Robots beat human records, and Figure's 16-million-video dataset

UniBLEed: Unauthenticated Root RCE on Any Unitree G1 Humanoid Robot (13 minute read)

A disclosure chains a Bluetooth characteristic that accepts writes without pairing, a heredoc injection that hijacks WiFi, a path traversal in the robot's chatbot and a 1050-byte buffer overflow into root code execution on a Unitree G1. A cloud API decrypts any G1's AES key from a free account without checking ownership, and the exploit is wormable; it produced two CVEs and a $6,700 bounty. It follows UniPwn and Unitree's first mitigations, by a different chain.

First 11 vs 11 humanoid soccer game played at RoboCup 2026 (1 minute read)

RoboCup 2026 saw the first 11-versus-11 humanoid football match, between B-Human of Bremen and HTWK Robots of Leipzig, both using Booster Robotics machines. RoboCup's founders set the goal in 1997 of fielding robots that could beat the human World Cup champions by 2050. RoboCup Federation president Ubbo Visser said the new humanoid hardware paired with AI has put the robots at a level the competition had not seen in earlier years.

AGIBOT Wins 18 Gold Medals on World Humanoid Robot Games Debut, Tops Gold and Overall Medal Tables (2 minute read)

AGIBOT won 18 gold medals on its World Humanoid Robot Games debut, topping both the gold and overall medal tables.

Humanoid robots surpass human records in 100M, high jump (2 minute read)

More than 2,000 humanoid robots are competing across 51 events at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, held in the National Speed Skating Oval built for the 2022 Winter Olympics. Chinese machines broke human marks on the opening day, including the 100-metre sprint record. The games opened the same week Beijing held the 2026 World Robot Conference, where companies showed around 3,000 products; China makes most of the world's humanoid robots.

How to Train a Cross-Embodiment Robot Navigation Policy with AI Agents (11 minute read)

NVIDIA describes an agent-driven workflow in which a coding agent validates dependencies, prepares assets, runs smoke tests, launches training and compares checkpoints for a navigation policy. Human approval gates control scene acceptance, the smoke test and checkpoint promotion, so the work is not repeated for every robot-scene pair. The tutorial uses Spot as the reference robot across a built-in scene and a SAGE-10K scene, with Omniverse NuRec supporting captured environments.

CLAP: Cross-Embodiment Video World Models are Zero-Shot Physical Simulators (paper · 15 minute read)

CLAP trains action-conditioned video generation across both human and robot footage, reconciling incompatible action spaces through end-effector poses, language and latents. It covers DROID, Bridge, bimanual YAM robots and G1 humanoids, and all code and models are open-sourced. A curriculum first learns physical priors from unlabelled video before specialising, since action representations differ sharply between platforms and are absent from human footage altogether.

SOLO: Stable Omni-terrain Long-Horizon Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion (paper · 15 minute read)

SOLO walks a humanoid 1.5 km outdoors zero-shot on nothing but a chest-mounted depth camera and proprioception. It replaces dense terrain reconstruction, which smooths away the detail a footstep needs, with Fourier-encoded cell queries that cut height-map error by a factor of 3.3 to 4. Folding teacher-student disagreement into the PPO reward carries that penalty back to earlier actions, and on stress terrain it reaches 97.5% traversal and 96% on stepping stones against 75% and 0–3% for dense-reconstruction variants.

NC State's soft 'ring leaper' keeps jumping while infrared light shines on it (3 minute read)

North Carolina State University researchers have built a teardrop-shaped liquid crystal elastomer robot that twists under infrared light, stores the energy and snaps itself into a jump, resetting on its own so it keeps leaping while the light stays on. The angle of a stiff V-shaped tail decides whether it crawls, jumps forward or leaps upward; the work is published in PNAS.

Introducing Index: Building The World’s Largest and Most Diverse Physical Dataset (3 minute read)

Figure has come out of stealth with Index, a robot training dataset it says is the most diverse built so far. In four months its creator network uploaded over 16 million videos from more than 100 countries, processing 30 minutes of video every second, with $15 million paid out to contributors. Figure crossed 264,000 app downloads and 44,000 weekly active users while still in stealth, and says it will spend over $1 billion on data and compute in the next twelve months.

Hugging Face is selling a cute $399 open source duck robot, Microduck (2 minute read)

Hugging Face unveiled the Microduck, a $399 open-source robot that ships before Christmas. The 25-centimetre duck waddles, picks things up with its beak, rights itself after a fall and roller skates, following the Reachy Mini in a hardware line the company started by acquiring Pollen Robotics. It perceives with a camera, lidar and two inertial measurement units.

ViFailback's 5,202 episodes of robot failures, now in LeRobot format (dataset · 1 minute read)

ViFailback, the dataset from a CVPR 2026 paper on learning from manipulation failures, now has a LeRobot conversion: 5,202 real ALOHA dual-arm episodes across 100 tasks, 4,545 of them failures, each failure with an annotated keyframe to avoid and one to correct. It is MIT-licensed; the depth maps were left out.

How green is your robot? And other awkward questions (4 minute read)

Robohub raises the environmental cost of robotics, noting that robots that clean rivers and sort waste are themselves manufactured and powered.

NEURA Acquires ADLATUS Robotics, Bringing Physical AI to Professional Cleaning (5 minute read)

NEURA Mobile Robots has acquired 100% of ADLATUS Robotics of Ulm, bringing hundreds of installed autonomous cleaning machines and proprietary navigation software into the group. It follows the Bosch Rexroth ACTIVE Shuttle deal as NEURA consolidates different robots onto one Physical AI infrastructure. ADLATUS has spent years building autonomous cleaning and sweeping robots for industry, logistics, healthcare and public spaces, and NEURA will add sensing and fold it into the Neuraverse.

Robotics startup Generalist reaches $3B valuation, sources say (2 minute read)

Generalist is valued at $3 billion after a nearly $200 million extension led by 8VC, taking its Series B to $600 million in total. The company was founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Pete Florence and Andy Zeng with ex-Boston Dynamics engineer Andrew Barry. Early backers include NVIDIA, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions and Fei-Fei Li, and the company says its Gen 1.5 model learns new tasks from video demonstrations.

Nvidia: Jetson Orin Nano 2 Robotics Computer (3 minute read)

NVIDIA announced the Jetson Orin Nano 2, an entry-level edge AI robotics computer aimed at bringing the platform to more developers.

AGIBOT x Chimelong Group: Build the World’s First Embodied‑AI Theme Park (video · 3 min)

Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing (4 minute read)

These tiny drones are powered by sound (2 minute read)

I spent a day at a robot "carnival" in Shanghai. Here's what I saw (4 minute read)

Robot brain builders are pushing out of their GPT-2 era (5 minute read)

Perceptron releases Isaac 0.5, an open-weight vision model for factory robots (3 minute read)

China's humanoid robots aren't smart enough to take your job (1 minute read)

Microduck (2 minute read)