Harmonic Drive Systems

Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou maker of quadruped and humanoid robots that listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in August 2026, now earns more from humanoids than from robot dogs. Its filings show 73.6% of humanoid revenue in the first nine months of 2025 came from research and education buyers, the central question for a company worth about RMB61 billion at its issue price.

The joints of today's humanoid robots come from a short list of gear and actuator makers: Harmonic Drive Systems and Nabtesco in Japan, Leaderdrive, Tuopu and Sanhua in China, and Schaeffler in Germany, while Tesla, Figure and Unitree design key parts themselves. Filings show orders reaching the Japanese incumbents first, yet Tesla's stated Fremont capacity alone implies 25 million to 30 million joint actuators a year, about 22 times the 1.15 million precision reducers Nabtesco can make annually.

The U.S. Army has named five winners of its xTechHumanoid competition after final demonstrations at Marine Corps Base Quantico, and only one of them, IHMC's Alex, is a complete humanoid robot. The other four supply power, touch sensing and command software, a mix that shows where the Army sees the bottlenecks in military humanoids.

Watney has raised an $80 million Series A co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, taking its total funding past $100 million. The San Francisco company runs dexterous robots for hyperscale cloud operators and claims better than 99.99% reliability over hundreds of thousands of operating hours, but it disclosed no customer names, valuation or founders.

Harmonic Drive Systems booked ¥24,128 million of orders in April to June 2026, up 55.7% from a year earlier, and lifted its operating profit forecast for the year to March 2027 from ¥6,200 million to ¥8,500 million on 7 August. A large North American surgical robot order and AI driven semiconductor spending led the recovery, while China delivered the smallest order intake of its four regions.

Tesla said in its second-quarter 2026 update, released on July 22, that it has decommissioned the Model S and Model X lines in Fremont and is installing first-generation Optimus production lines, with production expected soon and the first robots reserved for an internal Optimus Academy that collects training data. Capital expenditure rose to $5.79 billion from $2.49 billion in the first quarter and free cash flow turned negative at minus $1.09 billion, while the update gave no robot unit count, no capacity figure and no date for Optimus Gen 3.

Intuitive placed 468 da Vinci systems in the second quarter of 2026, up from 395 a year earlier, including 246 da Vinci 5 units, and revenue rose 19% to $2.89 billion, the company said on 16 July. It lifted its 2026 non-GAAP gross margin outlook to 68% to 69% of revenue, the second increase this year, while holding da Vinci procedure growth guidance at 13.5% to 15.5% and pointing to the midpoint.

Nabtesco, which estimates it supplies about 60% of the joint reducers in medium and large industrial robots, said component segment orders rose 16.2% to ¥82.4 billion in 2025 and operating income more than doubled to ¥5.4 billion. The Tokyo-listed company forecasts precision reduction gear sales of ¥88.2 billion in 2026, with robot demand recovering mainly in the second half, while its Changzhou plant already runs at 115% utilisation.

Orders for industrial robots from Japan Robot Association members rose 27.8% in value to ¥925.8 billion in 2025, driven by a 36.2% rise in exports while domestic shipments fell 8.9%. The association expects all-industry orders to grow only 3.2% to ¥1.03 trillion in 2026, citing AI-linked demand from semiconductor and electronics makers.

Hyundai Mobis will supply actuators for the production version of Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid under a framework announced at CES on January 7, 2026, its first robotics customer. The Hyundai parts maker says actuators make up more than 60% of a humanoid's material cost, and plans to extend the tie-up to grippers, sensors, controllers and battery packs as Hyundai Motor Group targets 30,000 robots a year by 2028.

LG Electronics unveiled the CLOiD home robot and launched LG Actuator AXIUM, a brand of motor, drive and reducer joint modules aimed at the wider robotics market, at CES 2026. The robot came with detailed joint counts but no price or date, and the actuator with no specifications or customer, leaving LG behind Hyundai Mobis, which named Boston Dynamics' Atlas as its first actuator customer three days later.

The International Federation of Robotics said on 25 September 2025 that 542,000 industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2024, the second-highest annual total on record and 2% below 2023. Japan (44,500 units, down 4%), the Republic of Korea (30,600, down 3%) and Germany (26,982, down 5%) all contracted, while China installed 295,000 units and domestic Chinese makers took 57% of their home market for the first time.