Phynetic AI Weeklyby Phynetic
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humanoids

General-purpose bipeds and the companies deploying them — demos, pilots, safety cases.

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18 Sep

D-Robotics Closes $400M in Series C Funding to Boom the Robotics Industry (2 minute read)

D-Robotics has closed a US$400 million Series C, with strategic investment from an unnamed global internet company and follow-on from existing shareholders. The round funds its Sunrise chip portfolio and a software platform. The company says cumulative Sunrise shipments passed 8 million units in the first half of 2026, and that its S600 embodied AI chip, launched in November 2025, has been adopted by more than 20 customers in six months.

— en.d-robotics.ccindustry-fundinghardwarehumanoids
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18 Sep

Learning Safe Humanoid Navigation from Reduced Order Models (paper · 15 minute read)

A single-stage RL navigation pipeline struggles on multi-story terrain, so the authors split the problem: a policy on reduced order dynamics with full 3D LiDAR observations learns multi-story navigation, then kickstarts a full-order policy with a frozen locomotion policy in the loop. A Poisson safety filter recovers safety around out-of-distribution obstacles. On a Unitree G1, RoM-Nav performs mapless multi-floor navigation over 10m of vertical displacement and over 100m of path length.

— cs.RO updates on arXiv.orghumanoidslocomotionhardware
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17 Sep

Helix 2.5: Zero-Shot 30-Home Generalization (8 minute read)

Figure has pretrained Helix 2.5 on Index, its dataset of human behavior, and run three whole-body behaviors — tidying living rooms, folding towels and making beds — in 30 Bay Area homes with no data collected in any of them. The company reports that Index pretraining alone lifts zero-shot success from 9% to 56%, and that Helix 2.5 matches a Helix 02 policy while using half the task-specific data.

— Figure newsvla-foundation-modelshumanoidslocomotion
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17 Sep

China's Ubtech Opens Plant Making a Humanoid Robot Every 10 Minutes (3 minute read)

UBTECH has started operations at a humanoid robot plant in Liuzhou, Guangxi, with annual capacity of 10,000 units, according to Global Times. Built with Siemens Digital Industries Software and covering 14,000 square meters, the plant mainly produces the Walker S and Cruzr series, with Cruzr Y1 and Cruzr S2 humanoids handling materials and more than four hours of full-unit testing for each finished robot.

— en.sedaily.comhumanoids
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15 Sep

Agility Robotics says its new Digit 5 robot can work next to people without safety fences (1 minute read)

Agility Robotics' Digit 5 lifts up to 22.7 kg, 40 percent more than its predecessor, and its battery charges in 9 minutes for 90 minutes of runtime, which the company says allows more than 20 hours of work per day. The humanoid spots people and, according to the company, stops or steps aside. Agility points to orders worth more than $300 million, with first deliveries starting in early 2027.

— the-decoder.comhardwarehumanoids
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12 Sep

Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data (2 minute read)

Mecka AI, which collects and analyses human motion data to train humanoid and other robots, is nearing a new round led by Sequoia at a valuation of about $500 million, TechCrunch reports, citing two people with knowledge of the deal. It comes three months after a $60 million round led by Framework Ventures; the terms are not final, and neither company commented.

— Robotics News | TechCrunchindustry-fundingteleoperation-data-collectionhumanoids
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8 Sep

ETH Zürich's humanoid jumps onto monkey bars and crosses them (video · 3 min)

A humanoid from ETH Zürich's Robotic Systems Lab jumps onto a set of monkey bars, traverses them through sparse bar interactions and lands safely. The lab frames the problem as perceiving thin, overhanging geometry while executing agile, accurate whole-body motions. The video leads IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday for the week.

— YouTube · Robotic Systems Lab: Legged Robotics at ETH Zürichhumanoidslocomotion
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8 Sep

Iron Walks Off the Line, XPENG Starts Building Humanoids in Guangzhou (3 minute read)

XPENG's Iron humanoid was finished on a new Guangzhou line and walked off the factory floor under its own power on 7 September, with no remote pilot. The company says more than 80% of the line's fundamental steps are automated, adapted from its electric-vehicle plants to the tighter tolerances humanoids need. Chairman He Xiaopeng said there was no prior playbook when they started developing the lines, and called the result a small first step.

— TechEBlog -humanoidshardware
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7 Sep

Agility Robotics reports $1.8M revenue ahead of humanoid SPAC (3 minute read)

Agility Robotics generated $1.8 million in net sales in 2025 against a $140 million operating loss, according to an S-4 filed ahead of its SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp. XI. The deal values Agility at $2.5 billion, roughly 1,400 times annual revenue, with Digit deployed at nine customer sites. The merger is expected to raise more than $620 million, including a $200 million PIPE led by Foxconn.

— The Robot Reporthumanoidsindustry-funding
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7 Sep

NEURA Robotics and SECO Join Forces to Scale Physical AI from Europe (5 minute read)

NEURA Robotics and SECO will jointly design and manufacture the compute modules for NEURA's cognitive robots, including the 4NE1 humanoid, with series production in Europe. The modules carry Qualcomm Dragonwing processors and form part of NEURA's distributed Brain-plus-Nervous-System architecture. The two will also work together on industrial data and automation for semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.

— Neura Roboticshardwareindustry-fundinghumanoids
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5 Sep

Sabac Robot Factory Ships First Humanoid Units (2 minute read)

A plant in Šabac shipped its first humanoid units on 4 September 2026, with a planned capacity of three thousand robots a year. Serbia's first factory of its kind is a joint venture between Chinese automotive parts maker Minth and robot maker Agibot, building two humanoid models and a quadruped. Serbia is the base Minth wants for the European market rather than another car-industry plant, and the robots go first to industry and later to households.

— srpske.rshumanoidsindustry-funding
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3 Sep

BRIDGE: An Open-Source Humanoid Platform via Morphology-Control Co-Design for Physical AI (paper · 15 minute read)

Bridge is an 88 cm open-source humanoid whose body and controller were optimised together rather than one after the other, released with its control policy. The paper introduces a metric that scores a design on both kinematic retargeting fidelity to human motion and dynamic tracking performance, and reports better numbers than Bumi, K1 and Toddlerbot on all of them.

— arXivhumanoidsopen-source-toolshardware
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3 Sep

Figure and Nscale sign for up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform (1 minute read)

Figure is committing $3.5 billion, with intent to scale past $6 billion, to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform from the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas. Nscale is also investing in Figure, which says it is now bound by the data and compute needed to train Helix. It follows Index, Figure's effort to assemble the most diverse humanoid training dataset yet, which the company says is generating 35 minutes of data every second.

— Figure newsindustry-fundinghardwarehumanoids
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2 Sep

Innovation at Agility: Digit Redecorates (video · 3 min)

Agility's Digit rearranges a full room of objects, each a different size, weight and grip. The company presents this as the same generalised manipulation Digit uses for mixed loads and changing layouts on a real warehouse floor. It is posted as a short video demonstration, with no new hardware and no customer deployment attached.

— Agilityhumanoidsmanipulation
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2 Sep

Nori Robotics takes orders for the $1,688 Nori A3 humanoid (1 minute read)

Nori Robotics, a Y Combinator company, is taking orders for the Nori A3, a humanoid it prices at $1,688 in full with no deposit and says will ship in autumn 2026 from assembly in San Francisco. The company pitches it for household tasks — kitchen help, tidying, loading dishes, folding clothes — and plans a marketplace where owners share the skills they teach it.

— noril1.comhumanoids
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28 Aug

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.

— Robohubhumanoidslocomotion
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28 Aug

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.

— boschko.capolicy-safetyhumanoids
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27 Aug

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.

— arXivlocomotionhumanoids
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26 Aug

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.

— espn.comhumanoidslocomotion
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19 Aug

Ban on Chinese robots leaves U.S. startups stranded (5 minute read)

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.

— restofworld.orgpolicy-safetyhumanoids
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18 Aug

Unitree Robotics IPO: "Embodied AI" Valuation Bubble? (4 minute read)

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.

— cnn.comindustry-fundinghumanoids
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17 Aug

Is Shipyard Welding the Right First Job for Humanoid Robots? (5 minute read)

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.

— IEEE Spectrumhumanoids
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16 Aug

San Mateo County Moves to Regulate Humanoid Robots (2 minute read)

San Mateo County's Board of Supervisors has unanimously directed staff to draft an ordinance regulating untethered, autonomous or semi-autonomous humanoid robots in commercial settings, while California still has no framework of its own. Staff are to consider requiring that any permitted robot be supervised at all times by a trained human on site, which Humanoids Daily says would undercut remotely teleoperated services such as Tau Robotics' $30-an-hour humanoid cleaning in San Francisco.

— humanoidsdaily.compolicy-safetyhumanoids
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14 Aug

HumanTracker: Galaxy General Robotics' humanoid motion-tracking benchmark (dataset · 1 minute read)

Galaxy General Robotics' HumanTracker benchmark scores humanoid motion tracking against 2,500 reference clips retargeted to a 29-DoF Unitree G1-style body, in four families from daily motion to highly dynamic moves. It adds 6,000 human preference pairs comparing rollouts from four trackers — GMT, TWIST2, SONIC and Humanoid-GPT — which train a HumanScore reward model meant to catch foot skating and unstable support that per-frame error misses. It is Apache 2.0, with an ECCV 2026 paper.

— Hugging Facedatasets-benchmarkshumanoids
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14 Aug

The Global Humanoid Robotics Ecosystem Is Broader Than Robot Makers (5 minute read)

Humanoid Analytics' July 2026 market snapshot tracks 351 companies and programmes: 225 build complete humanoids and 126 work in adjacent segments such as dexterous manipulation, sensing, components, AI and data infrastructure. That puts 35.9% of the tracked ecosystem into humanoid robotics without building the robot — a count of participants, the firm stresses, not market share. Dexterous manipulation is the largest adjacent segment, with 58 entities.

— humanoidanalytics.comhumanoidsindustry-funding
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12 Aug

ZEST turns motion capture, video and animation into robot skills without fine-tuning (3 minute read)

Researchers at the RAI Institute and Boston Dynamics describe ZEST, a reinforcement-learning recipe that turns motion capture, single-camera video and keyframe animation into whole-body skills, trained entirely in simulation and run on hardware without fine-tuning. On Atlas, Unitree's G1 and Spot it produced crawls, cartwheels, breakdancing and a backflip, each policy taking about 10 hours on one NVIDIA L4 GPU; so far it is limited to flat, non-slippery ground.

— interestingengineering.comhumanoidslocomotionsimulation
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11 Aug

Agility's Digit V5 is built to work beside people without safety fencing (3 minute read)

Agility Robotics plans to deploy Digit V5 to its first customers in December, with safety systems meant to let the humanoid work beside people without the fencing that usually surrounds industrial robots. Its battery is designed for more than 20 hours of work a day, and an ISO-standard flange takes interchangeable grippers, with autonomous tool changes planned. Early deployments are meant to validate the safety claims before wider production.

— interestingengineering.comhumanoidshardwarepolicy-safety
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10 Aug

Global Humanoid Robot Shipments Surge Threefold in First Half; China Captures 97% Market Share, Agibot Leads (4 minute read)

Global humanoid shipments reached 19,100 units in the first half of 2026, more than three times the 5,100 of a year earlier, and Chinese manufacturers took 97% of them. Agibot overtook Unitree for the top place with 44% of the global total, and the four largest suppliers were all Chinese. Smart Analytics Global puts industrial and commercial work at more than 70% of shipments, and names falling margins and the US import ban as what shapes the next phase.

— finance.biggo.comhumanoidspolicy-safetyindustry-funding
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10 Aug

Atlas swaps its own battery in under three minutes (3 minute read)

Boston Dynamics says the production Atlas can recognise when its battery is depleted, return to a station, swap the battery in under three minutes and resume its task. It runs about four hours between swaps, or two when lifting heavy loads, while a conventional recharge takes about 90 minutes, which is what makes swapping matter for factories running several shifts.

— interestingengineering.comhumanoidshardware
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8 Aug

Mitsubishi joins the humanoid robot race, at a 1k unit per month pace (2 minute read)

Mitsubishi plans to build up to 1,000 Highlanders humanoids a month at a former engine plant in Kyoto, with mass production possibly starting next year. The robots, co-developed with a University of Tokyo startup, will work in Mitsubishi's own factories first — including building themselves at the Kyoto site. Mitsubishi is better known as a leader in automation and controls than as a carmaker, and the memorandum of understanding with Highlanders was signed last month.

— electrek.cohumanoidshardware
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5 Aug

Trump's AI protectionism has come for robotics (3 minute read)

The FCC has banned imports of foreign-made advanced robots, including humanoids, quadrupeds and wheeled machines. The order cites the data such robots would collect in homes and sensitive facilities, and the need to shield US robotics firms from Chinese competition. The playbook predates this administration: the same tariff-and-procurement response followed Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles and drones.

— technologyreview.compolicy-safetyhumanoids
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3 Aug

When expressive humanoid robots are awkward, people become wary (3 minute read)

In a study published in Science Robotics, 50 people held conversations and made joint decisions with the commercial humanoid Pepper, which sometimes gave sound advice and sometimes interrupted or pushed illogical suggestions. When an expressive robot broke conversational norms, participants' oxytocin rose, and the higher it rose the less they trusted the robot and took its advice. Errors damaged trust whether or not the robot was expressive; expressiveness changed how their brains handled the moment.

— theconversation.comhumanoids
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3 Aug

Walden Robotics Partners With Toyota on Practical Humanoids (5 minute read)

Walden Robotics, the Toyota Research Institute spinout that left stealth on 15 July with $300 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, is partnering with Toyota on humanoids built for practical work. IEEE Spectrum sets it against two years in which humanoid companies were founded largely because it was possible and lucrative, and the industry-wide sobering about practicality and value that followed.

— IEEE Spectrumhumanoidsindustry-funding
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3 Aug

Sharpa's Wave hand served as verification hardware for Gemini Robotics 2 (2 minute read)

Sharpa's Wave dexterous hand, mounted on Apptronik's Apollo 2, served as verification hardware for Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2. The demonstration covered multi-finger tasks including tying trash bags, unscrewing light bulbs and sealing resealable bags. Gemini Robotics 2 extends control from the upper body to the whole humanoid, feet to fingertips, and in a recorded demo guided Apollo across a room to shelve a watering can while avoiding obstacles.

— Gasgoomanipulationhardwarehumanoids
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3 Aug

Unitree opens its STAR Market IPO to subscription on 10 August; AgiBot starts a Hong Kong listing (7 minute read)

Gasgoo's weekly roundup leads with Unitree's STAR Market listing: the preliminary inquiry was set for 5 August and subscriptions for 10 August, for 40.45 million new shares, 10% of the enlarged capital. Unitree projects first-half revenue of 1.05 billion to 1.13 billion yuan, up roughly 35.6% to 45.4% year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 258 million to 306 million yuan. The roundup also notes AgiBot starting its Hong Kong listing process.

— Gasgooindustry-fundingpolicy-safetyhumanoids