Hugging Face

Minerva Humanoids said in a GlobeNewswire release on Oct 6 that it raised about $10 million in a pre-seed round led by General Catalyst, with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures co-leading. The San Francisco start-up, founded at the end of 2025 by alumni of Tesla's Optimus programme and Boston Dynamics, is building Roger, a semi-autonomous humanoid an operator drives through a VR headset, and starts paid pilots this autumn.

A vision-language-action (VLA) model is one neural network that reads camera images and a plain-language instruction and outputs a robot's next motor commands, built by training a vision-language model on robot demonstrations. Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Figure AI, Skild AI and AgiBot lead, and the commercial race now turns on the cost of action data rather than model design.

Hugging Face released version 0.6.0 of its open-source LeRobot robotics library on July 7, adding three world-model policies, five vision-language-action models including NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7, two reward models and six simulation benchmarks. NVIDIA said a day earlier that it is bringing GR00T, Isaac Teleop, Isaac Lab-Arena, Jetson Thor support and, soon, Cosmos 3 into LeRobot.

NVIDIA announced at GTC Taipei on June 1, 2026 an Isaac GR00T reference humanoid for academic research, built on Unitree's H2 Plus body with two 22-degree-of-freedom Sharpa Wave tactile hands and a Jetson AGX Thor T5000 computer. Unitree will sell it from late 2026; Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford and UC San Diego are the first named research users. No price was given.

NVIDIA used its GTC keynote on March 16, 2026 to preview Isaac GR00T N2, a robot foundation model built on its DreamZero world action model research that it says succeeds at new tasks in new environments more than twice as often as leading VLA models. It also put the 3-billion-parameter GR00T N1.7 into commercial early access and announced Cosmos 3 and Isaac Lab 3.0, with N2 due by the end of 2026.

NVIDIA used CES 2026 to launch the Jetson T4000, a Blackwell robot computer priced at $1,999 at 1,000-unit volume, and to release the GR00T N1.6 humanoid model and the Cosmos Reason 2 reasoning model as open models. Qualcomm answered a day earlier with its Dragonwing IQ10 robot processor and named Figure as a partner, setting up a fight for the compute socket inside humanoids.

Unitree Robotics on 25 July 2025 launched the R1 humanoid, about 25 kg with 26 joints, from RMB 39,900 in China and US$5,900 abroad. The price is 40.3% of what the company charged for its G1 at launch and sets a public benchmark for low-cost humanoids.

Google DeepMind on June 24, 2025 released Gemini Robotics On-Device, a vision-language-action model built to run locally on a robot with no network link. It is the first VLA the lab is letting outside developers fine-tune, through a new Gemini Robotics SDK offered to trusted testers, and DeepMind says it adapted the model from its ALOHA training rig to a bi-arm Franka FR3 and Apptronik's Apollo humanoid.

Hugging Face said on 14 April 2025 that it had acquired Pollen Robotics, the French maker of the Reachy humanoid robots, its fifth acquisition. It will sell Pollen's Reachy 2 at US$70,000 as its first robot and tie the hardware to its open-source LeRobot software; the price and terms of the deal were not disclosed.