News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Nex AGI's own benchmark page changes the owner of its third column halfway down — and the model that disappears is the flagship
Nex AGI published three models with open weights on 8 September 2026: the small mini, the mid-sized Pro and the 1.6-trillion-parameter Max. The results for all three sit on one page, in two tables placed a few dozen lines apart — and the tables do not have the same columns. In the upper table, covering coding and agent work, the third column is Nex-N2.5-Max. In the lower one, covering multimodal benchmarks and computer use, the third column belongs to MiniMax-M3, a competitor's model. Nothing but the header marks the change. A reader who takes in both tables with one sweep of the eye will credit the flagship with 22.3 points on OSWorld-2, the benchmark for actually operating a desktop — a figure that belongs to somebody else's, much smaller model. The flagship has no result there at all, and the reason is stated plainly by the maker a few paragraphs higher: Max is built on a text-only foundation, while the mini and the Pro continue the multimodal line. A model with no sight is not put through tests that consist of looking at a screen, so it drops out of the second table entirely instead of scoring badly in it. What follows is practical rather than academic. Anyone picking a Nex model to drive a computer is choosing between the Pro (OSWorld-2 56.4, OSWorld-G 87.4 — the best figure in the maker's own comparison) and the mini (30.5 and 82.9, the latter ahead of Claude Opus 5 at 76.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 77.7). Size is not the axis here; sight is. And the largest model in the family, by far the most expensive to run at two nodes and sixteen H200 cards, is the one that cannot do this job at all. Editorial note: our own profile of Nex-N2.5-Max carried that 22.3 for a day, taken from the column in good faith. We corrected it on 17 September, which is also how this story came about.
Nex-N2.5-Max →DeepSeek's new model beats Opus and GPT on the agent test everyone has already saturated. On the two harder versions of that same test, it loses by twenty points
DeepSeek published V4.1-Flash on 10 September 2026 with a comparison table that reads like a clean sweep — until you follow one test through three of its versions. On Terminal-Bench 2.1 the new model scores 90.6, ahead of Opus-5.0 at 89.1 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 88.8. On Terminal-Bench 3.0 it scores 30.0 against Opus-5.0's 43.3. On version 4.0, 31.2 against 51.8. The three numbers describe the same model on the same family of tasks, and the spread is a lesson in how to read a benchmark. Version 2.1 has been in circulation long enough for every serious laboratory to score in the high eighties; a 1.5-point lead there separates models that are, in practice, equally capable. Versions 3.0 and 4.0 are the harder revisions written precisely because the old one stopped telling models apart — and there the distance between DeepSeek's model and the most expensive Western one is roughly twenty points. The same pattern repeats elsewhere in the table. On Humanity's Last Exam, a test still far from saturated, V4.1-Flash reaches 36.8 against Opus-5.0's 56.3. On ProgramBench, 20.3 against 37.0. What the model does win is worth stating plainly, because it is not a small thing. Its Codeforces rating of 3,471 is the highest in the table. It resolves 74.2 percent of DeepSWE v1.1 tasks, leads on CyberGym with 88.1 and on AutomationBench with 54.8. And it does this while activating 8 billion parameters per token when reading a prompt and 16 billion when writing — out of 552 billion in the backbone. The efficiency is the actual headline. DeepSeek rebuilt the part of the model that stores the conversation, cutting the memory held per token to 890 bytes, about a quarter of what the July model needed. Through the company's API the new model costs $0.30 per million input tokens at peak and $1.20 per million output, against $0.44 and $1.32 for its predecessor, with off-peak hours at half price. Weights are MIT-licensed and were downloaded 140,636 times in the following weeks. Read together, the table says something more useful than 'best model'. For agent work at scale, where a million-token session runs on a budget, this is a remarkable instrument at a fraction of frontier pricing. For the hardest reasoning a buyer can currently pose, the expensive models remain ahead, and DeepSeek's own numbers say so.
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash →Sakana's new models route your task to the cheapest engine that can handle it. You pay the same flat rate either way
Sakana AI released two new versions of Fugu on 11 September 2026, and both are built on the same idea: instead of one enormous network, a pool of open-weight and specialised models, with a router that sends each task to the leanest member capable of solving it. "A system that deploys a multi-trillion-parameter model to execute a simple data lookup is not intelligent, but wasteful," the Japanese lab writes. The interesting part is not in the announcement. It is in the price list. The original Fugu, still on sale, bills the customer for whatever it picked: when one agent is active, the buyer pays "only the standard rate for that specific underlying model", and when several are active, a single rate based on the most expensive one involved. Clever routing on a cheap task shows up directly on the invoice. The two new flagships do not work that way. Fugu Max is a flat $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output. Fugu Ultra v2 is a flat $5 and $30, doubling to $10 and $45 above a 272,000-token context. The rate does not move with the engine that answered. Route a question to a small open model or to an expensive specialist, and the bill is identical. That is a legitimate way to sell a service — flat pricing is predictable, and Sakana carries the risk if a task turns out to need the expensive machinery. But it inverts who benefits from the routing. Under the old scheme, every cheap decision landed in the customer's pocket. Under the new one, it lands in Sakana's margin, and the customer's gain is limited to the headline rate being lower than a frontier model's: the lab claims Fugu Max undercuts Sonnet 5, GPT 5.6 Terra and Kimi K3 on output pricing by 40 to 60 percent. The second thing worth reading twice is what Fugu Ultra v2 does not contain. Sakana states plainly that Fable 5, Fable 5.1 and GPT-6-Astra are not in its agent pool — the results are meant to be reached without the strongest closed models on the market. The lab reports 48.3 on Chartography, a test of reasoning over charts and structured data, against 27.3 for Opus 5 and 29.5 for Fable 5, and 74.3 on DeepSWE. Every one of those numbers is the vendor's own; none has been independently reproduced. What neither product has is a specification in the ordinary sense. There is no parameter count, no stated context window, no training-data description and no model card, because, as Sakana puts it, Fugu is an architecture rather than a fixed set of weights. The only public hint at the size of the window is that Ultra v2's price changes above 272,000 tokens. Buyers of these two models are not buying a network. They are buying a routing policy over other companies' networks — and, as of this release, paying a fixed fee for it. Both models are live through Sakana's OpenAI-compatible API. A technical report accompanies the release. Their catalogue profiles on wujec.ai record what the maker discloses and, just as importantly, what it does not.
Sakana Fugu Max →Dyson launched two robot vacuums without printing a single suction number. In a category sold on pascals, that is the news
Dyson announced two robot vacuums in London on 3 September 2026 - the R1 Nurovi Dry and the mopping R2 Nurovi Wash+Dry - and the launch material contains no suction rating for either machine. That absence is deliberate. Every rival in the category leads with a pascal figure, and figures for this range are already circulating in secondary coverage, but the company's own announcement argues the opposite case: that pick-up is a property of the whole system, and that the cleaner head matters as much as the motor behind it. The argument has hardware behind it. Dyson's new Twin-capture system splits a job the category normally hands to suction alone. Bristles on the brush bar mechanically sweep larger, heavier debris straight into the machine, which is exactly the debris that suction handles worst; the vacuum motor is then left to do what suction does well, pulling fine dust out of the floor surface. Redesigned side sweepers extend outward to reach the wall and use an angled, webbed connector to control brush pressure and direction, so hair is guided into the airflow instead of being flicked across the room or wrapped around the bristles. Acoustic piezo sensing and floor detection read dust level and surface type as the robot works and change its behaviour on the fly. The mopping model carries the range's most unusual idea. Instead of the round pads used almost everywhere else, the R2 spins a pair of Reuleaux triangle pads - a curved shape of constant width that rolls as smoothly as a circle, but whose three corner points reach into corners that a circle cannot touch. Dyson drives them in an eccentric pattern so the pads work the wall line rather than stopping short of it. The dock washes those pads in 75 C water after every clean and dries them with 45 C air; for both robots it is a bagless cyclonic unit with eight cyclones that empties the machine after each run and holds up to 90 days of dry waste in a sealed system. What Dyson has not published is almost as notable as what it has. There are no dimensions, no weight, no battery capacity, no runtime and no price in the announcement, and no shipping date for the R1 beyond launching soon. The catalogue profiles for both machines therefore carry the engineering and leave the number fields empty, including suction. They will be filled when Dyson publishes a specification sheet, and not from third-party estimates in the meantime.
Dyson R2 Nurovi Wash+Dry →13,361 deposits, and the first companion humanoid leaves the warehouse on 16 September. Reporters who watched it walk describe a machine more mechanical than the renders
UBTech has a delivery date for the machine it calls the world's first mass-produced ultra-bionic humanoid: 16 September 2026. It is the moment the consumer humanoid stops being a launch event and becomes something a courier hands over, and the number of people waiting is unusually precise — 13,361 orders across every online and offline channel, each secured with a 3,000 RMB deposit. The date was set at the Shenzhen launch on 30 June 2026, where UBTech introduced UWORLD as a consumer brand separate from the Walker humanoids it sells to car factories. The U1 series splits into three machines at three very different prices: U1 Lite, a half-body edition at 119,800 RMB; U1 Pro, the full-body model at 169,800 RMB; and U1 Ultra, the only one able to move on its own, at 990,000 RMB for the male edition and 880,000 RMB for the female one. The company publishes its headline figures at series level: 88 degrees of freedom, biomimetic silicone skin, a claimed 500-millisecond response, and two to four hours of runtime on a charge. What makes the shipping date worth watching is what Chinese reporters wrote after seeing the robot in person. TMTPost, in a hands-on piece published on 5 July 2026, described a walk with a pronounced mechanical quality and quoted an industry view that the pre-sale campaign had lifted expectations higher than the live machine could meet. The same report noted that the marketing language about high-end domestic service was walked back by the company itself: what U1 offers is home companionship, not housework. Nothing in that is fraud, and UBTech never published a specification promising chores — but it is the gap between a render and a room that 13,361 buyers are about to measure for themselves. Two numbers will decide how this is remembered. The first is runtime: a companion that lasts two to four hours cannot sit with someone through a night, and at Ultra prices that limit is hard to argue away. The second is how many of the 13,361 orders actually turn into deliveries this autumn, because a deposit is not a sale. UBTech has not disclosed battery capacity, compute specification or a delivery schedule beyond the start date.
UWORLD U1 →Dobot's smallest industrial arm is named after a reach it does not have — and its wrist has quietly doubled
The DOBOT MG400 is a four-axis desktop arm with a base of 190 x 190 mm - smaller than a sheet of A4 - and its current datasheet gives it a working radius of 440 mm. The model is called MG400, and the launch announcement of 22 December 2020 described a 400 mm reach. Every product datasheet the manufacturer has published since at least March 2023 says 440 mm. Dobot has never marked the difference. The second change is larger and equally unannounced. The datasheet archived in March 2023 gives the tool axis J4 a range of plus/minus 180 degrees. The page live today gives the same axis plus/minus 360 degrees - a full turn in each direction, twice the travel, on a machine sold under an unchanged name. There is no revision note, no hardware suffix and no dated changelog; the numbers simply differ between two snapshots of the same page. Neither is a scandal, and both matter to anyone integrating the arm. A cell laid out from the 2020 press release assumes 40 mm less reach than the machine has. A tool path written against the 2023 datasheet leaves half of the wrist's travel unused, and a fixture designed to avoid cable wind-up at 180 degrees is solving a problem the current arm may no longer have. The rest of the specification is stable across both snapshots: 500 g rated payload, 750 g maximum, plus/minus 0.05 mm repeatability, 300 deg/s on all four joints, the controller built into the base, 8 kg of arm, 100-240 V mains. The MG400 was launched in Shenzhen alongside the CR3, CR10 and CR16 cobots, and Dobot's founder and chief executive Jerry Liu presented it there as the industrial successor to the DOBOT Magician, the desktop arm that had made the company's name in classrooms five years earlier. It remains in production and Dobot publishes no list price for it. wujec.ai publishes the current figures in its MG400 profile and records the discrepancies rather than presenting either number as if it had always been true.
DOBOT MG400 →Two flagship models launched on the same day. One promises to spend more tokens, the other to spend fewer
On 2 September 2026 Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash and Meta released Muse Spark 1.3. Both are pitched at the same job — long-horizon coding and autonomous agents — and both were added to our catalogue this week. Read side by side, their launch materials argue for opposite things. Google keeps the price list untouched: USD 0.75 per million input tokens and USD 3.75 per million output, the same introductory rate 3.7 Flash opened, with both figures doubling on 1 January 2027. The context window, the output limit and the three thinking levels are unchanged too. What changed is how hard the model works. Google states it plainly: on complex tasks 3.8 Flash executes extra reasoning steps and calls tools iteratively, and "might use more tokens to maximize performance, especially at higher effort levels". The company then tells cost-sensitive developers to lower the effort level or simply stay on 3.7 Flash, which remains fully supported. Meta's announcement leads with the opposite number. Muse Spark 1.3 is described by Meta's own engineers as significantly faster than Muse Spark 1.2 while using around 20% fewer tool calls and around 25% fewer tokens — fewer turns where they are not needed, less verbose code. The published scorecard backs a real jump in coding (DeepSWE v1.1 rises from 55.0 to 75.4) and a very large one in long-context retrieval (MRCR 512K–1M from 55.5 to 98.1), though in most agent rows the model still finishes behind Anthropic's Opus 5. The practical lesson for anyone budgeting an agent is that the per-token rate has stopped being the whole story. A frozen price list can still produce a bigger invoice if the model decides to think longer, and a model with a higher headline rate can be cheaper if it stops calling tools it does not need. Neither company publishes the figure that would settle it — the average token cost of a completed task — so the comparison has to be run on your own workload. One asterisk on Meta's table: version 1.3 is measured at max reasoning while 1.2 is measured at xhigh, so the two columns are not set to the same effort. A postscript that sharpens the point. Meta put no price in its launch post, and the figures that spread afterwards — USD 0.10 per million input tokens and USD 0.20 per million output, widely reported as the lowest rate on the market — turn out to belong to a separate model id, muse-spark-1.3-contributor. That tier is cheap precisely because you grant Meta permission to train on your prompts and completions. The Standard tier, where Meta states your data is not used for training, costs USD 1.25 and USD 4.25. In other words the cheapest published rate for this model is not a discount on compute at all: it is a price for your data.
Gemini 3.8 Flash →In ugo's robot line-up, the arms are not a luxury option. They decide how many floors the robot can reach
The Tokyo company ugo Inc. sells three patrol and inspection robots that share a platform, a cloud console and a top speed of 3.6 km/h. Reading the three specification sheets side by side shows that the difference between them is not comfort or finish. It is whether the machine can use a building the way a person does. ugo Pro (G4) carries two arms on a powered lifting mast. That is what lets it call a lift, press the button for a floor and hold a security card against a reader — and it is the reason a single Pro can patrol a whole building rather than one storey of it. The robot stands 1,800 mm tall on a 440 x 580 mm base, weighs about 58 kg, carries three HD cameras and runs roughly four hours of continuous driving at its default 1.9 km/h, recharging in about two and a half. ugo Ex (G4) is the same height and the same platform with the arms taken off. It narrows to 375 mm, drops to about 45 kg and swaps the arm assembly for a bare aluminium mounting pole that the customer drills and populates: ugo publishes the frame dimensions, the mounting area and the formula for recalculating the centre of gravity, and supplies two 900 mm edge cushions for whatever gets bolted on. Two USB Type-C ports deliver 100 W each for the added hardware. The trade is straightforward — no arms, no lift buttons, one floor. ugo mini (G1) takes the reduction further. At 370 x 370 mm and about 16 kg it is small enough for security rooms and quiet enough, thanks to gearless direct-drive motors, for hotels and care homes. Instead of arms it has a periscope: a telescopic pole that lifts a gimballed 4K camera from 62 cm to 1.86 m, so a valve at floor level and a gauge on top of a cabinet are both within reach of the same machine. It runs about three hours driving, recharges in an hour and a half, and its 3D LiDAR is an option rather than standard equipment. One caveat worth recording. Figures circulating in secondary listings give ugo Pro a weight of 54 kg and a top speed of 5 km/h. The manufacturer's own current support documentation states 58 kg and 3.6 km/h, and that is what our profiles use. Profiles for all three models are now in the catalogue.
ugo Pro (G4) →Epson sells its folding arm in two lengths. The shorter one is the more precise, and it is the only one you can order for a cleanroom
Two catalogue entries, one model name: Epson lists the Flexion N6 as an 850 mm and a 1000 mm arm, and the naming suggests the usual trade - more reach for a little less accuracy. The company's own specification pages say something more specific than that. The 1000 mm version repeats to +/-0.04 mm and weighs 69 kg. The 850 mm version repeats to +/-0.03 mm and weighs 64 kg. That is a third less positional error, not a rounding difference, and it is the sort of gap that decides whether an arm can be used for fine assembly at all. The differences do not stop at precision. The catalogued 1000 mm item is offered for tabletop and ceiling mounting; the catalogued 850 mm item is a ceiling-mount unit, and 850 mm is the only length Epson lists in a cleanroom version. Buyers who pick a length by reach alone can therefore end up with a different mounting envelope and a different set of production environments than they expected. The nominal lengths are also rounded down. Epson's own tables give the 850 mm arm a length of 860 mm - 860 mm to the fifth-axis centre and 960 mm to the flange - and the 1000 mm arm 1010 mm to the wrist centre and 1110 mm to the mounting face. Everything else the two share: 3 kg rated and 6 kg maximum payload, brakes on all six axes, an external RC700A controller drawing 2.2 kVA, and the folding geometry that gives the first three joints a full +/-180 degrees each so the elbow tucks back over the base instead of swinging out behind the robot. That geometry is the reason the line exists. Epson introduced it in 2016 with the smaller N2 - a 450 mm arm that repeats to +/-0.020 mm, the tightest figure in the company's six-axis range - and scaled it up to the N6, shown at iREX in November 2017 and on sale in Japan from 30 May 2018 at 2,400,000 yen. Both machines are still in the current six-axis catalogue. Both now have profiles in this catalogue, with the full specification tables in English and Polish.
Epson Flexion N6 →Anthropic's new flagship costs exactly what the old one did. The whole discount is hidden in the prompt cache
A new top-of-the-range model that does not raise its price is unusual enough; one whose maker cuts a bill by up to 45 percent while leaving the headline rate untouched is rarer still. Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on 1 September 2026 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output — the same figures Claude Fable 5 carried since June. The change sits one line further down the price list: reading from the prompt cache fell from a tenth of the input price to a fortieth, or $0.25 per million tokens. That line matters more than it looks. In agent work the same instructions, tools and files are re-sent on every step of a long task, and it is the cached re-reads, not the fresh input, that pile up. Anthropic puts the saving at roughly 25 percent for typical workloads and up to 45 percent for heavily agentic ones — an effective price cut delivered without touching the number buyers compare. On capability, the maker's own figures put the biggest jump in scientific agent work: Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 rises from 24.7 percent for Fable 5 to 52.6 percent, more than doubling. The model reports 73.4 percent on CursorBench 3.2.0 and 65.0 percent on Humanity's Last Exam with tools. Its context window (1M tokens) and maximum output (128K) are unchanged, and its knowledge runs to June 2026. One design decision sets it apart from the rest of the line-up: adaptive thinking is always on and cannot be disabled. Every answer is a deliberated one, and the maker openly labels the model's latency as the slowest it sells — which is why it does not recommend it as the default. That role belongs to Claude Opus 5 at half the price; Fable 5.1 is for demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work, or for cases where Opus 5 at high effort still falls short. Developers moving over should note three breaking changes: forced tool use now returns an error, earlier models cannot read Fable 5.1's thinking blocks, and editing an earlier turn in a conversation invalidates them. The same day, Anthropic shipped an identical model under a second name. Claude Mythos 5.1 shares Fable 5.1's specifications and pricing to the last figure, but is offered by invitation only through Project Glasswing, aimed at verified cybersecurity and life-sciences professionals; access is arranged through an Anthropic, AWS or Google Cloud account team, and at launch covers US organisations. The split is the same one Anthropic drew in June with Fable 5 and Mythos 5: one model with safety classifiers in front of it, one without, so that the unfiltered configuration can be tracked — and withdrawn — separately. Claude Fable 5 moves to the maker's legacy list and remains available.
Claude Fable 5.1 →Five of OpenAI's seven Codex models cannot be bought any more. Their model cards are still online
Read OpenAI's model index today and the Codex line looks like a healthy range of seven coding models. Read the deprecation page and five of them were switched off seven weeks ago. The withdrawal was announced on 22 April 2026 and executed on 23 July 2026, in a batch that also took the chat aliases and the deep research variants. Four Codex models went that day - gpt-5-codex, gpt-5.1-codex, gpt-5.1-codex-max and gpt-5.1-codex-mini - and gpt-5.2-codex, released only in January, went with them. The substitute named for most of them is GPT-5.6 Sol, a general-purpose model rather than a coding one; GPT-5.1-Codex Mini was pointed at GPT-5.6 Terra instead. Earlier, on 12 February 2026, OpenAI had already removed codex-mini-latest, the model that started the line in May 2025. That leaves exactly one survivor: GPT-5.3-Codex, released on 24 February 2026. The pricing page confirms it - among all Codex models, gpt-5.3-codex is the only one still quoted with a rate. Everything else in the family is documentation without a product behind it. The documentation has not caught up. The models index still lists all seven with live links, and each card still opens with a present-tense description, a full endpoint table and a price in dollars per million tokens. Nothing on those pages says the model is gone. A developer who starts from the model list - the obvious place to start - has no way of knowing which of these can still be called. There is a second oddity in the same trail. The replacement OpenAI named for codex-mini-latest, gpt-5-codex-mini, has no card at all: the documentation URL returns a redirect and then a 404, and the name does not appear in the model index. The recommended migration target is harder to find than the model it was meant to replace. One more number is worth keeping in view. OpenAI's own policy promises at least six months of notice for generally available models, but only three months for specialised variants - and it names Codex versions as an example. GPT-5.2-Codex lived a little over six months from release to shutdown. In this line, a coding model that is current in January can be gone by summer. We have brought all six retired models into the catalogue with their shutdown dates, so the Codex family can be read as what it is: one model on sale and six in the archive.
GPT-5-Codex →OpenAI's new generation did not add a single token of context. It costs two and a half times more
GPT-6 Astra, released on 3 September 2026, is the first model of OpenAI's sixth generation and, by the company's own description, its most capable. Put its model card next to the one for GPT-5.6 Sol, the flagship it succeeds, and the headline numbers are the same numbers. Both models have a 1,050,000-token context window. Both cap output at 128,000 tokens per request. Both price prompts above 272,000 input tokens at 2x input and 1.5x output for the whole request - Astra additionally doubles the cache rate at that threshold. The one specification that genuinely moved is the knowledge cutoff, from 16 February 2026 to 30 April 2026: ten and a half weeks of fresher training data. The price moved further. Sol runs at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output; Astra at $10 and $50. That is 2.5 times the cost per token in both directions. Sol's rate is promotional - OpenAI guarantees it at least through 21 November 2026 - but it is the rate a developer pays today, and it was itself a cut of 20% on input and 33% on output announced in August. Astra also takes options away. It rejects custom temperature, top_p and log probabilities, all of which Sol accepts. It drops the 'none' reasoning effort level, so the model always reasons. Tool calling works only through the Responses API; calling tools from Chat Completions requires migrating. In exchange it adds five effort levels up to xhigh and max, effort changes mid-conversation, asynchronous tool calling, mid-turn steering over WebSockets, and asynchronous misalignment monitoring that can stop an agent run for review. OpenAI has published no benchmark figures alongside the model card, so the case for paying 2.5 times more currently rests on the company's own description of the model as its most capable, and on capabilities aimed squarely at long agent runs rather than at bigger prompts.
GPT-6 Astra →Yukai built its name on robots that hear nothing. Its family robot now remembers your conversations for 1,700 yen a month
On 28 August 2026 Yukai Engineering switched on a generative-AI conversation mode in BOCCO emo, the family robot it has sold since March 2021, and put it behind a paid subscription: a premium plan at 1,700 yen a month, with two months free for anyone signing up before the end of September 2026. What the money buys is memory. In the new mode the robot recognises which member of the household is speaking, remembers what was said and carries that context from one conversation into the next, rather than treating each exchange as a fresh voice command. The same character also appears as an illustration inside the app's chat room, so a conversation can continue on a phone away from home. A free update landed the same day for every owner, and it is the more revealing half of the announcement. Until now the robot had to be summoned by name; it can now be woken by poking it or by pressing its function button. The recording window, previously six seconds, was extended to ten. Both changes read as fixes for a device whose voice interface was tuned for short instructions and now has to cope with something closer to talking. The move is worth noting because of what else this manufacturer sells. Yukai's best-known products are deliberately deaf: Qoobo, the tailed cushion, has no microphone and no camera at all, which is exactly why it is accepted in care homes and hospital wards. BOCCO emo has always been the opposite case in the same catalogue — mains-powered, cloud-dependent, useless without a router and a smartphone — and the premium plan pushes it further in that direction. Yukai has not said which AI model or provider sits behind the conversation feature; its announcement says only that it uses generative AI. The Wi-Fi model of BOCCO emo currently lists at 52,800 yen, up from the 44,000 yen it launched at in 2021. Buyers who want the new conversations should count on the subscription on top.
BOCCO emo →For seven years Kassow left repeatability off every spec sheet. Its two new arms finally print a number
Kassow Robots has spent its whole commercial life as the odd one out in the cobot market. Every arm it builds has seven axes rather than six, and until this spring not one of them had a published repeatability figure - not in the product manual, not in the datasheet section, not in the FAQ. In a class where every competitor prints a tolerance in hundredths of a millimetre, the Danish maker printed nothing. That changed with the KR1240 and KR1824, introduced on 10 April 2026. The brochure for the pair lists repeatability of +/-0.03 mm for the KR1240 and +/-0.05 mm for the KR1824 - ordinary numbers for this class, but the first the company has ever committed to. The five older arms, KR810 through KR1805, still carry no figure. The two models also mark the first real mechanical break in the range. The KR1240 carries 40 kg over 1200 mm and the KR1824 carries 24 kg over 1800 mm, against 5 to 18 kg on the earlier arms. Kassow attributes the jump to new joints: 1.5 times the torque, 40 percent more mechanical stiffness and wrist joints roughly 20 percent faster, reaching 270 deg/s on the KR1824. The KR1824 is the more telling of the pair. Its 1800 mm reach is not new - the KR1805 has covered that radius since 2019 - but it did so with payload cut to 5 kg. The new arm keeps the radius and lifts nearly five times as much. The price is size. The base grows from 160 x 160 mm to 194 x 194 mm, and mass roughly doubles: 80 kg for the KR1240 and 76 kg for the KR1824, against 34 to 38 kg for the older models. Protection improves to IP56 and IP55 respectively, up from IP54. Both are offered in the Edge Edition, with the controller folded into the arm base for mobile platforms. Both models now have profiles in our catalogue, and the five older entries have been corrected: the claim that Kassow publishes no repeatability for any model was true until April 2026 and is not any more.
Kassow Robots KR1240 →Elite Robots' three biggest cobots weigh the same. Their payload climbs from 20 to 30 kg
Elite Robots of Suzhou sells six collaborative arms in its CS series, and the numbers on its own product pages describe a range that stops growing physically while it keeps growing in capability. The first three models scale the way arms usually do. The CS63 carries 3 kg and weighs 15 kg; the CS66 carries 6 kg and weighs 20 kg; the CS612 carries 12 kg and weighs 34 kg. Payload roughly doubles, mass rises with it, and the ratio of what the machine lifts to what it weighs improves from 0.20 to 0.35. At the top of the range the mass stops. The CS620 lifts 20 kg and weighs 60 kg. The CS625 lifts 25 kg and weighs 58 kg. The CS530H, the newest and strongest arm in the family, lifts 30 kg and also weighs 58 kg. Half a family's worth of extra payload arrives on a body that never gets heavier — the payload-to-weight ratio rises from 0.33 to 0.52, and the strongest arm is fractionally the lightest of the three. What pays for it is reach. The CS620 stretches to 1,800 mm, the longest arm the company builds; the CS625 pulls back to 1,500 mm and the CS530H to 1,522 mm. Shortening the lever is what lets the same motors hold more weight. The same trade shows up in accuracy: the CS625, on the shortest of the three arms, is the most repeatable at +/-0.08 mm, while both 30 kg and 20 kg models sit at +/-0.1 mm. The CS530H also breaks a habit of the category. Its tool point moves at 4.0 m/s, the fastest in the family, while carrying the heaviest load — the CS625 manages 3.3 m/s with 5 kg less. Elite Robots describes the model as built around palletising, reaching stacking heights of up to 2,300 mm, which explains a design tuned for vertical throughput rather than radius. Across the whole six-model range the pattern of the industry holds: precision degrades as the arm gets longer, from +/-0.02 mm on the 624 mm CS63 to +/-0.1 mm on the 1,800 mm CS620 — a fivefold spread. It is the same relationship visible in Universal Robots' range, where the smallest and oldest arm is still the most accurate. The manufacturer does not date the CS530H publicly. Web archive snapshots place it: the company's product listing of 19 June 2024 already showed the other five CS arms and not this one, and its product page has no snapshot before 19 March 2025. The three smallest models appear in the listing archived on 31 March 2023, consistent with the manufacturer's own statement that the CS series was released in 2022.
Elite Robots CS530H →Dobot quietly grew its cobot range to ten arms — and the longest one is also the most precise
Dobot's CRA specification table listed seven collaborative arms in August 2025. It lists ten today. The three additions — CR6AL, CR16AL and CR30A — arrived without a launch announcement, and one of them quietly contradicts a rule this catalogue has watched hold at four other arm makers. The new CR6AL reaches 1,800 mm, further than any other arm Dobot sells and 100 mm beyond the 20 kg flagship. Reach normally costs precision: a longer lever amplifies every error at the joints. Yet Dobot rates the CR6AL at ±0.02 mm repeatability, the tightest figure in the whole family, while the CR7A — which reaches 800 mm, less than half as far — is rated at ±0.05 mm, two and a half times looser. Within a single manufacturer's own table, the longest arm is the most accurate and one of the shortest is the least. The payload numbers refuse to line up too. The CR6AL lifts 6 kg, less than the shorter CR7A's 7 kg. The CR5A reaches 900 mm while the stronger CR7A reaches 800 mm. And the new CR30A, the strongest arm Dobot has ever sold at 30 kg, covers a radius of 1,305 mm — 395 mm short of the 20 kg CR20A — at 4 m/s rather than 5.5 m/s. It is nonetheless three kilograms lighter than the CR20A and runs on the same 500 W supply, so the extra payload was bought with reach and speed, not with more metal. Dating the three arms took the Internet Archive and the web server. They are absent from a snapshot of 11 January 2026 and present on 19 July 2026; their product images carry a Last-Modified header of 20 March 2026, all three uploaded in the same second. This catalogue therefore dates them to 2026 and says in each profile that the year comes from snapshots rather than from a manufacturer's statement. Two inconsistencies in Dobot's published data are worth recording. The series table gives maximum linear speeds of 3 to 5.5 m/s, while the CR20A's own product page puts maximum tool-centre-point speed at 2,000 mm/s — a gap of nearly threefold with no explanation. And the ingress-protection row of the series table shows a repeatability value instead of an IP rating for the two largest models; the CR20A page states IP54 for arm and control box, which is the figure published here. Six of the ten arms now have profiles on wujec.ai: CR3A, CR5A, CR7A, CR6AL, CR20A and CR30A. The remaining four will follow.
Dobot CR6AL →Flexiv's two small Rizon arms lost 40 mm of reach in the autumn of 2024 — and the Rizon 10's claimed touch got twice as coarse
Flexiv's Rizon series specification table was rewritten between 3 August and 9 October 2024, and none of the model names changed with it. On the earlier version of the page the Rizon 4 reached 916 mm and the Rizon 4s 959 mm; on the later one, and on the page as it stands today, they reach 876 mm and 919 mm. Both arms lost exactly 40 mm. In the same edit the Rizon 10's force sensing accuracy moved from 0.1 N to 0.2 N — a declaration made twice as coarse, on a machine sold on its sense of touch. Everything else in those columns stayed put: payload 4, 4 and 10 kg, arm weight 20, 21 and 38 kg, pose repeatability ±0.05 mm to ISO 9283, IP65, maximum tool force 200, 150 and 350 N. The Rizon 10's own reach, 941 mm, did not move either. The change was not announced. Flexiv's company timeline records product launches, awards, funding rounds and certifications, but carries nothing for the autumn of 2024 beyond the release of Flexiv Elements Series 3 in October. There is no note on the product page, and the arms are still sold under the same names, which means a datasheet printed in mid-2024 and one printed today describe the same robot with different numbers. Which set is right matters practically: 40 mm is roughly the difference between reaching the far corner of a work cell and not reaching it. The current table is the manufacturer's own, so this catalogue uses 876 mm and 919 mm — and the correction also explains a long-running disagreement, because several distributor listings still credit the Rizon 4 with 780 mm and the Rizon 10 with 1015 mm, matching neither version of the manufacturer's page. The same archived pages date one more thing Flexiv does not: the Rizon 10s, the fourth model in the family, first appears in the specification table between 14 June and 5 August 2025. It has no launch announcement and no entry on the company timeline.
Flexiv Rizon 4 →Read JAKA's Zu30 page in inches and pounds and you are reading the Zu20
Every headline figure on the product page of JAKA's 30 kg collaborative arm is printed twice, once in metric and once in imperial. The two do not describe the same machine. Converted, the imperial column turns out to be the specification of the neighbouring model, the Zu20. The page states a payload of "30 kg (44.1 lb)". Thirty kilograms is 66.1 lb; 44.1 lb is 20.0 kg. It states a reach of "1350 mm (70.1 in)". Seventy-point-one inches is 1,781 mm. It states a weight of "65 kg (149.9 lb)". One hundred and forty-nine-point-nine pounds is 68.0 kg. Payload 20 kg, reach 1,780 mm, weight 68 kg: those are, to the digit, the three numbers JAKA publishes for the Zu20 one page across. The imperial column was not mistyped — it was copied wholesale from a different robot. The practical consequence falls on exactly the buyers the units are there for. A North American integrator sizing a cell in inches and pounds from this page will plan around an arm that reaches 430 mm farther and lifts a third less than the one being ordered — and both errors point in the direction that produces an unusable workcell rather than a merely tight one. The error is not isolated. Across JAKA's classic Zu family the same parameter table is shifted by one row, so the field labelled "Degree of freedom" displays a programming method and a field labelled "Humidity" displays the tool input/output count. On the desktop MiniCobo the same shift pushes the arm's ingress protection rating off the table altogether: the field named "IP classification" shows an ambient temperature range, and the actual IP figure is nowhere on the page. The company's newest tables — the Zu35 and the Mini 2 — carry the same fields correctly labelled, which suggests an old template still serving most of the catalogue rather than a one-off slip. None of this touches the robots themselves. JAKA, founded in Shanghai in 2014 and the manufacturer Teradyne is currently suing at Europe's Unified Patent Court, builds a well-regarded range whose metric figures are internally consistent: within the classic Zu family repeatability loosens from ±0.02 mm on the short arms to ±0.05 mm on the long ones, exactly as arm length predicts. It is the sheet that is broken, not the machine. Three JAKA arms — the Zu3, the Zu12 and the MiniCobo — enter this catalogue today, with metric values only and with the shifted rows left blank rather than filled in. Figures verified against JAKA's own English product pages on 8 September 2026.
JAKA Zu12 →Techman has launched its smallest cobot ever — and left it out of its own product catalogue
Techman Robot put a new collaborative arm on the market on 24 July 2026, and six weeks later the machine still has no page in the company's product catalogue. The TM3S is the smallest arm the Taiwanese manufacturer has ever sold: 3 kg of payload, a 600 mm working radius and a body it describes as weighing under 12 kg. The number that matters is the last one. At under 12 kg the arm is inside what one technician can lift off a bench and carry, and Techman designed the rest of the machine around that possibility. The power lead uses a quick-release connector, so the composite cable can be swapped and the unit unbolted and remounted at another station without opening the arm. On a shop floor running short batches, that turns relocation from a scheduled job into something done between shifts. Everything else is borrowed from the S series launched in 2023: the same control box, the same TMflow programming environment, the same hand-guided vision teaching, and the wrist camera that has been standard on every Techman arm since 2016. The manufacturer points the TM3S at precision welding, assembly, workstation localisation and fast automated inspection in confined spaces. What is missing is the paperwork. The arm made its overseas debut in Bangkok at ME Assembly and Automation on 17 June 2026 and was declared commercially available five weeks later, but as of 8 September 2026 tm-robot.com has no TM3S entry under either cobot series, no datasheet and no price. The payload, reach and mass quoted above exist in exactly one place: a launch post on the company's Chinese-language site. Figures the S series is otherwise sold on — repeatability of plus/minus 0.03 mm, IP65 sealing — have not been published for this model, and this catalogue does not assume they carry over. The launch also settles a question about the rest of the range. Techman has added a ninth S-series model without dropping anything: TM5-700, TM5-900, TM12, TM14, TM16 and TM20, all from 2016 to 2021, remain listed and linked from the manufacturer's front page. Where Universal Robots renamed two of its best-known arms this year and FANUC quietly cut its collaborative line from five models to two, Techman is still adding to both ends at once.
Techman TM3S →Universal Robots' two best-known cobots gained 2.5 kg each without a single new part
Anyone looking today for a UR5e or a UR10e on the maker's website ends up on the general product listing. Both pages redirect, while the UR3e and UR16e pages still answer at their own addresses — which rules out a site rebuild and points at something else. The two most widely installed collaborative arms in the world left the catalogue under those names on 12 May 2025. They did not leave the factory. At the Automate fair in Detroit, alongside the launch of the faster UR15, Universal Robots announced that the UR5e would be sold as the UR7e and the UR10e as the UR12e. The company's own wording was that it was introducing clearer names and more power where it counts. Deliveries of both were declared immediate, and the e-Series line-up became UR3e, UR7e, UR12e and UR16e. Put the old and the new technical data sheets side by side and the interesting part appears: on the mechanical side, nothing moved. The UR7e weighs 20.6 kg with its cable, reaches 850 mm, stands on a base 151 mm across, repeats a pose to within 0.03 mm per ISO 9283, tops out at 4 m/s at the tool centre point and draws 570 W at maximum — every one of those figures matches the UR5e document. The UR12e repeats the UR10e in the same way: 33.5 kg, 1,300 mm, a 190 mm base, 0.05 mm of repeatability, 615 W, and a force-torque sensor rated to 100 N and 10 Nm. Universal Robots states that accessories, URCaps and application kits transfer unchanged and that installed systems need no modification. What changed is the label. The smaller arm now carries a 7.5 kg rating instead of 5 kg — an increase of half again on a machine whose parts are the same. The larger one gained nothing at all in 2025: it had been rated at 12.5 kg since an enhanced version announced on 17 May 2021, sold at an unchanged price, so for four years its name understated its lifting capacity by a fifth. The 2025 announcement corrected a number that had been wrong since then. For a buyer the practical consequence is small but real. A quotation, a risk assessment or an integrator's cell drawing dated before May 2025 will name a robot that no longer appears in any price list, and a specification written around a 5 kg limit is being met by an arm the maker now certifies for 7.5 kg. For a catalogue like this one the consequence is a rule worth remembering: a model vanishing from a manufacturer's menu does not always mean the machine was discontinued. Sometimes it means only that the marketing department finally read the data sheet.
UR7e →FANUC's green cobot line has quietly shrunk from five arms to two
FANUC's collaborative robots come in two colours. The white CRX arms are the ones the company advertises. The green CR arms came first, and there are now only two of them left on sale. A reading of the manufacturer's current cobot listing shows eight models: the CRX-3iA, CRX-5iA, CRX-10iA, CRX-10iA/L, CRX-20iA/L and CRX-30iA in white, and just the CR-15iA and CR-35iB in green. Missing are the CR-4iA, CR-7iA and CR-7iA/L that opened the line at IMTS in September 2016, and the CR-35iA that started it all in June 2015. None of the four has been declared discontinued. Their product pages are still published and still carry full specification tables — but where a current model offers a "Get a Quote" button, each of the four now offers "Get Support". That single word is the only public statement of their status, and it is the reason this catalogue has moved all four to retired without a withdrawal date: FANUC has published none. The replacement tells its own story. The CR-35iA of 2015 was the first force-limited arm to carry more than 10 kg, and it needed 990 kg of machine to lift 35 kg — twenty-eight kilograms of robot per kilogram of payload. The CR-35iB that replaced it in 2022 lifts 50 kg, since a 2023 uprating, using 375 kg of robot. Seven years bought a higher payload for 615 kg less mass, at the cost of 170 mm of reach. The trade the buyer accepted in 2015 — enormous mass for the right to work without a fence — is no longer the trade on offer. This catalogue keeps profiles for all six green arms, including the four no longer sold. A machine that defined a market segment does not stop being worth describing when its maker stops quoting a price for it.
CR-35iA →The name says 35, the datasheet says 50: FANUC's strongest cobot outgrew its own model number
FANUC's CR-35iB is, by the manufacturer's own description, the industry's strongest collaborative robot: 50 kg of payload with no safety fence, over a 1,643 mm reach, from an arm weighing 375 kg. The figure that should give a specifier pause is the one in the name. The machine launched in May 2022 as a 35 kg cobot, a redesign of the 2015 CR-35iA that shed roughly 62 percent of its mass, 375 kg against 990 kg, to make the heavy cobot something a plant could install in an afternoon. On 1 June 2023, after showing the robot at Automate in Detroit, FANUC America announced a payload increase to 50 kg. The model number did not change. FANUC's own cobot microsite still describes the machine as having "a payload of 35kg or 50kg", while its specification table lists 50 kg flat. The same announcement did the opposite to a sister machine. The CRX-25iA, FANUC's largest white-series cobot, also gained payload - from 25 kg to 30 kg - and this one was renamed, becoming the CRX-30iA. FANUC's website now redirects the old name to the new page. Two upgrades announced on the same day, two different conventions: one arm kept a number that understates it by 15 kg, the other took a new one. For anyone reading a specification sheet this is a practical trap rather than a curiosity. A 2022 datasheet, a 2026 quotation and a third-party listing can all carry the designation CR-35iB and describe different lifting capacities, and none of them is wrong. FANUC publishes no list price for either machine, so the payload line in a written quotation is the only place the difference becomes visible. This catalogue records the manufacturer's current specification table - 50 kg - and notes the older 35 kg rating in the profile, because both appear to remain in the manufacturer's own materials. Two further discrepancies sit in the same file: FANUC America gives the reach as 1,643 mm while the 2022 European launch release quoted 1,831 mm, and the product page lists 300 mm/s in collaborative mode where the cobot microsite lists 750 mm/s.
CR-35iB →Two FANUC cobots, one 1,418 mm arm: the stronger one is the only cobot in the range that never speeds up
FANUC sells two collaborative arms with exactly the same 1,418 mm reach, and the specification tables on its own product pages show the stronger one giving up something the rest of the range keeps: its high-speed mode. The CRX-10iA/L, launched in December 2019, carries 10 kg and weighs 39 kg. The CRX-20iA/L, announced on 1 March 2022 and shipping from that April, carries 20 kg and weighs 41 kg. Same reach, same six axes, same R-30iB Plus controller, same IP67 sealing, same mounting options. Twice the payload for two kilograms of extra arm, and the heavier model is the more accurate of the two at +/-0.04 mm against +/-0.05 mm. On every line a buyer normally reads, the 20 kg arm is simply the better machine. The exception is the speed row. Every other arm FANUC lists in the CRX family runs at 1,000 mm/s in collaborative mode and doubles to 2,000 mm/s in high-speed mode, the setting used when the cell is fenced and no operator is standing inside it. For the CRX-20iA/L, FANUC publishes 1,000 mm/s in both modes. The strongest mid-size cobot in the range is capped at human-safe speed permanently, so in a fenced cycle the older, weaker CRX-10iA/L will complete more moves per hour on any job it can physically lift. That matters because most cobots do not spend their lives working next to people. A great many end up behind a fence doing palletizing or machine tending, where the collaborative rating is an installation convenience rather than a daily operating mode. For those cells the missing high-speed mode is a throughput ceiling, and it is not visible in the payload, the reach or the price. The same tables settle a question this catalogue has now asked of four cobot makers in a row. Reach does not predict payload. Techman numbers its arms so that a TM5-700 lifts more than a TM5-900; Universal Robots gives its strongest and its mid-range arms an identical reach; KUKA and now FANUC repeat the pattern. In FANUC's case two arms of the same length differ by a factor of two in what they will carry. The number in the name and the number on the drawing are not the same kind of fact, and only one of them is in the datasheet. wujec.ai has added the CRX-10iA, CRX-10iA/L, CRX-20iA/L and CRX-30iA to the catalogue. All figures come from FANUC America's own product specification tables.
CRX-20iA/L →Techman's S series is not a new cobot line. It is the old arms, rebuilt to a third of the tolerance
Techman Robot unveiled the TM AI Cobot S series at Automate 2023 in Detroit on 22 May 2023. Read the four base models against the arms they replace, and the series turns out to be a rebuild rather than a new range — the geometry is carried over almost unchanged, and what moves is the precision. The TM12S carries 12 kg over 1300 mm and weighs 33 kg. The TM12 of 2018 carried 12 kg over 1300 mm and weighed 32.8 kg. The difference is repeatability: plus/minus 0.1 mm then, plus/minus 0.03 mm now. The TM14S repeats the pattern against the TM14 — same 14 kg, same 1100 mm, tolerance cut by the same factor of a little over three. That is where Techman's advertised "up to 70 percent" improvement in repeatability is literally true. At the top of the range it is not: the company's own product pages give the TM25S and TM30S plus/minus 0.05 mm. The smaller pair moved further. The TM5S keeps the 946 mm reach of the 2016 TM5-900 but lifts 5 kg instead of 4, and the TM7S takes the place of the TM5-700 with 7 kg over 758 mm instead of 6 kg over 700 mm. Both gained the same tolerance step, from plus/minus 0.05 mm to plus/minus 0.03 mm. The rest of the S-series package is what a 2016 or 2018 arm does not have: IP65 sealing instead of IP54, so the machine can be hosed down; a sixth axis turning at 450 rather than 225 degrees per second, which the manufacturer converts into a claimed 25 percent shorter cycle; and up to 31 TUV-certified safety functions rated PL d, Cat 3, which Techman says remove the need for a separate safety PLC in the cell. One detail is worth reading carefully before ordering. In the older line the model number named the family and a suffix gave the reach, so a TM5-700 was the short version of a TM5. In the S series the number is the payload in kilograms and the reach is not in the name at all — which is why the TM5S reaches 188 mm further than the TM7S sitting next to it in the same catalogue. The catalogue now holds all eight S-series arms alongside the older line they were built from.
Techman TM12S →Techman sells its S series on +/-0.03 mm. Its own pages give the two biggest arms +/-0.05
Techman Robot promotes its TM AI Cobot S series on one number: a repeatability of plus/minus 0.03 mm, which the company calls an improvement of up to 70 percent over its earlier line. The claim sits on the series landing page, and trade coverage of the TM25S and TM30S launches repeated it as a specification of those machines. The manufacturer's own product pages say something else. Read one by one, the eight arms of the S series split into two groups. TM5S, TM7S, TM12S, TM14S and TM20S each carry the plus/minus 0.03 mm line. The TM25S and the TM30S — the 25 kg arm with the longest reach in the catalogue at 1902 mm, and the 30 kg arm rated to 35 kg when palletising — are both listed at plus/minus 0.05 mm. The practical reading is that the series headline describes the light and medium arms, not the flagship pair. A buyer who needs both the reach and the precision has to choose: the TM20S holds plus/minus 0.03 mm but stops at 1300 mm and 20 kg, while going up to the TM25S buys 600 mm of extra span at a stated cost of two hundredths of a millimetre. The difference is small in absolute terms and irrelevant for palletising, which is what these two arms are sold for. It is not irrelevant for the buyer comparing spreadsheets, because the number quoted in most launch coverage is not the number on the product page. Where the two sources disagree, this catalogue records the per-model figure from the manufacturer's current page and says so in the profile. wujec.ai has added the TM20S, TM25S and TM30S to the catalogue today, completing Techman's collaborative range at eight S-series arms and seven of the earlier line.
Techman TM25S →Two cobots, the same 900 mm arm, twice the difference in precision — and the reason is not the reach
Last week the Universal Robots range gave us a tidy rule: pose repeatability degrades as the arm gets longer, almost in proportion. Put the Techman Robot catalogue next to it and the rule falls apart. Techman's TM5-900 and its TM16 both work within roughly a 900 mm radius. The TM5-900 is quoted at +/-0.05 mm repeatability, the TM16 at +/-0.1 mm. Same reach, half the precision. The number that changed is the payload: 4 kg against 16 kg. And once a Techman arm leaves the TM5 series, the tolerance stops moving at all — the 900 mm TM16, the 1,100 mm TM14, the 1,300 mm TM12 and the 1,300 mm TM20 are every one of them rated at +/-0.1 mm, whatever their length. So precision at this manufacturer is a property of the platform, not of the geometry. There are two families: a light one that holds 50 micrometres and a heavy one that holds 100, and choosing a shorter model inside the heavy family buys nothing in accuracy. That is a different engineering answer to the same physics, and it changes how a cell is specified. At Universal Robots a buyer trades reach for precision. At Techman a buyer trades payload class for precision, and the reach comes free. The pattern repeats inside the heavy family in the way speed is spent. The TM12 and the TM20 share a 1,300 mm arm and weigh 32.8 and 33 kg — two hundred grammes apart — but the TM20 carries eight kilogrammes more. It pays for them with time rather than metal: its first two joints turn at 90 degrees per second where the TM12's run at 120, and average tool speed falls from 1.3 to 1.1 metres per second. The TM12 is, quietly, the fastest arm the company sells, because a long arm converts a given joint rate into more travel at the tool. One more number is worth pulling out, because it runs against the industry grain. Every arm in this range is rated for an ISO Class 3 cleanroom, a stricter class than the Class 5 that only a single Universal Robots model reaches and the Class 6 available on its larger ones. For semiconductor and optics work — where the whole question is whether the machine may stand in the clean space at all — that is the line in the specification that decides the purchase, and here it does not depend on which model is chosen. A note on where the figures come from. Techman publishes no specification table on its own product pages, and its printed catalogue carries the numbers as an image with no text layer. The full data set is documented instead by Omron, which has resold these arms under its own brand since the two firms allied in 2018; its comparison table was last revised in October 2024. Where the two sources disagree — Omron rounds the TM5 reaches to 700 and 900 mm, Techman states 946 mm for the long variant — the manufacturer's own figure stands.
Techman TM16 →The most precise arm Universal Robots sells is the smallest one it launched in 2018
Put the whole Universal Robots range side by side and one number refuses to improve with time. Pose repeatability, measured per ISO 9283, is +/-0.03 mm on the UR3e and the UR5e — the two smallest arms of the e-Series, shown at automatica in June 2018. Every machine the company has launched since is rated at +/-0.05 mm or worse: the UR16e of 2019 and the UR10e at +/-0.05 mm, the UR15 of 2025 at +/-0.05 mm, and the heavy UR20 at +/-0.1 mm, three times the figure of an arm now eight years old. The pattern is not a decline in engineering. It is what reach and payload cost. Longer tubes and heavier joints move a fixed positional error further from the base, and in this family the relationship is almost mechanical: the 500 mm UR3e and 850 mm UR5e hold 30 micrometres, the 900 mm UR16e and 1,300 mm UR10e hold 50, and the 1,750 mm UR20 holds 100. What makes it worth stating plainly is that the newest products do not escape it. The UR15, introduced in 2025 as the company's fastest arm, matches the 2018 UR10e on repeatability while beating it on speed. Universal Robots has spent seven years adding payload, reach and tool speed; the accuracy ceiling of the small arms has not moved. For a buyer, that inverts the usual instinct to specify the newest and largest machine that fits the budget. An application defined by where the part is placed — electronics assembly, laboratory handling, screwdriving, dispensing — is best served by the oldest and cheapest arms in the catalogue. Reach is what you buy at the top of the range; precision is what you buy at the bottom. Two smaller findings sit in the same data sheets. The UR3e is the only arm in the family whose three wrist joints run at 360 degrees per second, twice the rate of everything else, which suits it to twisting work rather than carrying. And the UR5e is the only Universal Robots arm certified for an ISO Class 5 cleanroom; the larger UR10e and UR16e reach only Class 6. In this range, cleanliness and precision both go down as the arm goes up. All figures are from the manufacturer's own technical data sheets, revision of May 2025, and its PolyScope 5 user manual.
UR3e →In KUKA's cobot range, the cleaner the room, the bigger the robot you have to buy
KUKA now lists seven builds of its LBR iisy collaborative arm, and two of them are factory cleanroom versions rated up to ISO Class 3. Both sit at the top of the payload range: the 11 kg long-arm model and, since 2025, the 15 kg compact one. The 3, 6 and 8 kg arms have no cleanroom variant at all. That ordering runs against the work. Cleanroom duty is concentrated in semiconductor handling, optics, medical device assembly and laboratory automation, and those are places where benches are short, equipment is packed tightly and a small arm is usually the right tool. In this family a buyer who needs ISO Class 3 has no small option: the entry point is a 1300 mm arm rated for 11 kg. The same inversion shows at the other end of the range. The smallest LBR iisy, the 3 kg R760, is the only member rated IP30 — protection against solid bodies above 2.5 mm and no protection against water whatsoever. Every model from 6 kg upward is IP54. In the family table the row looks like any other, but the practical meaning is a hard boundary: the 3 kg arm belongs on an assembly bench, not in a machining cell with coolant mist, grinding dust or wash-down cleaning. So the least protected robot is the smallest, and the most protected is the largest, with nothing in between. The cleanroom versions also arrived late. The standard 11 and 15 kg models were announced in June 2022 and available from the end of that year; the 6 and 8 kg builds joined during 2023. The first cleanroom variant, the 11 R1300 CR, appears in the manufacturer's own product listing during 2024, and the 15 R930 CR only in 2025 — three years after the arm it is based on. KUKA publishes no announcement date for either, so those years are lower bounds rather than launch dates. One detail is worth keeping in the manufacturer's favour. KUKA quotes the ISO Class 3 rating without a speed or payload condition, because the CR is a separate catalogue number rather than a standard robot asked to slow down. That is the more expensive way to sell a cleanroom cobot and the one that survives reading the small print. All seven builds are now in the wujec.ai catalogue.
LBR iisy 15 R930 CR →Techman still sells the cobots its own 2022 models beat on every number
Read Techman Robot's six-model TM AI Cobot line as one table and an awkward pattern appears: the two arms the Taiwanese manufacturer released in 2022 outclass the two it released in 2018 in every published parameter, and all four remain in the catalogue. The TM20 carries 20 kg over a reach of 1300 mm and weighs 32 kg. The TM12, four years older, carries 12 kg over exactly the same 1300 mm reach and weighs 33 kg. Same working envelope, eight kilograms less payload, one kilogram more mass on the mounting plate. The other pair repeats the shape: the TM16 carries 16 kg to 917 mm at 32 kg, against the TM14's 14 kg to 1100 mm at 33 kg — here the older arm at least keeps a reach advantage, which is the only column in the whole line where 2018 wins. The naming does not help a buyer see this. In the heavier models the number is the payload, so TM12 through TM20 read as a ladder. In the TM5 pair it is not: the TM5-700 carries 6 kg and the TM5-900 carries 4 kg, both under a name suggesting five, and neither reaches the millimetre figure in its own model number — the datasheets say 746 mm and 946 mm. Techman publishes no list prices, so the catalogue offers no visible reason to choose the 2018 pair over the 2022 pair. Whatever that reason is — price, installed base, spare-part continuity for existing cells — it does not appear on the product pages, and a buyer sizing a workstation from reach and payload alone would have no way to find it. The company's newest line moves in a different direction again. The S series, launched in 2023 and extended in 2025 with the TM6S and TM20S, is sealed to IP65 rather than IP54 and quotes repeatability of plus/minus 0.03 mm, which Techman describes as up to 70 percent better than the earlier arms. Sealing and precision usually trade against each other; here they improved together, one generation apart from the arms that are still on sale beside them.
Techman TM5-900 →Read all twelve Doosan cobots at once and one rule appears: precision is set by arm length, not by payload
Doosan Robotics sells twelve collaborative arms, and its own line-up page lists each of them with exactly three numbers: payload, reach and repeatability. Put side by side, those thirty-six numbers say something the product pages never state — the third number depends only on the second. Every Doosan arm with a 900 mm reach is quoted at 0.03 mm repeatability. That holds for the A0509 lifting 5 kg, for the force-sensing A0509S, and equally for the M1509, which lifts fifteen kilograms — three times the load, same reach, same precision. The arms that reach 1,200 or 1,300 mm are all quoted at 0.05 mm: the 9 kg A0912, its S and F variants, and the 10 kg M1013. And every long arm is quoted at 0.1 mm: the 20 kg H2017 at 1,700 mm, the 25 kg H2515 at 1,500 mm, and the new P3020, which carries 30 kg to 2,030 mm. The intuitive expectation is the opposite. A buyer asked which of two cobots will be more accurate usually reaches for the lighter one, on the assumption that heavy payloads bend things. Doosan's own catalogue says the load is not what costs you accuracy — length is. A small angular error at the shoulder becomes a large error at the tool, and it grows with the lever arm. Payload is handled by stiffer joints and stronger motors; leverage cannot be engineered away. There is exactly one exception in the line-up, and it is instructive. The E0509 also reaches 900 mm, but repeats to 0.05 mm rather than 0.03 mm. It is the sealed food-industry model, rated IP66 so it can be washed down without a protective jacket — and, as this catalogue noted earlier, sealing the joints is what costs it those two hundredths of a millimetre. It breaks the rule for a reason that has nothing to do with geometry. Seen through this lens, the P3020 that Doosan unveiled at Automate 2024 is not a machine that compromised on precision. It is the least precise arm the company sells, at 0.1 mm, because it is the longest — and it is aimed at stacking cartons on pallets, where a tenth of a millimetre is far below anything the job can notice. The same page shows why the shortest arms are the precise ones and why no amount of paying more will buy 0.03 mm at two metres of reach. None of this is a criticism of the manufacturer's disclosure: the numbers are published openly and consistently, which is what makes the pattern readable at all. It is a reminder that a specification table read one row at a time answers a different question than the same table read as a whole.
P3020 →Doosan sells two cobots for food work. The one you may hose down is the less precise one
Doosan Robotics answers the question of how to put a robot arm near food twice, and its own product pages show what each answer costs. The Korean maker's E-SERIES exists for the food and beverage industry. Its single model, the E0509, carries 5 kg over a 900 mm reach, holds NSF certification for food hygiene and is rated IP66, with the gaps between its axes sealed. Doosan's selling point is what that removes: hygiene control without extra equipment such as robot jackets — the washable covers normally wrapped around an industrial arm working near food, which cost money, hide the joints and get in the way of cleaning. The same catalogue also lists the A0509F, the food-and-beverage build of the lightweight A-SERIES. It has the same 5 kg payload, the same 900 mm reach and the same NSF certification. The difference is in the third number. The A0509F repeats to 0.03 mm. The sealed E0509 repeats to 0.05 mm. Two hundredths of a millimetre is what closing the joints costs, and Doosan publishes no IP figure at all on the A0509F page. That is not a defect, it is a choice presented to the buyer, and an unusually honest one. A plant that cleans by wiping can have the more accurate arm. A kitchen that cleans with a hose has to give up precision to get a machine that survives the water. What the marketing does not say — and what only appears when the two cards are read side by side — is that hygiene ratings and accuracy pull against each other, and the robot advertised as the food specialist is the coarser of the two. The E-SERIES was announced on 17 April 2023, part of a launch of thirteen cobots across five families, and shipped from June that year. Doosan's own listed uses are consumer-facing rather than industrial: loading a fryer and cooking chicken at 170 degrees, pouring hand-drip coffee at three cups in fifteen seconds, cooking noodles at constant quality. Both robots now have profiles in this catalogue. Neither figure for arm mass, joint speed or list price appears on the manufacturer's pages, so those fields stay empty here rather than being filled from distributor listings.
E0509 →Three cobots, three cleanroom ratings — and two of them come with an asterisk
Reading three collaborative arms' data sheets side by side turns up the same sentence written three different ways, and the differences decide whether the number on the brochure survives contact with a real production line. ABB launched its PoWa cobot family from Zurich on 22 April 2026, and the flagship PoWa 13 is the fastest thing in the class: 5.8 m/s at the tool with the full rated payload on the flange, 8.3 m/s with a kilogram, and pose repeatability of 0.03 mm while doing it. The company also certifies the arm for ISO 14644-1 Class 4 cleanrooms. The condition sits one line further down the data sheet: Class 4 applies at 50 percent of rated speed. At full speed the arm is Class 5. The same construction appears at Universal Robots. The UR15, shown at Automate in Detroit in May 2025 and the fastest arm the Danish company has built at 5 m/s, is likewise rated for Class 4 — with a footnote tying the rating to velocity and payload held at or below 80 percent. This catalogue noted that clause when the UR15 profile went up. ABB's derating is the steeper of the two, which is the arithmetic consequence of the faster arm: more speed means more particles shed, so more speed has to be given back. KUKA answers the question differently. Rather than derate the standard machine, the German company builds separate cleanroom variants: the LBR iisy catalogue lists an 11 R1300 CR and a 15 R930 CR next to the standard models, and rates the cleanroom build up to ISO Class 3 — a cleaner class than either rival claims — with no published speed condition attached. That is the more expensive answer for the buyer, because it means purchasing a different robot rather than turning down the one already installed, and it is the one that holds up when the line runs at rate. The practical reading is simple. A cleanroom class printed on a cobot brochure is not a property of the robot; it is a property of the robot at a stated speed. Two of these three tell you that in a footnote, and the third tells you by selling you a second part number. All three arms are now in this catalogue: ABB PoWa 13, KUKA LBR iisy 15 R930 and Universal Robots UR15. Figures are taken from each manufacturer's own data sheet or product page — ABB's PoWa CRB 1910 sheet of 27 May 2026, Universal Robots' technical specification of April 2026, and KUKA's LBR iisy product pages.
PoWa 13 →FANUC's smallest collaborative arm is also its fastest and most precise
In a robot range, the small model is usually the compromise: less reach, less payload, and worse numbers everywhere else as well. FANUC's newest collaborative arm breaks that rule, and the break is visible only when its data sheet is read next to its nearest sibling's. The CRX-3iA went into mass production in January 2026 and reached the North American market on 20 April 2026. It lifts 3 kg over a 692 mm reach and weighs 11 kg. The next size up, the CRX-5iA, lifts 5 kg over 994 mm and weighs 25 kg. Read the rest of both cards and the ranking inverts. Repeatability is ±0.02 mm on the small arm against ±0.03 mm on the larger one. Speed goes the same way: 1,200 mm/s in collaborative mode and 2,500 mm/s in high-speed mode, against 1,000 and 2,000 mm/s. The smallest CRX is the tightest and the quickest in the family — it simply cannot carry much. The mass is the design decision the rest follows from. Eleven kilograms is light enough for one person to carry, so FANUC removed the anchor bolts: the robot stands on a magnetic base, mounts floor, wall, ceiling or at an angle, and detects its own installation angle rather than being configured for it. After a move, the operator touches a wall with the welding wire and the arm works out where it now stands, so the taught program survives the relocation — the step that usually makes moving a cobot expensive. The 3 kg is not an arbitrary floor either. It is enough to hold a welding torch and a seam sensor at once, which is what lets the robot locate the joint and generate its own path instead of replaying a fixed trajectory. FANUC names shipbuilding among the applications: structures too large to bring to a robot cell, where the machine has to come to the work. The arm is the first FANUC robot in this catalogue. FANUC does not publish a list price; the robot is quoted per configuration.
CRX-3iA →One adaptive robot family, two very different machines
Yaskawa sells the Motoman NEXT line as a single idea in four sizes: an industrial arm that recognises what is in front of it, decides and checks the result, instead of replaying a taught path. Read side by side, the four data sheets — edition 06/2026 — describe two different machines wearing one badge. The small pair is light and quick. The NEX7 carries 7 kg, weighs 48 kg and repeats a position to 0.01 mm; its base swings at 375°/s and its tool flange turns at 1,000°/s. The NEX10 carries 10 kg for 58 kg of own mass and 0.015 mm. The large pair is a different kind of hardware. The NEX20 doubles the payload of the NEX10 but nearly quadruples the mass, from 58 kg to 225 kg. The NEX35 reaches 35 kg of payload and 370 kg of mass. The ratio of robot weight to payload jumps from roughly six-to-one in the small sizes to eleven-to-one in the large ones — the series is a shared control philosophy, not one mechanism scaled up and down. Speed and precision follow the mass. From NEX7 to NEX35 the base slows from 375°/s to 180°/s, the tool flange from 1,000°/s to 400°/s, and repeatability loosens fourfold, from 0.01 mm to 0.04 mm. The intelligence is identical across the range — the same YNX1000 controller and the same NVIDIA Jetson Orin decision unit — but a robot that decides in real time and then swings its base at 180°/s is a different proposition from one that does it at 375°/s. Adaptivity is sold uniformly; the ability to act on it is not. One number is not monotonic: the NEX20's tool flange turns at 900°/s, faster than the NEX10's 800°/s, so wrist speed is a design choice per size rather than a straight consequence of payload. Two caveats about the source. Yaskawa's own NEX35 sheet is inconsistent about the product name — the headline reads NEXT35, while the file name, the running head and the catalogue all read NEX35 — and it prints the lower-arm motion range as -140/-90°, a span of 50° that no articulated lower arm has; neighbouring sizes are given as +135/-100° and +145/-100°. We have treated that figure as a misprint and left it out of our profile rather than repeat it. All four sizes now have profiles in our catalogue. The gap between what was announced and what is offered runs wider than one model: the 4 kg NEX4 of the 2023 announcement has no product page in Yaskawa's North American catalogue, and neither do the two collaborative arms, NHC12 and NHC30, presented with the platform in September 2024 — the collaborative section of that catalogue lists only the older HC10DTP, HC20DTP and HC30PL (checked 6 September 2026). Seven machines were announced for the platform; four can be found in the catalogue.
Motoman NEXT NEX35 →The slope figure on a robot mower's spec sheet often stops at the edge of the lawn
Robot mowers are sold on a single slope number, and buyers with a sloping garden read it as the machine's limit. In the manuals it is frequently two numbers, and the second one — the slope the mower may take at the boundary of the lawn — can be a third of the advertised figure. Segway-Ninebot's new Navimow H2 series, which reached the manufacturer's European store on 9 February 2026, is rated for 45 per cent inside the working area and 25 per cent at the boundary. The i2 LiDAR declares exactly the same split. Husqvarna is blunter still: the Automower 450X is specified at 45 per cent inside the installation and 15 per cent at the boundary, a threefold difference. Within Segway's own catalogue the split follows the drivetrain rather than the price. The i2 AWD, the cheapest machine in the line at EUR 899, keeps its full 45 per cent right up to the edge. So does the i2 LiDAR Pro at 55 per cent, and so does the flagship X4, which holds 84 per cent — 40 degrees — both inside the lawn and at its boundary. The two models that lose ground at the edge, the H2 and the i2 LiDAR, are the two without four-wheel drive. A better sensor package does not buy traction on a bank. The distinction matters because the boundary is where sloping gardens usually slope. A lawn that falls away towards a fence or a ditch meets its steepest gradient at precisely the point the mower is rated for least, and an owner who checked only the headline number will have bought for the wrong part of the garden. The figures above are all taken from the manufacturers' own specification tables — Segway publishes them only inside the user manuals, not on the product pages.
Segway Navimow H2 Series →One Segway mower series, three ways of knowing where it is — and only the cheapest one may end up with an antenna in your lawn
Segway-Ninebot now sells three robotic lawn mowers under one name, the Navimow i2. They look like a price ladder: i2 AWD from EUR 899, i2 LiDAR from EUR 1,199, i2 LiDAR Pro from EUR 1,599. Read the three user manuals side by side and they turn out to be three different answers to the same question — how does a mower know where it is in a garden? The cheapest machine has no lidar. The i2 AWD finds itself with satellite corrections delivered over its own cellular link, which Segway calls network RTK, fused with a forward camera that fills in the gaps where the signal fades. The middle model drops satellites and maps the lawn with a laser scanner and a camera instead. The top model, sold since 16 March 2026, is advertised as fusing all three: lidar, network RTK and vision. The consequence for a buyer is in the installation chapter, and it runs the opposite way to the price. The i2 AWD manual is the only one of the three that contains a section headed Install the Antenna. Where the network correction service is not supported in a given area, the owner has to plant the supplied reference antenna in an open spot with an unobstructed view of the sky and at least two metres clear on either side, or buy a mounting kit and fix it to a wall. The two lidar manuals have no such chapter, no antenna and — checked word by word — not a single mention of RTK anywhere in their pages, even in the model Segway markets as using it. Their installation chapters amount to switching the machine on, assembling the charging station and updating the software. So the marketing line about an antenna-free lawn is true of the whole series, but it is unconditional only on the expensive models. On the cheap one it holds inside the coverage map and not outside it. Buyers on the edge of network coverage are exactly the buyers most likely to be shopping at the bottom of the range. One further oddity emerged from the same manual. The store lists two i2 AWD variants, the i205 for 500 square metres and the i208 for 800. The manual specifies four, adding an i206 for 600 square metres and an i210 for 1,000 — and the store does sell extended warranty plans for both machines it does not otherwise admit to having. All three mowers are now in the catalogue, with the specifications taken from the manufacturer's own manuals.
Segway Navimow i2 AWD →Segway sold four mowers as one family — only the top one could see an obstacle before hitting it
Segway's H Series is presented as one machine in four sizes: the same body, the same 21 cm cutting width, the same 30 to 60 mm cutting height, the same 54 dB(A) sound power. The only thing the marketing separates is lawn area — 500, 800, 1,500 or 3,000 square metres — and the battery that goes with it. The manufacturer's own manual separates two more things, and neither of them appears in the sales copy. The first is the ultrasonic sensor. In the packing list of the H-series manual it carries a footnote of its own: "For H3000E". The specification table backs this up with two different sensor columns — three of the four machines get an IMU, a blade-halt sensor, a bump sensor, a lift sensor, a rain sensor and wheel encoders, and only the largest model adds ultrasound. For the buyer this is the difference between a mower that notices an object at a distance and a mower that finds out about it by driving into it and reversing. The second is the cellular modem. The status display chapter states that the 4G indicator applies "for H800E, H1500E and H3000E models", which leaves the entry-level H500E on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth alone — the one machine most likely to be bought for a small garden at the far end of a house's wireless coverage. Neither gap is hidden, exactly. Both are simply printed in a 69-page PDF rather than on the product page, and both survived the line's 2025 relaunch as the camera-equipped H500-VF through H3000-VF, priced from 1,399 to 2,699 euros. As of September 2026 every H variant shows as unavailable in Segway's European store, which now sells only the lidar-navigated i2 range and the X4 flagship. The pattern is worth carrying forward: in a family sold on lawn size, the cheaper number can also buy a shorter sensor list.
Segway Navimow H Series →The same Mammotion mower ships with an RTK station in Europe and is advertised in America as needing none
Mammotion's YUKA mini is one product name covering two different machines, and the difference is the part a buyer cares about most: how the mower knows where it is. The European store sells the 600 and the 800, and the packing list on the product page is explicit. In the box, next to the mower, its charging station and a spare set of blades, there is an RTK reference station, an RTK antenna, a power supply for it, a five-metre extension cable and a ground pile to drive into the lawn. Satellite corrections come from hardware the owner installs and points at the sky. The American store sells the same mower as the 600H and the 800H, and its listing opens with the opposite sentence: no wire, no RTK installation. There, corrections arrive over the network through Mammotion's iNavi service, which the company describes as centimetre-level positioning without a physical base station. The footnote underneath matters: the American version has no built-in 4G module, so the network link that the whole arrangement depends on is a paid bundle, not part of the machine. The cameras are identical on both sides. Mammotion calls the system UltraSense AI Vision, quotes an AI chip running five trillion operations per second, and claims the mower can keep cutting for up to three hundred metres with the satellite link disrupted, syncing back up when it returns. That claim reads differently depending on which box arrived: in Europe it is a fallback for when the garden's own base station loses sight of satellites, in America it is a fallback for patchy mobile coverage. The practical consequence is for anyone shopping by review. A European owner writing about installing an antenna on a pole and an American owner writing that the mower needed no installation at all are both describing the YUKA mini accurately. Prices differ too: EUR 599 and EUR 699 in Europe against a EUR 899 list, with both variants sold out there by September 2026, and USD 749 and USD 1,299 in the American store, which still has stock. As with every cheaper mower from this manufacturer, the published figures stop early. Mass is given as 10.6 kilograms in Europe and 23 pounds in America, slopes at 50 percent, cutting height between two and three and a half inches. Cutting width, dimensions, mowing time per charge and noise appear nowhere.
Mammotion YUKA mini →In both of Mammotion's compact mower lines, the cheaper variant is not a smaller machine — it is the one that swapped lidar for a mobile signal
Mammotion's 2026 catalogue names its compact mowers after lawn area: LUBA mini 2 AWD 1000 and 1500, YUKA mini 2 800 and 1000. The numbers suggest the only difference is how much grass the machine is rated for. Read the manufacturer's own product pages for all four and a different line appears, and it runs through the sensors. In each line, the more expensive variant carries a 360-degree lidar. The LUBA mini 2 AWD 1500, listed at EUR 1,699, positions itself from lidar and two cameras and needs no network connection of any kind. The YUKA mini 2 1000, at EUR 1,099, is sold under the headline "Ultimate 360 LiDAR" and the flat statement "No RTK, No Cable". In each line, the cheaper variant has no lidar at all. The LUBA mini 2 AWD 1000, at EUR 1,399, fuses three cameras with NetRTK — satellite corrections delivered over 4G or Wi-Fi instead of from an antenna in the garden. The YUKA mini 2 800, at EUR 899, does the same with three cameras and Mammotion's iNavi service, which the company advertises as free for the life of the machine. That is a real difference in what the buyer has to have at home, and the model name does not carry it. A lidar machine measures the garden itself and works the same whether or not the phone network reaches the far hedge. A camera-and-NetRTK machine has one absolute reference, and it arrives over the air. Trees, walls and dusk are handled by the cameras in both cases; a dead spot in mobile coverage is not the same problem for both. The wording on the cheaper pages is worth reading closely for the same reason. The YUKA mini 2 800 page says "No RTK, No Cable, No signal issue" and, a few sections later, offers lifetime free access to a network correction service that works "without the need for a physical base station". Both are true in the narrow sense the manufacturer means — there is no base station to install and no antenna to mount — but a reader who takes "No RTK" at face value would conclude the machine ignores satellites altogether, and it does not. None of this makes the cheaper machines bad buys. They cost EUR 200 to EUR 300 less, they install in minutes, and Mammotion throws in three years of mobile data on the YUKA mini 2 800 precisely because the link matters. It is a straightforward trade, stated plainly here because the product names state it nowhere: in this catalogue the price step is not a step in lawn size, it is the step between a mower that measures the garden and a mower that is told where it is.
Mammotion YUKA mini 2 800 →Mammotion calls three-source navigation its breakthrough — and left one source out of the successor to the mower that introduced it
Mammotion sells its compact mowers on a navigation idea it calls Tri-Fusion: solid-state lidar, network RTK corrections and camera-based AI vision working at the same time, so that a garden with trees, walls or narrow passages does not break positioning. The company is explicit about where the idea started. On the product page of the LUBA mini AWD LiDAR, listed in its European store on 30 June 2025, it writes that the system was first introduced on this machine and now powers the 2026 flagship LUBA 3 AWD. That machine is now sold out in Europe, and the store sends buyers to its direct successor, the LUBA mini 2 AWD 1500, launched on 8 May 2026. That variant navigates by lidar and cameras alone. There is no RTK antenna to mount and no network RTK service behind it — the manufacturer presents this as a feature, because it removes the one installation step that has always made satellite-corrected mowers awkward. Both statements are true at once, and together they are more interesting than either alone. In the space of eleven months the same company introduced a third navigation source in its compact line, moved it up to the flagship, and dropped it from the compact line again. A buyer comparing the two mowers is not choosing between an old model and a better new one: the older machine positions itself from three independent sources, the newer one from two, and only the older one can fall back on satellite corrections when lidar and cameras are both struggling — heavy rain, low sun straight into the lenses, a lawn that looks the same in every direction. The trade is real in the other direction too. Network RTK on the older mower is a paid service and one more thing to configure; the newer one works out of the box. Neither approach is simply better, which is why the difference deserves to be stated rather than buried under a marketing name that suggests the newer machine has more of everything. There is a second twist inside the successor line itself, and it is the kind a buyer only finds after paying. The cheaper variant, the LUBA mini 2 AWD 1000, listed in the same store on 1 January 2026 at EUR 1,399, is not the 1500 with a smaller battery. It keeps network RTK and drops the lidar instead, positioning itself from three cameras plus satellite corrections carried over a 4G or Wi-Fi link. So two mowers sold under one series name navigate in opposite ways: the more expensive one needs no network at all and sees the garden in three dimensions; the cheaper one needs a working connection and sees it only through lenses. The series name says nothing about which of the two is on the shelf. The list prices do not track the sensor count either. The older mower was listed at EUR 2,299 and cleared at EUR 1,399; the newer one sells at EUR 1,699.
Mammotion LUBA mini AWD LiDAR →The step height on the box is measured on a staircase. At a doorway threshold, the robot clears about half of it
Robot vacuums with lifting chassis are sold on one number: how high an obstacle they climb. Two manufacturers' own specification tables show that the advertised figure is measured on a double step — two edges in a row — and that a single threshold, the thing actually found in a doorway, has a separate and much lower limit. Dreame's X50 Ultra, added to our catalogue today, advertises 60 mm. The company's own table qualifies that as a two-step climb, and its footnote adds a condition: the gap between the two steps has to be wider than 40 mm. For a single vertical obstacle Dreame states 42 mm. The 2026 successor, the X60 Ultra, repeats the pattern with a wider spread: 88 mm on a double step, 45 mm on a single one. Ecovacs describes its DEEBOT X12 OmniCyclone the same way, in inches: single thresholds up to 0.94 in (24 mm), continuous double steps up to 1.57 in (40 mm). In all three cases the headline number is between 1.4 and 2 times the single-threshold figure. The distinction is not a trick of wording — a chassis that lifts its front wheels onto a first edge can use that edge to lever the rear wheels onto a second one, which is why a staircase-like pair is easier than one tall lip. It is, however, the wrong number for the buyer's question. Doorway thresholds, balcony rails and shower kerbs are single obstacles. Read against the smaller figure, the segment's leaders clear 24 to 45 mm, not 40 to 88 mm. All figures in this note come from the manufacturers' own specification tables and footnotes, and all are described by them as in-house laboratory results.
Dreame X50 Ultra →Z.ai closed the weights of its own video line — then built its open animation model on a rival's
Z.ai has two video products and they point in opposite directions. CogVideoX-3, the current generation of the line the company has developed since 2024, ships no weights at all: it is sold through the API and nothing is available to download. SCAIL-2, the character animation model the company released as open weights, does not run on that line. It runs on Alibaba's. The evidence is not subtle. The download bundles Alibaba's Wan 2.1 image encoder and Google's umT5-XXL text encoder, the inference command loads a checkpoint named SCAIL-14B, and the default branch of the code repository is called wan-scail2. There is a second branch, sat-scail2, for the company's own training stack, but the weights that were actually published are the ones for the competitor's runtime. The training material came the same way. Z.ai states that 60,000 motion pairs were synthesised using three off-the-shelf models, two of them from other labs: Alibaba's Wan-Animate and Orange's MoCha. The company calls the method reverse driving and reports that the finished model acquired behaviour its teachers never had — animal-driven motion, cross-identity replacement, and control from mesh renders it was never trained on. One detail is worth checking before anyone redistributes the file. The code repository is Apache 2.0. The weights repository declares MIT in its metadata and contains no licence file at all, while the archive it hands over includes third-party components released under Apache 2.0, a licence that asks for its notices to travel with the code. The badge and the contents do not say the same thing. SCAIL-2 now has a profile in our catalogue, with the licensing situation recorded as the publisher left it.
SCAIL-2 →Z.ai sells its speech model for meeting minutes and live captions. The API accepts 30 seconds of audio.
Two pages of Z.ai's own documentation, checked on 3 September 2026, describe the same speech-recognition model in ways that cannot both be acted on. The model card for GLM-ASR-2512 lists six uses. The first is real-time meeting minutes — "transcribe online meetings instantly, automatically organizing structured summaries". The third is live video captioning for news broadcasts, courses and video conferences. The sixth is medical record entry: a doctor dictates a patient history, the model writes it down. The API reference for the same model sets the ceiling: supported formats .wav and .mp3, file size 25 MB or less, and audio duration 30 seconds or less. Per call. The limit is not a side effect of the non-streaming path. Z.ai documents a streaming mode for this endpoint, and the same specification applies to it. Streaming here means the transcript comes back progressively while the model works — not that audio can be fed in continuously. There is no long-form endpoint, no asynchronous job for a recording, and no documented way to hand over an hour of audio. What that leaves the caller is arithmetic. A one-hour meeting is 120 separate requests, each cut at a fixed half-minute boundary that lands wherever it lands: mid-word, mid-sentence, mid-name. Every seam is a place where context is lost and where the custom dictionary — one of the model's genuine strengths — has to be resupplied. Speaker continuity across the joins is the caller's problem, not the model's. None of this makes GLM-ASR-2512 a weak model. Z.ai quotes a character error rate of 0.0717, the language coverage is unusually broad for the price — Sichuanese, Cantonese, Min Nan and Wu alongside Mandarin, English and dozens of other languages — and at roughly $0.0024 per minute it undercuts OpenAI's currently recommended transcription model by about half. For short utterances, voice input, commands and single customer-service turns, the shape fits. It is the advertised use cases that do not fit, and the gap is worth naming because of who it catches. A developer reading the model card sees meeting transcription promised in the first line and only meets the 30-second wall after writing the integration. There is an ending that is unusual for a paid product. Z.ai published an open sibling on the same day, GLM-ASR-Nano-2512: 1.5 billion parameters, MIT licence, free to download, and — because it runs on the caller's own hardware — subject to no per-call duration cap at all. For the three long-form uses the vendor advertises, the free model is the one that can actually do them.
GLM-ASR-2512 →Alibaba's new animation model was built for live video — and the live-video version is the one part it did not release
Alibaba published Wan2.2-Animate-2-14B on 7 August 2026 under Apache 2.0: weights, inference code and, a day later, a paper. It animates a still character from a driving video of a person performing, and the engineering behind it is a genuine redesign rather than a refresh. The first generation extracted a pose skeleton from the driving video and handed that to the generator; the team's own paper names what goes wrong with that arrangement, in plain terms — extraction errors travel into the output, and the character's identity drifts as the clip runs. Animate-2 removes the extractor and feeds the driving video straight into a rebuilt diffusion transformer. The paper's own framing, though, is not about fidelity. It opens by pointing out that every existing system of this kind is designed for offline synthesis and cannot meet the requirements of interactive applications such as digital avatars and live-streaming hosts. Its answer is Wan-Animate-2-Lite, an efficient variant trained in three stages — teacher-forcing pretraining with an error buffer, then Self-Forcing distillation with chunk-wise backpropagation — to pull latency down to real-time thresholds. That is the claim the abstract ends on. Lite is not in the repository. What is there are two checkpoints of identical size, 32.8 GB each: a base build that runs 40 denoising steps with classifier-free guidance, and a distilled build that reaches a picture in 10 steps with guidance off. Distillation makes the offline model roughly four times cheaper to sample; it is not the streaming architecture the paper describes. And the omission does not read as a queue: the to-do list on the model card has every item ticked — inference code, checkpoints, Diffusers, DiffSynth-Studio, ComfyUI — with no line for Lite at all. A smaller detail points the same way. The citation block at the bottom of the card still carries an unfilled placeholder where the arXiv number should be, while the correct number sits in a badge at the top of the same file. This was shipped quickly. What readers can act on is the ordinary part. The download counters show demand pointing at speed rather than quality: on the Diffusers conversions published the day before the release, the distilled build is pulled around three times more often than the full-quality one. The first-generation Animate, meanwhile, is still being fetched an order of magnitude more than either — which is what usually happens in the first month of a model that changes how it is driven. The base repository reports no downloads at all against 185 bookmarks, but that counter tends to read zero for repositories shipping raw checkpoint files rather than a standard configuration, so it says more about how the files are pulled than about interest in them.
Wan2.2-Animate-2-14B →The lawn size on the box is not one outing: Mammotion's own tables say four to six charges
Robotic mowers are sold on a single number — the lawn they are rated for — and Mammotion's own comparison tables show that the number describes a schedule, not a session. Every machine in the manufacturer's European store lists a second figure next to it, the area covered per charge, and the gap between the two is where the day actually goes. The YUKA is rated for 2,000 square metres and covers about 350 of them per charge. That is roughly six cycles, and each cycle is 65 minutes of mowing followed by 100 minutes of charging, so the machine spends more time on the dock than on the grass. The LUBA 2 AWD 5000X is rated for 5,000 square metres and covers 1,200 per charge: four to five cycles of 190 minutes mowing and 120 minutes charging. The flagship LUBA 3 AWD manages up to 1,700 square metres in one 215-minute run, and is sold in variants rated up to 10,000 square metres. Read the two columns together and one variant stands out for the opposite reason. The cheapest LUBA 3 AWD, rated for 1,500 square metres, is the only machine in the line whose whole rated lawn fits inside a single charge. Everywhere else the rating is a promise about what the robot will finish over a day or two of unattended work, not about what it will do before it needs to plug itself in. None of this is hidden — the numbers come from the manufacturer's own pages, published next to each other. It matters because the per-charge figure is the one that decides whether a lawn is mowed on Saturday morning or over the weekend, and it is the figure that disappears from the marketing headline. It is also the figure that changes when a battery ages, while the lawn rating on the box stays the same for the life of the product.
Mammotion YUKA →Every Wan 2.2 model card points readers at a licence file the repository does not contain
Alibaba's Wan 2.2 video models all close their model cards with the same paragraph: the weights are Apache 2.0, the company claims no rights over what users generate, and "for a complete list of restrictions and details regarding your rights, please refer to the full text of the license" — with the phrase "license" linking to a file named LICENSE.txt inside the repository. That file is not there. We checked all four Wan 2.2 weight repositories on 2 September 2026: T2V-A14B, I2V-A14B, S2V-14B and Animate-14B each return 404 for LICENSE.txt. The two Wan 2.1 repositories we checked, T2V-14B and T2V-1.3B, do carry the file, with the standard Apache 2.0 text in full. The practical effect is smaller than it sounds, but it is not nothing. Two independent declarations of Apache 2.0 remain in place: the licence tag in the repository metadata on Hugging Face, which is what the platform displays and what automated licence scanners read, and the LICENSE file in Alibaba's matching code repository on GitHub. Anyone shipping a product on these weights has a licence. What they do not have is the document the model card tells them to go and read — the one it says contains the complete list of restrictions. The timing gives this more weight than a filing error usually deserves. Wan 2.2 is the last generation of Alibaba's video line whose weights were published at all; everything since — 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and Wan3.0 — is served through an API only. These four repositories are therefore not an archive. They are the files anyone who wants a Wan they can run on their own hardware downloads today, and one of them, Animate-14B, is the most bookmarked video model the company has ever released.
Wan2.2-Animate-14B →Mammotion's 2026 mowers hide their navigation in the footnotes, not the model name
Mammotion is selling its fourth-generation flagship, the LUBA 3 AWD, on a positioning system it calls Tri-Fusion: a 360-degree lidar, a dual-camera vision system and network RTK corrections delivered over a cellular link, fused to a claimed accuracy of plus or minus one centimetre. The pitch is the fusion. The footnote is not. On the manufacturer's own product page, a single asterisk states that the LUBA 3 AWD 1500 and 1500H position with lidar and AI vision only. That is the cheapest way into the flagship series - EUR 2,299 in the European store, USD 2,399 in the American one - and it does not include the network RTK that the series is named for. The variants rated for 3,000 and 5,000 square metres, at EUR 2,699 and EUR 3,199, are the ones that get all three. The same pattern runs through the cheap end of the range. In the YUKA mini series, the mini 2 1000 at EUR 1,099 navigates with a 360 by 45 degree lidar and two cameras. Its sibling, the mini 2 800 at EUR 899, has no lidar at all and works from three cameras. Two hundred euros and a two-digit difference in the model number separate a machine that scans its surroundings from one that only looks at them. For a buyer this matters more than the headline numbers, because navigation hardware decides where the robot can actually work: lidar keeps working under trees and after dark, network RTK holds centimetres on open ground but depends on cellular coverage, and cameras alone are the cheapest and the most weather-dependent of the three. None of that is visible in a model name built out of a series and a lawn area. In Mammotion's 2026 line-up, the number after the name tells you how much grass the licence covers - and nothing about how the machine finds it. Source: Mammotion product pages and the manufacturer's European and American stores, read on 4 September 2026.
Mammotion LUBA 3 AWD →Two Dreame flagships, one machine: the $200 gap is a dispenser module and a bottle of floor cleaner
Dreame's specification table for the X60 Ultra promises automatic cleaning-solution dosing from a dual-solution compartment. The packing list on the same page ships a single-solution module and one 200 ml bottle of pet-odour solution. The dual compartment, and the floor cleaner that goes with it, arrive only in the X60 Max Ultra Complete bundle — for USD 200 more. Both pages were checked on 3 September 2026. Line by line, the two robots are the same machine: 6,400 mAh battery, 35,000 Pa suction, 4.7 kg robot on a 10.6 kg dock, a 3.2 L dust bag with 4.2 L clean and 3.0 L waste water tanks, 88 mm double-step climbing, mop washing at 100 °C and hot-air drying. Neither table lists a difference in motor, chassis or station size. The X60 Ultra sells for USD 1,499.99 and has been listed since 13 March 2026; the Max Ultra Complete, listed since 6 January 2026, sells for USD 1,699.99 in the same store. What the pricier listing does add is consumables and a module: the dual-solution dispenser, a 1 L bottle of floor cleaning solution and a 200 ml pet-odour solution, against the single 200 ml bottle in the cheaper box. The Max table also states auto-empty as good for 100 days, where the X60 Ultra table simply ticks the feature without a figure. The two tables disagree in one more place, and not in the direction a buyer would expect. The X60 Ultra lists obstacle avoidance as two AI cameras plus lateral 3D structured light plus an LED; the pricier Max Ultra Complete lists two AI cameras plus an LED, with no structured light row at all. Dreame does not explain the omission anywhere on either page, and the marketing copy for both models is otherwise identical. Until the manufacturer clarifies, the safer reading is that one of the two tables is incomplete — which is itself the point: on a purchase this size, the tables are all a buyer has. Our X60 Ultra profile carried the dual-solution claim, copied from the specification table. It has been corrected: the entry now separates what the table advertises from what the box contains.
Dreame X60 Ultra →