TechnologyPage 2
How humanoid robots work and what's new: locomotion, dexterity, perception, control software, batteries and the engineering behind each new robot.
Technology archive
Singapore held its first humanoid fight night. California just shut down the American version.
ARC's Singapore event put professional martial artists in motion-capture suits piloting full-sized humanoids in live combat. The same week, California issued a cease-and-desist to REK for running similar events without a license. Where is this sport/entertainment/spectacle going?
Oct 9, 2026The K-pop agency that's become a humanoid robot unicorn
Galaxy Corporation, a Korean entertainment agency, deployed 16 Unitree G1 humanoids at Times Square in September, owns the world's first robot theme park in Seoul, posted $215M in revenue with 619% growth, and is preparing for a U.S. IPO. The entertainment industry just entered the humanoid robot market.
Oct 9, 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, 2026China's Lumos Robotics says it staged the world's first fully autonomous robot theater
A Shenzhen startup founded in 2024 put its NIX humanoid robots on stage for a 45-minute autonomous theatrical performance with reportedly no remote operators. Entertainment is becoming a real vertical for robots, and TrendForce says the business model already works out to a 6-8 month payback.
Oct 9, 2026Hello Amazon! AWS just entered the physical AI infrastructure race
Amazon Web Services launched an open-source Physical AI Toolchain today, and it's a direct play for the software layer sitting beneath every humanoid robot being built. That's a super-interesting play for a company that might own more robots than any other on the planet.
Mecka AI is making $100M a year sending humans to collect robot training data
Mecka AI crowdsources human movement data using body sensors and iPhones, has hit $100M annual run rate, and just closed a Sequoia-led round approaching a $500M valuation, providing the clearest sign yet that robot training data is its own industry.
Oct 7, 2026Boston Dynamics picks Amazon's Alexa head Rohit Prasad as its new CEO
Rohit Prasad, who built Alexa into a product in hundreds of millions of homes and led Amazon's Nova foundation models, takes over at Boston Dynamics on October 7. He's the company's third CEO in 34 years and a clear signal that Hyundai is betting on AI commercialization, not hardware engineering, to win the physical AI race.
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, 2026Hexagon's path to 1,000 humanoids at Schaeffler runs on two metrics and a set of wheels
Schaeffler wants at least 1,000 Hexagon Aeon humanoids in its factories by 2032. Hexagon Robotics president Arnaud Robert explains what it takes: a multipurpose fleet rather than single-task robots, two metrics that matter (cycle time and human intervention), no teleoperation, a sim-to-real-to-sim data loop, and wheels that he says can even climb stairs.
Oct 6, 2026Singapore's $100 million center to train humanoid robots for bomb scenes, prison searches, and hazmat missions
The Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre is 29,000 square feet, costs $100 million, and opened September 30. It's the world's first facility dedicated entirely to training humanoid robots for public safety work and its first operational deployment target is 2028.
Oct 6, 2026Dyna Robotics' new Taku humanoid is built for a job, not a set of tasks
Dyna Robotics wants to sell businesses a robot employee, not a robot task. Taku is the hardware making that pitch real: a wheeled semi-humanoid that chains 79 subtasks across an hour of laundry work with no human standing by.
Oct 5, 2026GRASP 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, 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, 2026Tesla Is building 1,000 Optimus robots a week, but the hands are a major problem
Tesla's Optimus production ramp is reportedly very real: hundreds of units per week, trending to 1,000. But a hand assembly bottleneck involving 100+ screws, unreliable touch sensors, and supplier inconsistency is keeping most units out of customer (internal or external) hands.
Oct 2, 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, 2026Here are the 5 winners of the U.S. Army's xTechHumanoid competition
From 103 submissions to 5 winners: the xTechHumanoid competition results include a bulletproof humanoid robot, two power solutions, tactile sensors, and command-and-control software. This is pretty much a component map of what the U.S. Army thinks it needs.
Sep 30, 2026This home humanoid costs $3,555 and learns new tasks with your smartphone
Flourish 1 uses your phone's IMUs to capture motion demonstrations and trains a robot skill model in the cloud ... no coding, no teleoperation, just show it what to do. Is it magic or too good to be true?
Sep 29, 2026SiMa.ai wants to be your new humanoid robot brain, and it's targeting NVIDIA
SiMa.ai raised a $150 million Series C at a $1.45 billion valuation to challenge Nvidia's Jetson Thor as the brain inside humanoid robots. Its pitch is twice Thor's performance at 60 watts, a pin-compatible drop-in module and agentic software that ports CUDA code. Will any humanoid makers sign on?
South Korea is writing the world's first law to get robots in and out of apartment buildings
Seoul's proposed special law for residential robot access could unlock a massive new deployment category and set a template for every other country watching. It could also unlock massive robot deployments across the country.
Sep 28, 2026Japan made one of the world's first humanoid robots. Now it's buying from China
Japan Airlines, Honda, and Hitachi are deploying Chinese-made humanoid robots to solve a labor crisis. And the country that gave the world ASIMO is now watching its domestic robotics industry scramble to catch up.
Sep 28, 2026Inside China's robot schools: 70 training grounds where humanoids drill 45 skills up to 600 times a day
China has built a state-backed network of 70-plus embodied AI training facilities where competing robot manufacturers train side by side and feed data into a shared national pool — a structural advantage no private US company has an equivalent for.
Sep 28, 2026Google & NVIDIA both shipped open source robot stacks at ROSCon. Only one supports humanoids
Google's Intrinsic and NVIDIA both released open source robotics software infrastructure on Tuesday morning at ROSCon in Toronto, hours apart. The two releases are for very different robots, though.
Sep 22, 2026GPT-6 Astra just beat human baseline on drone control tasks ... humanoid robots next?
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra is the first AI model to beat human baseline performance on all five drone control subtasks in standard robotics evaluation, even without specialist robotics training. Can generalist models compete with specialist ones in physical domains?
Sep 17, 2026Machine vision conference VISION 2026 surpasses exhibitor record and leads the way
VISION 2026 will bring around 500 machine vision exhibitors to Stuttgart from October 6–8, setting a new record, with 30% exhibiting for the first time and roughly two-thirds coming from outside Germany. The show will focus heavily on AI and emerging technologies, with new features including a Synthetic Data Symposium, VISION Makeathon, expanded industry tours, and a dedicated AI tour.
Sep 16, 2026Hello Digit 5: Agility Robotics releases a key candidate for a safe robot coworker
Agility Robotics' Digit 5 is the first humanoid engineered from the outset around a certifiable functional safety architecture, and a 20-hour workday. The design choices that make that possible include a dedicated safety island, redundant human detection, a statically stable degraded pose, and cycloidal actuators sized for fatigue life rather than peak torque.
Sep 15, 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, 2026Skild AI hits $100M revenue run rate in 10 months. Physical AI is apparently very lucrative
The Pittsburgh physical AI startup that teaches robots new tasks from a single video demonstration has gone from $30M to $100M in annual revenue run rate in under a year, with 60+ customers ...
Sep 10, 2026XPeng says it has built the world's first automated humanoid robot production line
It's the dream of automated manufacturing: robots building robots, and completed humanoid robots walking off the assembly line under their own power after completion ...
Sep 8, 2026The robot is not the product: the factory of the future
Inside Agile Robots' bet that the factory — not the humanoid — is what you actually sell. And the humanoid is just one part of many components that altogether form the factory of the future.