Schaeffler

Korea's regulatory sandbox approval on October 13 lets Robros put 20 walking humanoids beside workers at Nepes, Sungwoo Hitech, HD Hyundai Samho and Delivery Lab, lifting a fence rule written for fixed industrial robots. Set against MEKAWIRE's records, the number is small: Hyundai plans 25,000 Atlas units, UBTech sold 921 full-size humanoids in six months and Figure says it builds one robot an hour. But Korea is the only market in our data where the state has formally changed who may let a humanoid work next to people, and that permission, not robot count, is what most factory deployments are still waiting for.

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.

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026, a humanoid it says can work beside people without safety fences. The company reported more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 orders as of May 2026, subject to contractual milestones, while general availability is set for the end of 2027 as its Churchill Capital Corp XI listing heads for a fourth-quarter close.

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.

UK robotics start-up Humanoid said on 30 March 2026 that its wheeled HMND 01 Alpha completed a January to February proof of concept with SAP and Turkish seat maker Martur Fompak, taking orders from SAP's AI agent in live production. It was the first time an enterprise system controlled a Humanoid robot externally, through the four-layer KinetIQ AI framework the company unveiled on 5 February.

BMW Group said on 27 February 2026 that Plant Leipzig will pilot Hexagon Robotics' wheeled AEON humanoid in high-voltage battery assembly and component production, after a first test in December 2025 and with the pilot phase set for summer 2026. It also set up a Munich-based Center of Competence for Physical AI in Production and published the results of its 2025 Figure 02 pilot in Spartanburg, where the robot moved more than 90,000 parts in about 1,250 hours.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has signed a Robots-as-a-Service agreement with Agility Robotics to deploy Digit humanoids in manufacturing, supply chain and logistics work at its Cambridge and Woodstock plants in Ontario, following a pilot. Neither company disclosed fleet size, contract value or term. The deal adds a Toyota vehicle plant to a Digit customer list that already includes GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Mercado Libre, as rivals tie up with BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai.

Schaeffler and UK start-up Humanoid agreed on 13 January 2026 a five-year technology partnership that combines a supply contract for Schaeffler strain wave gear actuators with a purchase arrangement for humanoid robots. The German motion technology group said it would integrate several hundred humanoids into its global production network, and within a week Humanoid published pilot results from Siemens in Erlangen and Ford in Cologne.

Schaeffler and NEURA Robotics announced on 4 November 2025 that they will jointly develop and supply humanoid components, led by actuators, and signed an offtake agreement under which Schaeffler plans to integrate a mid-four-digit number of humanoids into its global production network by 2035. Schaeffler's planetary gear actuators, rated at up to 250 Nm, are designed for the joints of NEURA's 4NE1 humanoid.

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.

Swedish measurement group Hexagon launched AEON, a humanoid robot for inspection, machine tending, manipulation and reality capture, at its Hexagon LIVE Global conference on 17 June 2025. Schaeffler and Pilatus will pilot the robot, which runs on NVIDIA Jetson Orin computers and swaps its own batteries, and Hexagon plans six months of production deployments before a wider commercial rollout.

NEURA Robotics of Metzingen, Germany, said on 15 January 2025 it had raised EUR 120 million in a Series B round led by Lingotto Investment Management. The company said the money would fund research and development, new product launches and its Neuraverse software platform, and reported more than 300 staff, tenfold revenue growth in a year and a EUR 1 billion order book.