News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Humanoid shipments nearly quadrupled in half a year — and every Western maker combined stayed behind China's fifth-largest
Smart Analytics Global published its half-yearly count of humanoid robot shipments on 10 August 2026, and the headline number travelled fast: 19,100 units delivered worldwide in the first six months of the year, against 5,100 in the same period of 2025 — a rise of 272 percent. The second number to travel was the change at the top. AgiBot shipped 8,400 units, a 562-percent jump, taking 44 percent of the market and pushing Unitree, on 5,900 units and 31 percent, into second place for the first time. The figure nobody quoted is the one at the other end of the table. The five vendors the report names — AgiBot, Unitree, Galbot with roughly 900 units, UBTech with about 700 and Leju with about 600 — account for some 16,500 of the 19,100 machines. Chinese vendors, the report says, contributed more than 97 percent of global shipments. That leaves everyone else on the planet, taken together, with fewer than 600 humanoids in six months: less than Leju alone, the fifth-largest producer in a single country. That comparison is worth making carefully, because the milestones Western manufacturers announce are counted differently. Figure said on 23 July that it had built its 1,000th Figure 03 — a cumulative total since production began, not a half-year figure. AgiBot's widely repeated "15,000 robots", announced in June, is cumulative too. The 8,400 and the 5,900 above are six months of deliveries, and mixing the two kinds of number is what makes the gap look smaller than it is. The forecast attached to the report sets up the test for the rest of the year. Smart Analytics Global expects global shipments to approach 60,000 units in 2026, worth roughly 1.6 billion dollars. If the first half really delivered 19,100, the second half has to deliver about 40,900 — a little over twice as much, in five months rather than six. The revenue line implies something else that rarely appears in coverage of this industry: about 27,000 dollars of market revenue per machine shipped. The humanoid business is growing on cheap units, not on the six-figure prototypes that fill the news. One structural shift in the data deserves more attention than the league table. Industrial and commercial deployments accounted for over 70 percent of first-half shipments, up from roughly 50 percent a year earlier, and China absorbed more than 85 percent of global demand. The machines are increasingly bought to work rather than to be demonstrated — and, for now, almost entirely bought at home by the companies that build them. Editorial note: these are the estimates of a private research firm, not audited figures. Manufacturers do not publish delivery numbers on a comparable basis, and the totals should be read as an order of magnitude rather than a count.
AgiBot A3 Ultra →Figure 03 climbs a vertical ladder on its own
Figure published a video on 1 August 2026 showing its Figure 03 humanoid walking up to a vertical ladder, taking hold of both rails and climbing to a platform without an operator. The company describes the run as fully autonomous, driven by its Helix vision-language-action stack rather than by teleoperation or a scripted motion sequence. A ladder is a harder problem than it looks. The robot has to keep its balance while three or four limbs are simultaneously loaded, judge where the next rung is from its own cameras and correct the grip as its weight shifts. According to Figure, the behaviour comes from the newer Helix 02 architecture, where a low-level network handles balance and contact at high frequency while stereo cameras build a three-dimensional picture of the surroundings. The policy was trained by reinforcement learning in simulation on randomised terrain and, the company says, transferred to the physical robot without extra calibration or fine-tuning. The caveats matter. Figure has not published the technical details behind the demonstration and no third party has reproduced or verified it, so for now the ladder climb is a company video rather than a documented result. It does, however, land in the middle of an ongoing argument in the industry over whether legs are worth their cost: wheeled bases are cheaper, more stable and sufficient for flat warehouse floors, but they cannot reach a mezzanine, a service platform or a roof hatch.
Figure 03 →Figure builds its 1,000th Figure 03 — and paints it gold
Figure has manufactured its one-thousandth Figure 03 humanoid, chief executive Brett Adcock announced on 23 July 2026, marking the unit with a golden finish that observers immediately compared to C-3PO. The number matters less than the slope behind it. In late April 2026 the company said its BotQ plant had reached a throughput of one robot per hour, with just over 350 units built to that point. Crossing a thousand roughly three months later means the line held that rate rather than hitting it once for a press photo — which is the harder part of manufacturing, and the part most humanoid programmes have yet to demonstrate. For context on where the field sits: Tesla's dedicated Optimus line in Fremont was still not confirmed to be producing as of early August 2026, and most humanoid makers remain in pilot deployments rather than series output. For scale, this still leaves the American company behind the Chinese volume leaders rather than ahead of them: AgiBot reported some 15,000 cumulative units by June 2026, and Unitree shipped more than 5,500 machines during 2025. Figure has the steepest recent slope, not the largest number, and it has it on a single full-size model built on one line, for which the company states a target capacity of 50,000 units a year. None of this says how many of those thousand robots are doing paid work. Unit counts measure a factory, not a market, and the humanoid industry has so far been much better at the first than at the second.
Figure 03 →