Unitree reports a two-metre standing high jump and a top speed of 12.66 m/s from a new humanoid with an 0.85 m leg length, beating the human records in both. The company says the machine has been in development for a little over three months.
Persona AI, founded by former NASA Valkyrie lead Nicolaus Radford and ex-Figure CTO Jerry Pratt, has committed its humanoid to welding — the job of one of the first industrial robots ever sold. IEEE Spectrum examines whether shipyard welding is the right economically viable first job for a humanoid. Persona was unfocused at first — Radford says they were "all over the place", weighing warehousing, automotive and even the home — before settling on a trade.
Researchers in Canada have built Ice Dart, a drone whose landing gear absorbs a hard landing and grips the surface with microspines, so it can perch on icebergs and glaciers. In tests at Iceland's Fjallsjökull glacier, reported in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics, it perched at up to 3 m/s on slopes of up to 58 degrees and succeeded every time, even in 30 km/h winds.
Skild AI presents S1 as in-context learning for robotics: one video prompt teaches an unseen task over ten-minute horizons, with no fine-tuning. The company draws the analogy to the shift from BERT-style models, which needed fresh data for each application, to prompting. S1's own framing is that robustly executing a new task has until now meant collecting hours of data and fine-tuning a specialist policy.
Generalist AI's GEN-1.5 learns a new task in seconds from a single example, without gradient updates or fine-tuning. The company notes the tasks are simple and short-horizon, but says this is the first model it knows of where one-shot and few-shot learning of physical skills have emerged at scale. It also shows zero-shot physical generalisation, which the company calls a step toward general intelligence for the physical world.
Hydra-0 represents robot actions as pixel motion, giving one visual interface for learning action consequences across embodiments, tasks and video backbones. The best configuration cuts robot-motion error by 90.4% against an action-conditioned baseline, and an emergent inverse mode predicts robot motion from object flow taken from a human demonstration. On the RoboLab benchmark it reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.96 between replayed and reference success rates, and supports zero-shot composition.
The Franka Emika Panda's external position interface has been unreliable for years, and this paper traces the vibrations and protective stops to the timing of the external control loop and sampling jitter rather than to the robot. The open-source stack decouples real-time communication from the ROS 2 control loop and adds rate matching and position-domain reference generation. It is validated across motion planning, compliance control, position-controlled manipulation and haptic teleoperation, on two independent Panda platforms.
MuJoCo 3.12.0 defines the MJCF grammar in a single schema file, generating the parser's grammar table, keyword maps and typed attribute bindings from it. The release also adds a PID actuator and, as a breaking change, drops the custom binary texture format in favour of PNG and KTX. The new PID actuator takes real position and velocity setpoints with optional integral action, anti-windup and slew limiting, subsuming the old plugin with proper activation state.
Unitree's shares rose more than 600% on their Shanghai debut, after an IPO that raised 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) and was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times — a record for the STAR market. Days earlier the company unveiled Superman, a humanoid it says jumps two metres and runs at 12.66 metres per second. Founder Wang Xingxing sat in the front row at President Xi's rare symposium with top technology businesses, a marker of how strategically the company is now regarded.
Under the FCC rule a robot must be assembled in the US with at least 65% of its components by value made domestically, rising to 75% in 2029. Rest of World reports the forced onshoring is arriving before an American supply chain exists, putting at risk the startups the policy is meant to cultivate. Devices already on sale are unaffected and robots imported for development rather than resale are still allowed, but founders struggle to see how they can manufacture commercially under the rule.
Crunchbase counts $47.4 billion of venture funding into physical AI across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, almost four times the $12 billion of the second half of 2025 and more than the $41.9 billion invested from 2022 to 2024 combined. Its definition is broad — robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, drones, industrial automation and sensors — and one deal, Waymo's $16 billion Series D, accounts for nearly a third of the total.
