Hardware
The parts that make humanoid robots work: actuators, dexterous hands, batteries, sensors and chips, plus the suppliers building them and what they cost.
Humanoid Daily
Figure's baby AGI, Meta's China gamble, China 5Xs physical AI investment, and Agility goes to Wall Street
Nov 3, 2026Physical Ai
Everything we learned about Figure from its public all-hands meeting
Nov 3, 2026Trends
The company making all of Atlas's actuators just got a Wall Street upgrade
Oct 31, 2026More Hardware
Figure AI just froze Figure 04's design and says it found a physical AI scaling law
Figure AI has reached design lock on Figure 04, committed $3.5 billion in cloud compute via a deal with Nscale, and CEO Brett Adcock is making a bold claim: robots have a scaling law, and Helix is the proof.
Oct 31, 2026Tesla will open Optimus reservations in December. Here's the fine print.
Tesla is opening Optimus reservations in early December at the Humanoids Summit. The robots won't ship for a year, the build cost is 3-5x the target price, and Musk said companies come first. Here's what the reservation actually means.
Oct 30, 2026XPENG starts producing solid-state batteries for its IRON humanoid robot
XPENG's robotics unit has completed small-scale production of a solid-state battery for the IRON robot that is 30% lighter and 30% more energy-dense than liquid lithium-ion as it targets mass production of IRON by end of 2026.
Oct 30, 2026Inside Neura Robotics' massive physical AI strategy: more than humanoids
In two weeks, Neura Robotics has unveiled a new humanoid, launched its own AI foundation model, announced a partnership on robotic memory, and opened a major training facility. Add in its $1.4 billion funding, industrial partnerships, acquisitions, and an expanding robot portfolio, and a much bigger strategy comes into focus.
Oct 29, 2026Agile Robots and Audi piloting humanoids ... on a task done 1 million times a day
Agile Robots launched its Agile ONE SN research humanoid at NVIDIA GTC Berlin and announced a 4-way proof-of-concept with Audi to automate a task performed roughly 1 million times daily at Audi's Ingolstadt plant.
Oct 27, 2026Mitsubishi Electric just connected a humanoid robot to a CNC machine with natural language
A three-component physical AI system lets a humanoid handle machine tool operations from a single natural-language instruction ... no robot-specific programming required.
Oct 26, 2026NVIDIA's massive robotics strategy: how all the puzzle pieces fit together
NVIDIA unleashed a wave of robotics announcements at GTC Berlin: Isaac Lab 3.0, Isaac OS, new GR00T training workflows, datasets, simulation assets, and a reference humanoid. Together, they reveal an emerging strategy: NVIDIA wants to supply the software, computing, and safety infrastructure underlying the entire robotics industry, regardless of who builds the robots.
Oct 24, 2026Killer hacked robots, Optimus in production, NVIDIA's platform wins, micro-factories staffed by robots, and more!
Today in Humanoid Daily ... Tesla starts building Optimus (but how many), NVIDIA wants to own the robot platform, 1 word turns a robot violent, Unitree's CEO warns investors, tiny micro-factories powered by humanoids, a humanoid with personality, and the number of the day is 348!
IDC: American humanoid robot makers face a 2028 squeeze under FCC robot ban
IDC projects US humanoid revenue 58% below baseline by 2030, because fast product cycles leave few certified models to keep shipping. US builders won’t reach scale until late 2028, which leaves an opening for component suppliers.
Oct 22, 20261.2 million consecutive steps: Figure 03 walked 348 miles in 9 days
Figure AI ran its Figure 03 humanoid on a treadmill for 9 consecutive days, logging 1.2 million steps to surface mechanical and software failures before commercial deployment.
Oct 22, 2026NVIDIA's GTC Berlin announcements: NVIDIA wants to be a robot platform company
Isaac Lab 3.0, GR00T N1.7 early access, GR00T N2 preview, the Agile ONE SN humanoid, and 5 new Halos safety partners ... NVIDIA is building infrastructure that others build on.
Oct 21, 2026Schaeffler's China factory: humanoid robots building parts for humanoid robots
The German precision parts maker opened a 7,500-square-meter facility in Taicang on October 20, 2026, where 6 humanoid robots assemble the actuators that go inside other humanoid robots. It is the most structurally literal example of the industry's self-referential supply chain.
Oct 20, 2026Farmtech, meet humanoid robots, sort of: AGCO is bringing Digit to farm equipment manufacturing
AGCO, a $10 billion agricultural equipment maker behind Fendt and Massey Ferguson, will pilot Agility Robotics' Digit at its Hesston, Kansas facility in 2027 ... the first major deployment of humanoid robots in agricultural machinery manufacturing.
Oct 20, 2026The $400 humanoid, Digit the forklift, Germany's robot gyms, and 6 chip companies focusing on humanoid robots
Today in Humanoid Daily ... a new $400 humanoid powered by a smartphone, Digit 5 is the forklift of humanoids, Germany's robot billionaire is building robot gyms, China unveils a 13-foot humanoid robot that lifts half a ton, and the number of the day is 6 ... 6 chip companies focusing on robots.
Here's the battery tech that gives Digit 5 a 10:1 work-to-charge ratio
A Cambridge battery spin-out using niobium tungsten oxide anodes just landed its second robotics contract, and the specs for Agility's Digit 5 are striking: 90 minutes of work, 9 minutes to recharge, and 20-plus hours of productive operation per day.
Oct 19, 2026UCLA researchers built a $400 humanoid using a $50 smartphone
A team at UCLA's RoMeLa lab has built a fully functional bipedal humanoid robot for $400 by centering its design around a cheap Android smartphone. The open-source PhoneBot is 8 to 9 times cheaper than any comparable platform and can walk, follow people, and recover from falls.
Oct 19, 2026Google one-shots humanoid training, Tesla gives robots skin, Faraday launches $2,490 humanoids, and more!
Today in Humanoid Daily ... Google one-shots robot training with Apptronik's Apollo humanoid robot, factory workers can now vibe-code robots, Galbot expands its 200 robot stores to Hong Kong, Agility goes public, Faraday launches $2,490 humanoids, Tesla develops touch-sensitive robot skin, we get a new humanoid designed to fight loneliness, and the number of the day is 10,000!
Linkerbot ships 10,000 robot hands, hits $3B valuation
Chinese startup Linkerbot is building 20-DOF robot hands for $980 to $14,700, has 80%+ market share in China, and is now racing toward a $6 billion valuation after closing at $3B in April 2026.
Oct 15, 2026Humanoid is a state of mind: Matter Venture Partners’ Haomiao Huang on robots worth building
Matter Venture Partners’ Haomiao Huang, fresh off closing a $450 million hard tech fund, says “humanoid is a state of mind.” To him that means a general-purpose robot with dexterity, mobility and onboard compute that fits human spaces, on legs or not. He sees factory robots at scale first, then 80%-good-enough helpers at home. Spiders might come later ...
Oct 13, 2026BYD's first humanoid robot design just surfaced
BYD filed a design patent for its humanoid robot this week, giving us the first official look. Behind it: 4,000 engineers, a seventh-generation prototype, a self-developed 4nm chip, and a target of 20,000 internal factory deployments by year-end.
Oct 10, 2026China controls 94% of the permanent magnets in a humanoid robot
A new supply chain review finds that Western humanoid manufacturers entering mass production face a structural dependency on Chinese rare earth magnets so deep it could triple unit costs ... and no one has a near-term fix.
Oct 7, 2026Former Tesla Optimus chief Ashish Kumar launches new industrial robot startup
Ashish Kumar, who led Tesla's Optimus humanoid program, is raising roughly $100 million to build Intelligent Machines: a San Francisco startup targeting the skilled manufacturing and aerospace tasks that current humanoids can't handle.
Oct 7, 2026Boston Dynamics' Atlas has 4 fingers. Tesla's Optimus has 5. Here's why ...
Boston Dynamics deliberately cut the pinky from Atlas's commercial hand after physical experiments and simulations showed 4 fingers matched the dexterity of 5 for factory tasks. Tesla chose 5 for Optimus to work with human-built tools. The difference isn't a hardware limitation ... it's two different theories of what humanoid robots are for.
Oct 7, 2026Kawasaki, Softbank, Sony, Honda and 40 other companies partnering to build Japanese physical AI
Kawasaki has been building a humanoid robot since 2015. Now it's partnering with a 44-company consortium to build Japan's domestic physical AI stack. It's structured like the country's most successful industrial strategies, with SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and 41 other companies behind it.
Oct 6, 2026Top 10 countries globally for industrial robots: who's growing, who's falling behind
China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, 59% of the global total and nearly 3X the next four countries combined. The US passed Japan for second place but still imports most of its robots. Japan and Europe are sliding, while India is rising fast, according to the IFR's World Robotics 2026 report.
Oct 5, 2026Robots assembling robots: UBTECH's Liuzhou factory will make 1 humanoid every 10 minutes
UBTECH opened a 14,000-square-meter factory in Guangxi where Walker S humanoids help build more Walker S humanoids at a pace no one in the industry has hit before.
Oct 5, 2026Hello Panasonic, Telsa cuts Optimus' memory budget, and Munich takes center stage
Today in Humanoid (almost) Daily ... Panasonic joins the humanoid race,Tesla trims Optimus memory because RAM is costly and rare these days, US VCs tour China’s robot factories and Munich gets another robotics unicorn AND a big partnership. Plus, the number of the day is 250,000.
Anthropic says cheap robot labor is 40 years away. But ... it's pricing the wrong robots
Anthropic says robots can do 74% of U.S. physical work but are cheaper than people for just 0.3%. With that logic, cheap robot labor is 40 years away. But their math focuses on single-purpose machines. General-purpose humanoids running 20-hour days and learning new jobs through software updates could reach ROI in years, not decades.
Oct 3, 2026Clone shows off an amazing robot hand it's already retiring. The new hand might be totally different.
Clone Robotics posted a stunning teleoperation video of its Torso 3 hand, then called it a "legacy" design. The company says it has rebuilt its entire system from scratch for simulatability and controllability, culminating in Torso 4, a human-level torso for enterprise bimanual tasks, launching in November.
Oct 3, 2026Galbot is selling a humanoid robot for $11,000 base. The compute that makes it interesting is more
Galbot opened pre-orders for the ET1 bipedal humanoid on JD.com: Standard at 79,000 yuan ($11,100), Pro at 139,000 yuan ($19,600), Flagship at 179,000 yuan ($25,200). The tier structure is a compute-gated upsell: the watch-and-learn system that can mirror a human dancer in real time is locked to the Pro and above, requiring NVIDIA Orin Nano to run.
Oct 2, 2026