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Research shaping humanoid robots: new papers, university and corporate labs, locomotion, manipulation and learning breakthroughs explained.
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ANYmal solved a Rubik's Cube with its feet. Hello ... pedipulation?
A quadruped robot with no arms autonomously scanned, planned, and solved a 0.4-meter Rubik's Cube using only its feet. The result from ETH Zurich and NVIDIA, published October 17 on arXiv, is proof that whole-body RL policies can learn dexterous sequential manipulation without dedicated end-effectors.
Oct 23, 2026Researchers hacked a robot to attack humans with a knife. The trigger was just 2 letters
A Binghamton University team demonstrated a supply chain backdoor attack that works 97-100% of the time across 7 different AI models. The trigger lives in the adapter layer, not the base LLM, and is invisible to standard safety benchmarks.
Oct 22, 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.
UCLA 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!
One-shot robot training: Google's Gemini 4 Argon taught Apptronik's Apollo to play cornhole
Google’s Gemini 4 Argon taught Apptronik’s Apollo humanoid to play cornhole from a single video of a person playing. It built its own simulation, practiced in the sim, then after a few real tests, sank 7 in a row. It’s yet more evidence that frontier models are taking over the work robotics teams used to do by hand.
Oct 14, 2026General foundation model for physical AI? Nature Will bets on 1 million hours of video
Can we zero-shot robot training? Nature Will’s new Natura-1 is a 50-billion-parameter model for robot hands trained on over 1 million hours of first-person human video. It’s the purest bet yet that watching people can teach robots dexterity ... but rivals argue that video data is insufficient.
Oct 13, 2026Unitree's founder tested GPT-6 on robots ... the results might have been too good to report
Wang Xingxing ran GPT-6 on Unitree robots at the China International Industry Fair and moved his embodied AI tipping point -- the moment robots become so general-purpose that they can perform most tasks in most environments without retraining -- from 2-3 years to 1-2 years.
Oct 12, 2026BYD goes big in humanoid robots with 4,000 engineers, NVIDIA makes robots smarter, and much more
Today in Humanoid Daily ... BYD reportedly has 4,000 engineers (!!!!) building humanoids, NVIDIA gives robots longer memories for vastly better physical AI, SafeWorld raises $12M for robot safety, Italy launches a factory humanoid named Luca, Denmark puts humanoids on the night shift, and the number of the day is $40.
WAM-bam-thank-you NVIDIA: Long-WAM gives robots vastly better skills
A new paper from NVIDIA, MIT, and HKU shows that giving a robot up to 38 seconds of visual history lifts success rates from 63% to 79% on complex manipulation tasks. But there's a catch: that gain only shows us if the underlying world model was pretrained autoregressively. Bidirectional pretraining gets you almost nothing.
Oct 10, 2026SafeWorld raises $12M to make humanoid robots safe ... before they meet real people
As humanoid robots ship at scale with no systematic safety validation, a Carnegie Mellon spinout backed by a16z Speedrun just emerged from stealth with a browser-based platform that runs millions of edge-case simulations with reactive human motion models before a robot ever meets a real person.
Oct 10, 2026Generalist physical AI: Odyssey-3 launches with a $1.45B bet on 1 AI foundation model for every robot
Odyssey launched Odyssey-3 today. It's a single world model that controls humanoid robots, cars, drones, and video games from one frozen backbone. Flexion is already using it to build humanoid policies that outperform specialized VLA models under lighting changes, so the specialized-vs-generalist debate in foundation models just got its strongest test case.
Oct 9, 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.
GRASP Lab: teaching robots complex tasks with 5 minutes of video
SymSkill from Penn's GRASP Laboratory won ICRA 2026's best conference paper by teaching a robot to plan and execute 12-step tasks from just 5 minutes of unstructured video ... and recover from failures mid-sequence without starting over.
Oct 3, 2026Anthropic 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, 2026This Chinese startup says teleoperation is poisoning humanoid robot training data
MindOn, a 16-month-old Shenzhen AI company with $14M raised, argues that training robots with teleoperation produces unnaturally slow movements ... and that human motion capture is the fix.
Oct 1, 2026Feather launches a cheap(ish) American robot ... and outsources the brain
Feather Robotics launched a $29,990 two-armed robot built to be a body for other companies' AI, running models from Nvidia, Skild or Physical Intelligence. The pre-seed startup raised $7.6 million, claims over $1 million in revenue, and is betting thousands of physical AI companies will want hardware they can buy.
Sep 25, 2026Open-RAIL connects VLA models and humanoids, smoothing and speeding motion
China Mobile has open-sourced Open-RAIL, middleware that lets humanoid robots keep moving smoothly while big VLA and world action models compute their next move. The team claims 100X less jerky joint motion, up to 2.09X faster execution and task success as high as 95%.
Sep 24, 202626 million humanoid robots a year: Berg Insight maps out the growth curve
A new Berg Insight forecast puts humanoid robot shipments at 26 million units annually by 2040. But the more important number is where the industry actually stands today ... and the growth curve.
Sep 15, 2026America just banned foreign robots. Building them locally costs 3X more
The FCC added foreign-produced advanced robots to its Covered List in July. New data from OpenMind suggests the biggest US weakness isn’t AI, chips, or software ... but the physical supply chain. And, ecosystem density.
Humanoid robot shipments up 300% in first half of 2026, and there's another IPO coming
Humanoid shipments triple in the first half of 2026, hello ET1, the RayNex G3 flexes some muscles in Hong Kong, you can win a humanoid robot, there'a another Humanoid IPO coming, and the number of the day is 30,000.
Aug 21, 2026The humanoid patent map: China, China, China, but USA has quality
China has the lion's share of patents in the global humanoid robot race, and its lead is increasing. The U.S. is capturing quality though, to some degree.
Aug 1, 2026