Oct 2, 2026
MEKAWIRE Daily Brief
Top news
- Inside Unitree Robotics, where humanoids now outsell robot dogs but nearly three-quarters go to labs and classrooms
- Who supplies humanoid robot joints? Japan's Harmonic Drive and Nabtesco, China's Leaderdrive and Germany's Schaeffler lead, while Tesla and Figure build their own
- Skild AI and Figure top the largest humanoid and embodied-AI funding rounds of 2025-2026, as money moves from robot bodies to robot brains
- What is a vision-language-action (VLA) model, and who is building them?
- ANYbotics launches Shift, pitching its inspection robots on the maintenance tickets they create
Funding & deals
Research
- PhysicsLENS: Diagnosing Physical Property Blindness in Video Generation Models
- Experience-Based Feasibility-Aware Generative Adversarial Imitation from Observation under Embodiment Mismatch
- Recova: Agent-Guided Failure Recovery for Autonomous Robotic Manipulation
- AFD-CAMLs: Agile Force-Distribution-Aware Planning and Control for Cable-Suspended Aerial Multi-Lifting Systems
- EIDA: Execution-Interface Dynamics Adaptation for Real-to-Sim-to-Real Robot Navigation