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What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
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 →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 →