb and 4 DOF in each of the other four fingers. The hand integrates its actuators into the palm in a serial-robot-like arrangement, so that motor motion corresponds directly to joint kinematics while balancing grasp force and payload capacity. Experiments evaluated the reachable workspace, fingertip coordinated trajectories, thumb opposition, coverage of 33 grasp categories, grasp force, payload, and task-level manipulation.
The paper proposes a learning-based real-to-sim-to-real framework that converts biological curves into cable-driven modular soft robot configurations through surrogate-assisted inverse design and uncertainty-guided refinement. The learned forward surrogate reduces deformation prediction time from 1.53×10^5 ms to 0.0008 ms, a speedup of about 1.9×10^8 times; inverse design time drops from 1.99×10^6 ms to 4.18 ms.
Humanoid robot output exceeded 40,000 units in the first half of 2026, with full-year projections surpassing 100,000; their performance ceiling is being determined by three foundational material categories: lightweight structural materials, flexible electronic skin, and high-performance batteries. On lightweighting, Tesla Optimus Gen2 makes extensive use of PEEK, which can reduce part weight to about half that of aluminum alloy; electronic skin faces a bottleneck in which high-quality tactile data worldwide totals only about 500,000 hours, a shortfall of over 95%. Current full-size humanoid robots have endurance of only 2 to 4 hours, and most battery capacities are below 2 kWh; solid-state batteries are accelerating from the lab toward robot applications.
Shanghai Jinkong Technology announced on October 26 that it has completed an angel round of tens of millions of yuan, led by CDH VGC, with Shanghai Jiao Tong University Hanyuan Assets, Guoke Green Fund, and Lingqiao Intelligent participating. The funds will be used for R&D of core components for space robots, in-orbit validation, and product engineering.
Bolzoni Group last week at AGV Expo 2026 in Piacenza, Italy, highlighted two electric attachments for AGV automation applications: an AGV-specific electric mast equipped with an electric side-shift fork positioner, and an AGV-specific electric rotating carton clamp for handling cartons and packaged goods.
HuaRay Technology exhibited new machine vision and AMR products and solutions at the Electronic Semiconductor Exhibition and Machine Vision Exhibition at Shenzhen Bao'an International Convention and Exhibition Center from October 27 to 29. On the vision side, these included the 65MP CXP large-area-array camera, RayDes camera, 5MP short-wave infrared camera, 16K 256-level TDI line-scan camera, and the R5000Pro and RS3000 code readers, among others; on the AMR side, live demonstrations included the M060C modular chassis, the FCX100B omnidirectional latent fork-lift AMR, and a latent lift AMR for the PCB industry, among others.
Liandong Attachments Company held its 2026 smart attachment series product launch on October 23, releasing and displaying 8 smart attachment products on site, with more than 70 representatives of smart logistics customers, OEMs, and partners in attendance. The event introduced the company's hydraulic attachment heritage and new electric-drive smart products, and guests also toured the sales showroom and the full production process.
Wouf, the quadruped robot in the Cubic Doggo project, managed to stagger a few steps while carrying a 1 kg load (about half its own weight), even though the steering gait code had not been fixed. Its ST-3215-C018 servos are not fast, and the author is excited about the result of this payload test and is considering having it carry the SO-ARM101, which also uses 12 servos. The build code has been released on GitHub.
Skydio launches the Controller 2 handheld controller, bringing Flight Deck to the X10, X10D, and R10, featuring a 7-inch sunlight-readable display, 5G control, customizable physical buttons, over 5 hours 45 minutes of battery life, and IP55 protection rating.