Industrial
Humanoid robots in factories and manufacturing: automotive and electronics pilots, production-line tasks, and how they compare with traditional automation.
Industrial
Swiss aircraft manufacturer testing a humanoid robot inspector on its PC-24 assembly line
Nov 6, 2026Technology
Toyota Robotics: Toyota just established a dedicated robotics division
Nov 5, 2026Industrial
Pivotting from cars to robots: Schaeffler cuts 3,460 jobs, bets €400 million on humanoids
Nov 3, 2026More Industrial
Everything we learned about Figure from its public all-hands meeting
Figure CEO Brett Adcock’s public all-hands revealed Figure 04 is in design lock. Figure spent $8.1 million on training data in one week, and its Index platform has collected 37.5 million human videos. Adcock also said Figure has over $2 billion in cash and a $6 billion compute deal, and teased a new model he calls “baby AGI.”
Nov 3, 2026Japan just mounted a humanoid robot on a railway vehicle and gave it a chainsaw
JR East's ZIZAI ZX-3 humanoid robot has a claw on one arm and a chainsaw on the other. The ZX-3 is trimming trees along the Koumi Line in Nagano ... a real-world deployment that shows humanoid robots finding traction in jobs humans don't want.
Nov 3, 2026Foundry Robotics raised $100 million to build autonomous factories, along with robots
Emeryville-based Foundry Robotics has closed a $100 million Series A to expand its AI-powered autonomous assembly factory, backed by Khosla Ventures and Marlinspike Partners, with defense and commercial customers already on the books.
Nov 2, 2026The company making all of Atlas's actuators just got a Wall Street upgrade
Citi upgraded Hyundai Mobis from Neutral to Buy with a 35% upside target, citing the start of Atlas actuator pilot production in November 2026. Actuators are 40-60% of humanoid robot cost ...
Oct 31, 2026Saturn Dynamics says its world model beats Nvidia's Cosmos by 73% ... and runs 38X faster
London startup Saturn Dynamics says its physics-based Arc world model beats Nvidia’s Cosmos by 73% on trajectory accuracy and generates data up to 38X faster on Jetson Thor. CEO Elisa Seghetti explains why reinforcement learning environments are the key to getting robots from 80% success to deployment-grade reliability.
Oct 31, 2026Europe's first humanoid robot factory is in Serbia, and it's Chinese
AGIBOT and Minth Group opened Europe's first humanoid robot mass-production facility in Šabac, Serbia in August 2025, weeks after the US banned Chinese robots on national security grounds. One year in, it looks like one of the shrewder strategic moves in the industry.
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, 2026Samsung robots for surgery, UK's biggest seed round, Boston Dynamics employee revolt, and hello BlackBerry!
Today in Humanoid Daily ... the UK's biggest ever robotics seed round, Samsung brings robots into surgery, Boston Dynamics employee revolt as they prep for for 10,000 Atlas robots, Digit gets more jobs, we see more robots building robots, BlackBerry wants to power physical AI, an $89,000 humanoid strolls through New York, and the number of the day is 185.
Mitsubishi 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, 2026What 86 Chinese executives really think about humanoid robots
Morgan Stanley's first AlphaWise survey of Chinese industrial buyers found 62% want humanoid robots but 77% are unsatisfied with current products. The ball is in the robot makers' court: improve humanoids and reduce costs.
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!
NVIDIA'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.
Hyundai and Kia plan humanoid robots in all new factories by 2032
At E-FOREST Tech Day 2026, Hyundai Motor and Kia unveiled a concrete roadmap to deploy humanoid robots in all newly constructed plants starting after 2032, alongside a live pilot of their manufacturing AI agent Polaris at Ulsan and a Singapore 'mother plant' concept targeting full virtual manufacturing by 2030.
Oct 18, 2026Korea approves 20 humanoid robots for working with humans in factories
South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy approved 20 bipedal humanoid robots for deployment at semiconductor, automotive, shipbuilding, and logistics sites, the country's first formal regulatory clearance for humanoids in shared workspaces. Korea also approved a deployment of quadruped guard dogs.
Oct 17, 2026Vibe coding robots: Standard Bots hands post-training to ordinary factory workers with iPads
Frontier models, agentic platforms and simulation startups are all collapsing the cost of teaching robots new skills. Standard Bots' new AI platform pushes that to the final step: the worker on the shop floor, with an iPad and no robotics background.
BYD'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, 2026New UBTECH, VW project: humanoid robots will help mass customize cars
Two years into a working deployment at FAW-Volkswagen's Qingdao plant, UBTECH has just formalized the relationship with a strategic cooperation agreement covering both logistics and smart manufacturing. The most interesting bit: humanoid robots will help the auto makers build more customized and personalized cars ... something that standard automation and assembly lines struggles to do.
Oct 8, 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, 2026Here's a modular humanoid you can repair in 5 minutes on the factory floor
Tokyo startup O-Id wants to build a humanoid that factories can fix themselves, fast, without shipping it anywhere ... and Japan's shrinking workforce is the target market.
Oct 5, 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.
Toyota's plan for 400,000 humanoid robots rewrites what 'at scale' means
Toyota is planning to deploy 400,000 humanoid robots across its factories and supplier network starting in 2028 ... a fleet larger than any other company has even imagined. Except, maybe, Tesla.
Oct 3, 2026Boston Dynamics' new Atlas hands bet on fewer parts, not more fingers
Boston Dynamics just unveiled new hands for Atlas with 13 degrees of freedom, four fingers and no pinky. While rivals like 1X, Tesla and Genesis AI chase 20-plus degrees of freedom, Boston Dynamics is betting on simplicity, strength, ruggedness and hands that can be accurately simulated for reinforcement learning.
Oct 2, 2026New IDC data: humanoid robot shipments up 432% year over year, jobs for robots, and much more ...
Today in Humanoid Daily ... Singapore puts humanoids on the police beat, Korea wants 200,000 robots by 2030, the U.S. Army and Ukraine push robots toward military use, robots are moving into hospitals and homes, and today's number of the day is 25,000. As in ... shipped robots, up 432% year over year.