News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
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 →China raises the bar for humanoid robot IPOs after Unitree's slump
Chinese regulators have quietly made it harder for humanoid robot startups to go public. The China Securities Regulatory Commission has issued informal "window guidance" to investment banks and companies, telling them that humanoid makers seeking a listing must show recurring revenue and either a credible path to narrower losses or genuine technological innovation before an application will be considered. The guidance was reported by The Information on 9 September 2026 and relayed by Reuters, which noted that Chinese financial regulators did not immediately respond to a request for comment and that it could not independently verify the report. Window guidance is not a rule. It is an unwritten signal from the regulator that banks and issuers are expected to follow, and it leaves nothing to appeal against, because formally nothing has happened. In practice it works as a filter applied before an application is filed rather than after. The trigger, according to the report, was a combination of a private funding frenzy, a long queue of filings and the share prices of recently listed robot makers. Unitree Robotics is the case everyone is looking at. The company listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on 19 August 2026 at 150.80 yuan a share and closed its first session at 845 yuan, a gain of more than 460 percent, having touched 1,100 yuan intraday. Roughly three weeks later the stock has given up about 45 percent from that debut peak. It still trades well above the offer price, and the roughly 6.1 billion yuan the company raised is untouched. The numbers behind the price are less spectacular than the price itself. Unitree reported 2025 revenue of 1.70 billion yuan, up from 392.77 million yuan a year earlier, with more than 5,500 humanoid robots accounting for as much as 868 million yuan of that, and a net profit of 278 million yuan. For the first half of 2026 the company guides to revenue of 1.052 to 1.128 billion yuan, growth of roughly 36 to 45 percent. For a catalogue like this one the interesting part is not the share price but what the regulator is asking for. Recurring revenue from repeat, independent customers is exactly the metric that is hardest to read from the outside in this industry, where a large share of Chinese humanoid deployments run through training centres and pilot programmes co-funded by local governments. If the guidance holds, the companies that reach a listing in the next year will be the ones that can document customers who came back on their own — a better signal for readers of a robot catalogue than any launch event.
Unitree G1 →The humanoid Japan chose for mass production has 19 joints and lifts 3 kg — and its brain is still being built
Mitsubishi Motors will put a humanoid robot on an unused engine line at its Kyoto plant, with production targeted for early 2027. The machine is HL Human, built by Highlanders, a University of Tokyo spin-off founded in May 2023. Read the specification sheet next to the announcement and the two do not obviously match. HL Human, unveiled on 30 June 2025, has 19 degrees of freedom — four per arm, the rest in legs and torso — and grips objects of up to 3 kg, with a five-finger hand offered as an option. For comparison, the humanoids shipping out of China in volume today carry roughly twice the joint count. Highlanders presents the number as a decision rather than a limit: dexterity and reliability over strength, on a body that walks autonomously at 3 km/h, maps its surroundings with a 3D stereo camera and LiDAR, and brakes automatically on collision detection. Instructions are given in plain language and interpreted by a vision-language-action stack. The memorandum of understanding signed on 9 July 2026 is unusual in the industry: it is the first time a carmaker has agreed to mass-produce another company's humanoid. Mitsubishi contributes mass-production engineering, quality assurance, durability and safety design, and factory operations - exactly the disciplines a four-year-old startup cannot buy. The first robots go to work inside Mitsubishi's own plants, moving parts and assembling engines, before either company sells them elsewhere. Japanese press reports put planned capacity at up to 1,000 units a month; neither official release confirms that figure, or a price. The part that is easy to miss sits on Highlanders' own website. The company now describes its hardware as a data-collection loop for Kepler, its foundation model for physical intelligence - and Kepler is labelled "v1.0 - in development". Its target is a 10-billion-parameter world model trained on vision, force, tactile, teleoperation and simulation data, planning at about 5 Hz while a reflex layer runs at 500 Hz. The training cluster, named HISUI, is quoted at 640 NVIDIA B300 GPUs across 80 nodes and 24 petabytes of storage. Every one of those figures carries the word "expected". The company's stated data target - 26 million hours of real-world data - is for 2027 alone. So the timeline reads in two directions at once. The body is a known quantity, already through a beta programme that opened in September 2025 and an early access programme in Q4 2025, and it is now heading for a factory line with a 2027 date on it. The intelligence meant to run it is a specification, not a product. Mass production originally promised "within 2026" has become "early 2027", and the first customer will be the manufacturer's own assembly hall - which, for a robot that has to prove itself before anyone else buys it, may be the point.
Highlanders HL Human →The only humanoid you can actually order is being bought at a lower price than it asked for
SoftBank is in talks to take a majority stake in 1X Technologies, the Norwegian maker of the home humanoid NEO, in a deal that would value the company at about 6 billion dollars. The talks were first reported by The Information on 26 August 2026 and relayed by Reuters; SoftBank declined to comment and 1X did not respond to a request for comment. Terms may still change. The number is the story. According to reporting on last year's fundraising, 1X was seeking a valuation of roughly 10 billion dollars for a round of about 1 billion. A controlling stake at 6 billion is therefore not a step up in the middle of a humanoid boom — it is a markdown of about 40 per cent against the company's own asking price, and it comes with a loss of control. Set that against what the money is buying. NEO is one of very few humanoids a private customer can order at a published price, and its 2026 hand is the most detailed piece of hardware 1X has documented: 25 degrees of freedom, force control on every axis, fingertip sensing that measures shear so a slipping object can be re-gripped. Three days before this report, XPeng's robot unit — which has no customers at all — was valued at 6.3 billion dollars in a funding round. A shipping consumer product is being priced below a pre-revenue subsidiary. For SoftBank the logic is continuity rather than novelty. The group agreed in 2025 to buy ABB's robotics division for 5.4 billion dollars, and it has been assembling automation assets around its AI investments; 1X would add a consumer-facing humanoid and a home dataset to an industrial portfolio. OpenAI's Startup Fund led an early round in 1X in 2023 and OpenAI itself is reported to have looked at buying the company in 2025 before those talks ended. Nothing has been signed. But if the price holds, the first serious valuation event for a humanoid that ordinary buyers can order will have set the market lower, not higher.
NEO →Last year's champion cut its own entry list — and the times Unitree won with in 2025 were beaten by 50 seconds and four minutes
The second World Humanoid Robot Games close in Beijing today, and the clearest measure of how fast this field moves is not the winner but the machine that stopped competing. At the first edition a year ago, Unitree won the 400 m in 1:28.03 and its H1 won the 1500 m in 6:34.40. At this edition, the 400 m large class went to Tiangong Ultra in 38.15 s and the 1500 m was won in 2:21.64. The old marks were beaten by roughly fifty seconds and by more than four minutes. Both of this year's times are inside the human world records for the distances — 43.03 s and 3:26.00 — and in the 1500 m the entire top six finished ahead of the human mark. Unitree itself did not defend either title. Its robot finished at the back of its 100 m qualifying group, and the company issued a statement the same day: constraints on time, on the number of new machines available and on testing had led it to withdraw from some events it had already entered, and its effort remains on products that are in volume production. Founder Wang Xingxing watched from the stands. The company did compete in taijiquan, where it scored 21.21 points; the gold in that event went to AgiBot. The scale of the event grew with it. Organisers counted 666 teams from 16 countries across six continents, 2,056 robots and 51 event categories over 1,301 contests at the National Speed Skating Oval — 138% more teams than last year and four times as many machines. The rules changed in a direction that makes the times harder to dismiss. Several competitions, the 400 m among them, dropped remote control entirely: an operator may give the start command and nothing else. In the scenario contests — pharmaceutical packing, office work, EV charging, catering, emergency response — a fully autonomous run is scored at weight 1.0 and a teleoperated one at 0.5. Two robots now share a lane instead of running alone, and the obstacle courses added box climbing, net crawls, tyre arrays and stepping stones. Han Gang, a motion-control specialist at the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, points at navigation as the quiet reason for the jump: in 2025 the robots ran by looking at the painted lane markings, while this year they localise and map, and hold a lane at speed without seeing the line at all. For a company already shipping robots by the thousand, a games medal is not the same prize it is for a research centre. But the gap is now measured in minutes, and it was opened in twelve months.
Tiangong Ultra →XPeng's robot unit is valued at $6.3bn before it has a single customer
XPeng announced on 24 August 2026 that its humanoid robotics business had raised more than US$900 million at a post-money valuation of over US$6.3 billion. By the company's own timeline, that valuation was set roughly a year and a half before the first robot is due to reach a paying customer. The round was led by IDG Capital, with Gaorong Ventures participating and Tencent and Alibaba coming in as strategic investors. XPeng calls it the largest single private financing round ever recorded in China's embodied AI industry. The carmaker keeps control: the robotics business stays a consolidated subsidiary. The schedule attached to the money is the part worth reading twice. Mass production of the IRON humanoid is expected at the end of 2026. The first units go to XPeng's own stores and campuses. Official launch and customer deliveries, in China and abroad, are scheduled for 2027. That sequence means the $6.3 billion is not a multiple of anything. When Unitree listed in Shanghai five days earlier, its closing price worked out to 201 times last year's sales — an extreme number, but a number, because there were sales to divide by. Here there is no denominator. The first party to take delivery of an IRON is XPeng itself. What the money buys is a machine the company describes as 76 degrees of freedom across the body and 21 in each hand, wrapped in a proprietary fully enclosed flexible lattice structure and driven by three in-house Turing AI chips rated at a combined 2,250 TOPS. Those chips are the strongest argument for the valuation: they are the same silicon XPeng already builds for its cars, which makes the robot programme an extension of an existing supply chain rather than a start from zero. One caveat on the specifications. XPeng's Chinese product page for IRON still states 22 degrees of freedom per hand, while the English-language release issued this week says 21. Both are first-party documents published in the same week. We keep the figure from the product page in our profile and will update it when the company reconciles the two. No price for IRON has been published, no order book has been disclosed, and no independent party has tested the robot.
XPeng IRON →The first gold of the robot games was won in the joints, not in the brain
The first gold medal of the second World Humanoid Robot Games was decided on the afternoon of 23 August 2026, in the 400 m large-class final at Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval. Tiangong Ultra, from the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, won it in 38.15 s. The human world record over the distance is 43.03 s. The night before, the same machine had taken the qualifying round in 39.70 s — also inside the human mark. In the small-class final an hour earlier, the centre’s smaller Tiangong Omni won in 45.66 s, so both 400 m titles went to the same laboratory. Asked what changed in a year, the engineer who leads Tiangong Ultra development, Guo Yijie, did not talk about intelligence. He listed joints: torque and rotational speed both raised substantially, higher motor power for acceleration and take-off, better reliability in the electrical components. On the software side the answer was equally mechanical — the control framework was retuned event by event, because the 100 m rewards acceleration while the 400 m and 1500 m reward taking corners at speed. That is the honest reading of these headline times. A sprint record measures actuators, thermal headroom and a controller that has been tuned for one specific track, and those are exactly the things that a well-funded hardware team can improve in twelve months: on this distance the winning time has come down from 21.50 s at the first games to 9.39 s in a qualifying heat this year. It says much less about whether a robot can decide anything for itself. The same centre entered four machines — Tiangong 3.0, Tiangong Ultra, Tiangong Omni and Tianyi 2.5-TE — across more than forty events, and the interesting half of that list is not on the track. Tianyi 2.5-TE is running the dexterous-hand contest and the retail, catering, industrial, office and home scenarios; Tiangong 3.0 is in the emergency-response and all-round events. Those events have no human record to beat and will produce no headline number, which is why they are the ones worth watching: they are the only part of the programme that tests the part of the robot nobody can upgrade with a stronger motor.
Tiangong Ultra →Honor says five human world records fell to its robot — and that the point of the robot is the phone
Honor is a smartphone company. It has no robotics product line, no robot for sale and no price list for one. Yet at the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing it fielded two machines, and on 22 August 2026 it put up a campaign page of its own to tell the world how they did. The page claims five human world records beaten by the larger robot, called Lightning: 9.32 s over 100 m, 39.45 s over 400 m, 2 minutes 30 seconds over 1500 m, 50 minutes 26 seconds over the half marathon, and a peak speed of 14.5 m/s. The page is also where the machine finally acquires a manufacturer designation, something no event report has used: the plaque carried at the athletes' oath ceremony reads HONOR Robotics D1. Those five figures need separating. The 400 m mark is a competition result — Honor states it was set in the large-robot final at the games. The 100 m figure is not: in the 100 m final at the same games Lightning was timed at 9.47 s and finished second, beaten on the line by Tiangong Ultra at 9.39 s. The 9.32 s comes from Honor's own runs. A record card and a results table are different documents, and this one is the record card. The sentence that explains the whole programme sits lower down the page, under the smaller of the two robots. Yuanqizai took silver in the 400 m small-robot final at 48.47 s, and Honor adds: the technical strength tested on the world stage will return, in full, in the Honor Magic9 series. Not in a robot. In a phone. That closes a loop this catalogue has already documented from the other end. Lightning's most distinctive component is its cooling: a liquid loop with a suspension pump turning above 20,000 rpm and moving up to 6 litres a minute, which is handset thermal engineering scaled up so the actuators can hold full power through a long, hot run. Honor built the robot partly to find out how far that technology bends. Now, by its own account, the answer goes back into the handset. It is a more honest statement of purpose than most humanoid programmes offer, and it is worth taking at face value rather than as modesty. A machine that runs 400 m and nothing else is not a product and was never meant to be one. It is a test rig with a racing number on it — and the thing being tested is not the robot.
Honor Lightning →Unitree closed its first trading day worth 201 times last year's sales — its own filing puts growth at 36%, not 333%
On 19 August 2026 Unitree Robotics became the first humanoid robot maker to trade on a mainland Chinese exchange. It priced its offering on Shanghai's STAR Market at 150.80 yuan a share, sold 40.45 million shares — a tenth of its enlarged capital — for about 6.1 billion yuan, and entered the session valued at roughly 61 billion yuan. The market disagreed with that price immediately. The stock opened at 1,100 yuan, 629% above the offer, briefly worth about 445 billion yuan (US$66 billion). It closed at 845 yuan, still up 460%, at about 342 billion yuan. Around 23.2 billion yuan of shares changed hands in a single day, while the STAR Market Composite fell 7.2% and the Shanghai Composite 2.4%. What the buyers were paying for is set out in the prospectus. Revenue reached 1.70 billion yuan in 2025, against 392.77 million yuan the year before — a 333% jump. Net profit was 278.21 million yuan. At the closing price, the company was therefore worth roughly 201 times its annual sales and about 1,230 times its annual profit. The same filings describe a business that is already slowing. Unitree guides for first-half 2026 revenue of about 1.1 billion yuan, growth of 35.6% to 45.4% year on year — roughly a tenth of the rate that produced the debut. First-quarter profit excluding one-off items fell 52.6% as spending on research and marketing rose. 2025 was also the year the robot dog stopped being the main product. Humanoid sales of 867.8 million yuan overtook the quadrupeds, which slipped to about 42% of revenue. Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoids, more than any other maker in the world, on top of more than 33,000 quadrupeds sold to date. Divide the humanoid line by the units and the average machine brought in about 158,000 yuan — roughly the price of one G1 with options, not of an industrial platform. The risk the prospectus names is American. Overseas customers provided 43.65% of main-business revenue, 731.66 million yuan, and the United States alone 13.3% — in the same season that US regulators moved to bar new equipment approvals for foreign-built humanoid and quadruped robots. Unitree says the products it already sells there keep their authorisation. The sharpest number of the day was not the share price. Meituan, the food delivery company whose own delivery drones we described yesterday, held 8.7% of Unitree after the listing: close to 30 billion yuan at the closing bell, about 70 times what it originally paid. Founder Wang Xingxing, 36, held 121.4 million shares worth roughly 103 billion yuan.
Unitree G1 →Unitree's whole deployment line has no legs — all three D-series humanoids stand on a column
Unitree lists five humanoids under "Application Plan" on its own site, and three of them carry a D suffix. Not one of the three walks. G1-D, the newest, is a G1 torso on a telescopic column that travels between roughly 1,260 and 1,680 mm. Unitree counts 19 degrees of freedom outside the end effector — seven per arm, two in the waist, one in the column, two in the base — and offers the base as a choice between a passive castor stand and a powered chassis capped at 1.5 m/s. H2-D does the same thing one size up: no legs, a lifting column with 0.5 m of travel, 135 kg, 7 kg rated payload per arm. R1-D goes furthest and drops the base as well — a torso, a head and two arms bolted to a flat mounting plate, from 4,290 USD in Unitree's own shop. The reason is written into the product rather than announced. G1-D is not sold as a robot at all but as an end-to-end platform, in which the machine is one of three components; the other two are a data-acquisition console built for hundreds of robots collecting simultaneously and a training stack that exports a policy back to the machine in one click, with declared support for the open pi and GR00T families and Unitree's own UnifoLM-WMA-0. For that job legs are a liability: they add cost, they add a balance problem, and a demonstration recorded from a swaying torso is a worse training example than one recorded from a rigid column. The height range does the work that legs would otherwise do, letting the same arms reach a low bench and a high shelf. It is a quiet admission about where humanoid value sits in 2026. The walking machines — G1, H2, R1 — remain the showpieces, and Unitree has spent the summer demonstrating boxing and ping-pong with them in Beijing. The versions the company positions for actual deployment and data work are the ones that gave up the feature the whole category is named for. One caveat on availability: Unitree publishes a price for exactly one of the three, the entry R1-D configuration. G1-D and H2-D are quote-on-request, and none of the three carries a published mass or payload figure on the G1-D page. In the United States, the FCC Covered List entry of 28 July 2026 blocks new equipment authorisations for the manufacturer, which affects new models rather than machines already authorised.
Unitree G1-D →Unitree claims 12.66 m/s for a machine three months old — its own H1 was clocked at 3.3
Unitree published a preview of an unannounced bipedal robot on its official channel on 17 August, under the working name "Superman". The description carries three numbers and nothing else: a two-metre standing high jump, a top speed of 12.66 m/s, and a leg length of 0.85 m. The company states the machine "has only been in development for a little over three months, with significant room for further improvement in the coming months", and claims the results surpass the standing high jump and running speed records of all humans. Against Unitree's own line-up, the figure is startling. Our profile of the H1, the humanoid that made the company's name in 2023, records 3.3 m/s as the speed actually clocked, with the maker citing a potential above 5 m/s; the G1 sits at roughly 2 m/s. The new claim of 12.66 m/s works out to 45.6 km/h — close to four times the H1's recorded run, from a machine the company says is a quarter of a year old. What is missing matters as much as what is given. Unitree publishes no mass, no overall height, no actuator or power figures, no price, no availability, and — crucially for a record claim — no test protocol: no surface, no run-up distance, no measurement method for the jump, no indication of whether the results are repeatable or were the best of many attempts. The 0.85 m leg length is the only dimension disclosed. Nor is "Superman" confirmed as a product name; the video is labelled a preview. wujec.ai is not opening a catalogue profile for this machine yet. Our rule is that a preview is not a spec sheet — a launch video routinely mistakes an option for a standard feature, and figures shown before release tend to move. The profile will follow once Unitree publishes a data sheet with a product name behind it. Until then the numbers above are the manufacturer's own claims, reported as such.
Unitree H2 →LG is building a humanoid — and buying its brain, its chip and its safety system from Nvidia
LG and Nvidia signed a memorandum of understanding on 13 August at Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, with LG Corp chairman Koo Kwang-mo and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang present. The announcement that followed a day later names a next-generation bipedal humanoid robot, to be shown publicly in the first quarter of next year. What is worth reading closely is the division of labour. LG supplies the body: actuators, sensors and batteries drawn from across LG Electronics, LG Innotek and LG Energy Solution — the "One LG" pitch. Nvidia supplies almost everything above it. The robot runs Isaac GR00T, Nvidia's open humanoid foundation model, on Jetson Thor for onboard reasoning and control, with Nvidia Halos for Robotics as the safety layer. That is the shape most new entrants now take. A humanoid programme used to mean years of building perception, locomotion and control in-house; today an appliance manufacturer with world-class experience in motors and batteries can buy the intelligence layer off the shelf and compete on the hardware it already knows how to mass-produce. The trade is obvious in both directions: LG skips the hardest and slowest part of the work, and accepts that its robot thinks with the same model as everyone else's. The rest of the agreement is less eye-catching but closer to revenue. LG will validate its CLOiD wheeled robots on a washing-machine line at its Tennessee plant, build AI factory reference sites on Nvidia DSX and Vera Rubin systems, and develop a next-generation vehicle platform on Nvidia DRIVE Hyperion. One caveat, plainly: nothing has been shown. No photograph, no specification, no name for the robot — the unveiling is still two quarters away, and this is an announcement of an announcement. wujec.ai will open a profile for the machine when LG publishes its figures.
Japan's first humanoid you can simply buy is 129 cm tall - because that is what fits through the door
On 5 August 2026 ZEALS, a Tokyo conversational-AI company founded in 2014, opened sales of D1 through its robotics division Omakase Robotics. The price starts at 5 million yen per unit, roughly 32,000 dollars, and deployment consultations began the same day. It is the first humanoid in Japan to go on open commercial sale after being trialled in a hospital. The striking number is not the price but the height: about 129.3 cm, on a driving base roughly 48 cm wide. That is a deliberate ceiling rather than a limitation of the engineering. A machine of this size passes through Japanese doorways, shares a lift with the people already in it and turns in the corridors of hospitals, hotels and offices - the places where a 170 cm humanoid becomes an obstacle. D1 rides on wheels rather than legs, carries two arms for moving objects and assisting with tasks, and runs up to about eight hours on a charge, which ZEALS lines up against a standard shift. What the company is really selling is the software layer it has spent a decade building in chat commerce: AI conversation, reception and guidance, indoor navigation and multilingual support. The credential behind the launch is a proof-of-concept at the University of Tsukuba Hospital, Japan's first humanoid trial inside an active medical setting, which ZEALS reports as ending with zero contacts with people and zero falls. The targets are modest and therefore credible: 100 units built in fiscal 2026 and 10,000 cumulative operating hours across healthcare, care homes, manufacturing, logistics and hotels. ZEALS describes the robot as quasi-domestic rather than fully Japanese - components bought on the world market, with the AI, control, assembly and site deployment led at home. The supplier of the driving platform is not published, and industry reporting points to Chinese-built hardware. That detail carries weight this month: on 28 July the US Federal Communications Commission stopped granting authorisations to new foreign robot models, so a machine of this class launched a week later has an open path in Japan and a closed one in the United States.
ZEALS D1 →The US closes its border to new Chinese robots — and BYD's first humanoid walks out three days later
The United States Federal Communications Commission updated its Covered List on 28 July 2026 to include foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots, alongside connected power inverters. The effect is narrow in wording and wide in practice: the agency will not grant equipment authorisation to new device models, which is the permission a radio-emitting device needs before it can be legally imported or sold in the US. Robots already authorised, and units already bought, are not affected. The stated reasoning came from a White House task force which concluded that foreign-built robots could constitute a cybersecurity risk to critical infrastructure, with espionage and the protection of the domestic AI industry named alongside it. China objected publicly. The measure is not written against a single company, but the market it describes is overwhelmingly Chinese: the great majority of humanoids and almost all commercial quadrupeds shipping today are built in China. Three days later the point was illustrated. On roughly 1 August, at its Di Space experience centre in Zhengzhou, BYD showed the physical unit of Xiao Di, the first humanoid from the world's largest electric-car maker. It stands 1.61 metres and weighs 58.5 kilograms; Chinese reports credit it with 31 degrees of freedom across hands, legs, hips and neck, 360-degree panoramic vision, and real-time interpreting between six Chinese dialects and six foreign languages. Its job is not manufacturing. BYD wants two or three of them in each dealership, welcoming visitors, explaining cars and running product demonstrations, and describes them as support for sales staff rather than a replacement. The company set up the team behind the robot in late 2024, inside its 15th Business Division; it presents Xiao Di as a working machine, not a concept. For a catalogue like this one, the ruling changes what a status badge means. A robot can be in volume production, publicly priced and commercially deployed, and still be unavailable in the largest single market for reasons that have nothing to do with the machine. The near-term winner is the one American humanoid programme with no Chinese competition to price against; the near-term loser is any buyer outside China who was waiting for the cheap option to arrive.
BYD Xiao Di →Behind Unitree in the IPO queue stands a quadruped maker that already turns a profit
This week's attention belonged to Unitree, which priced its A-share offering at 150.8 yuan and a multiple of 219 times earnings. The company directly behind it in the queue is less famous and, on the numbers, in better shape. DEEP Robotics, founded in Hangzhou in 2017, had its STAR Market application accepted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange on 18 May 2026 and is seeking about 2.5 billion yuan (roughly 347 million dollars). The company was valued at about 8 billion yuan after a 71-million-dollar Series C in December 2025, with China Telecom, China Unicom and JD.com among the backers. What separates it from most of the embodied-AI cohort is that the money comes from machines already at work. Its Jueying X-series industrial quadrupeds — sold outside China as the X20 and X30 — brought in 196 million yuan in 2025, 58 percent of total revenue, with unit sales more than doubling year on year to 681. The buyers are power grids, tunnel operators, fire services and public security, not laboratories. Frost & Sullivan ranked the company first worldwide in 2025 revenue from industrial quadruped applications, and the filing reports the business as profitable. The proceeds are earmarked for embodied-AI models, manufacturing capacity and a wider product range — which in practice means the humanoid line. DEEP Robotics launched the DR02 in October 2025 as the first full-size humanoid sealed to IP66, rated from minus 20 to 55 degrees Celsius, with arms and legs that detach on site. That is the same argument the company has been making with its robot dogs for years: not the most spectacular demo, but the one that still works in the rain. wujec.ai has this week added catalogue profiles for the X30, the Lite 3 and both humanoids, DR01 and DR02.
DEEP Robotics X30 →Tesla tore down the Model S/X line in 46 days to build Optimus — and Musk says the ramp will be "long and flat"
Tesla has begun installing its first Optimus production line at the Fremont factory, in the hall where the Model S and Model X were assembled until early May. The teardown took 46 days. The stated capacity of this first-generation line is one million robots a year. That number is the headline. The more informative part is what Elon Musk said around it. He has described the initial output as "quite slow" and the ramp as long and flat, and called the production rate for this year "literally impossible to predict" — because Optimus has roughly 10,000 unique parts, almost none of which Tesla has built at volume before, on a line that has never run. The destination of the first units matters too. They are not going to paying customers. Tesla intends to put early robots into its own factories and workflows first, which is both the cautious choice and the one that keeps the feedback loop inside the company. A second line is planned at Giga Texas, targeted at summer 2027. There is a gap here worth naming plainly. A line rated for a million units a year is a statement about tooling, not about output — annual capacity assumes a mature process running at speed, and Musk is simultaneously saying the process is neither mature nor fast. Both things can be true, and reading the first figure without the second is how humanoid timelines have been mis-reported for three years running. It is also worth noting what has not happened: Optimus V3, the generation this line is meant to build, has had its public reveal pushed back more than once. Until Tesla publishes a specification for the robot coming off that line, the catalogue treats its figures as reported rather than confirmed.
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 →AgiBot's new flagship humanoid works a full shift — and goes to charge itself
AgiBot used the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on 20 July 2026 to unveil the A3 Ultra, a humanoid aimed less at demonstrations than at factory rosters. It stands 1.74 m, weighs 60 kg, has 51 degrees of freedom and carries 5 kg per arm, running on NVIDIA's Thor compute platform. The specification that matters most is endurance. AgiBot rates the robot at up to eight hours on a charge and gives it three ways to keep going: conventional charging, a hot battery swap, and autonomous docking, in which the robot breaks off its task and returns to a charger without a human involved. Sensing is built for mixed environments — 3D LiDAR, RGB-D, fisheye and binocular cameras, and GPS, RTK and UWB positioning so the machine can locate itself outside a building as well as inside one. The A3 Ultra was shown with three other products: the X2 Edu teaching platform (1.3 m, 29 degrees of freedom), the heavy-payload G2 Max for material handling, and the OmniHand 3 Ultra-M dexterous hand, which packs 20 degrees of freedom into 0.65 kg. Shortly before the show, AgiBot said its 15,000th robot had come off the line — a figure that follows the 10,000th unit reported in March 2026. Neither a price nor a delivery date has been announced, so wujec.ai lists the new profile as a pilot until customer shipments are confirmed. The earlier AgiBot A2 keeps its own entry.
AgiBot A3 Ultra →Unitree's three-continent rollout stalls at the US border
Unitree Robotics set out to do something no humanoid maker had done before: launch the same machine commercially on three continents inside three weeks. The H1 Pro went on sale in Europe on 22 July 2026, Asia followed on 5 August with a reported deployment of more than five hundred units into logistics warehouses and manufacturing plants, and North America was scheduled for 12 August. The American leg no longer has a route. On 28 July 2026 the FCC extended its Covered List to foreign-produced advanced robotic devices, which withholds the equipment authorisation a new hardware model needs before it can be imported, marketed or sold in the United States. Reporting indicates no current regulatory pathway for the H1 Pro there. The move follows the Pentagon adding Unitree to its list of Chinese military companies earlier in the summer, which bars Department of Defense contracts. Analysts have also pointed to China's National Intelligence Law, under which a Chinese company can be required to provide data to state intelligence services regardless of where its machines operate. No equivalent European rule blocks the sale of the H1 Pro today. The H1 Pro now has its own profile in the wujec.ai catalogue, alongside the Unitree G1, Go2 and H2.
Unitree H1 Pro →BYD shows Xiao Di, its first humanoid robot, in the showroom
BYD presented its first humanoid robot, Xiao Di, in early August 2026 at the carmaker's Di Space experience centre in Zhengzhou. The machine stands 1.61 m tall and weighs 58.5 kg, and reports from the debut single out how smooth its motion is. Unlike several recent Chinese humanoid reveals, Xiao Di is presented as a working prototype rather than a concept. Its job is retail: greeting visitors, walking them through the electric cars on the floor and running product demonstrations. BYD frames the robot as support for showroom staff, not a replacement, and has signalled that two to three units could eventually be stationed in each of its stores. The move is a short step for BYD, which already builds the batteries, electric motors and power electronics a humanoid needs, and it puts the world's largest EV maker on the same board as Tesla's Optimus programme.
BYD Xiao Di →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 →1X gives NEO hands that can feel a grip slipping — 25 force-controlled degrees of freedom, IP68, 10,000 units a year
1X has replaced the hands on its NEO humanoid with a tendon-driven design that the company positions as its answer to the hardest part of home robotics: touching things that were not designed for robots. The numbers 1X publishes are unusually specific. The hand carries 25 degrees of freedom — 22 fully actuated in the fingers and palm, three at the wrist — and, crucially, all 25 are natively force-controlled and fully backdrivable. That is the difference between a gripper that closes to a commanded position and one that closes until it feels the right amount of resistance. The drive is quasi-direct: 1X's own tendon system running gear ratios of roughly 5:1 to 15:1, low enough that external forces travel back through the mechanism instead of being absorbed by a gearbox. Strength and delicacy are quoted side by side: 3.5 Nm peak torque at the thumb CMC joint, 2.6 Nm at the finger MCP joints, up to 45 N of distal flexion force and 17.75 Nm at the wrist, with positioning accuracy of ±0.2 mm. Tactile sensing runs across the fingertips and surfaces and measures three things — normal force, contact location and shear. Shear is the one that matters for the headline: it is what lets the robot notice an object starting to slide and tighten its grip before the object falls, rather than after. Two details point at a machine meant to live in a kitchen rather than a lab. The hand is rated IP68 and built from food-safe polymers and components, so it can be washed. And 1X says wrist joints have been proven beyond two million cycles under high loads, with components tested to millions of cycles. The part that is hardest to fake is manufacturing. 1X says hundreds of the hands have already come off a scalable production line, with capacity for 10,000 hands in 2026. "These hands are the culmination of intensive engineering focused on making humanoids truly useful," said chief executive Bernt Børnich. Hands remain the bottleneck for every humanoid programme: they are the component with the worst ratio of degrees of freedom to available space, and the one that wears out first. A vendor quoting cycle-life figures and a production line — rather than a demo video — is the more telling signal here.
NEO →The working humanoid goes public: Agility Robotics takes a $2.5bn SPAC deal, with Foxconn leading the money
Agility Robotics announced on 24 June 2026 that it will go public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value and more than $620 million in gross proceeds — $420 million from the SPAC's trust account and roughly $200 million of PIPE financing at $10 a share, led by Foxconn. The combined company is to trade as AGLT, with closing expected during 2026 subject to shareholder approval and regulatory clearance. What makes the filing unusual for this sector is that it contains operating history rather than promises. Agility disclosed four named customers in active deployment — Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre — across nine facilities, with more than 65,000 cumulative hours of robot operation and a pipeline of over 30 potential customers. In November 2025 a single GXO deployment in Flowery Branch passed 100,000 totes moved. The order book, however, points forward, not at the robot doing that work. More than $300 million in multi-year orders, subject to contractual milestones, is booked against Digit v5 — the next-generation machine Agility bills as the first "cooperatively safe" humanoid, and the first production platform for NVIDIA's Halos for Robotics safety stack. "Humanoids are at a meaningful inflection point in commercial adoption," said chief executive Peggy Johnson. Co-founder Jonathan Hurst put the thesis more narrowly: "Cooperative safety is the critical unlock for scaled humanoid adoption." Foxconn's presence at the head of the PIPE is the other half of that thesis — the contract manufacturer that builds iPhones is betting the next phase is volume production, not research.
Digit →NVIDIA gives humanoids a safety processor that the AI cannot override — Agility is first in line
NVIDIA announced Halos for Robotics on 22 June 2026, a full-stack safety architecture aimed squarely at the reason humanoid robots still work behind fences: nobody can certify a neural network as the thing that stops a machine before it hits a person. Halos separates the two jobs. The hardware layer is the industrial IGX Thor compute module, which carries a functional-safety island — an isolated processor, assessed against IEC 61508, that can halt the robot independently of the AI stack doing perception and planning. Above it sit Halos Core and Halos OS, plus an "outside-in" blueprint in which cameras mounted in the building, rather than on the robot, feed AI agents that see around corners and modulate the robot's speed as people approach. NVIDIA says the architecture is derived from its automotive safety work, and it has paired the launch with an ANAB-accredited inspection lab and certification partners including TÜV Rheinland, UL Solutions, TÜV SÜD, exida, SGS and CertX. Supported standards named at launch include IEC 61508, ISO 13849 and ISO/IEC TR 5469. Agility Robotics is the first production user, integrating IGX Thor and Halos Core into Digit — the humanoid already working for Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. It is the foundation of what Agility calls "cooperative safety" in the forthcoming Digit v5: sharing unmodified floor space with workers, no safety cage. The telling detail is the guest list. Six certification bodies and an accredited lab say plainly what the bottleneck for humanoids on a factory floor actually is — not autonomy, not dexterity, but a signature from a certifier.
Digit v5 →