MEKAWIRE
News

Wire

Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.

43 stories
AllBreakingAnalysisFundingM&AResearchProductPolicyGlobalUSCNKRSG
Jan 6, 2026
ProductUS

Boston Dynamics starts building the production Atlas as Hyundai targets 30,000 robots a year and a Georgia line debut in 2028

Boston Dynamics unveiled the production version of its electric Atlas humanoid at CES 2026 on January 5 and said manufacturing begins immediately in Boston, with all 2026 units already committed to Hyundai Motor Group and Google DeepMind. Hyundai set a goal of a production system able to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, when Atlas is due to start parts sequencing at its Georgia Metaplant, moving into assembly by 2030. Hyundai Mobis will supply the actuators and Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models are to supply the cognition.

10 sourcesBoston DynamicsHyundai Motor GroupGoogle DeepMindRobot Foundation ModelsVLA
Jan 6, 2026
ProductUS

NVIDIA brings Blackwell robot brains down to $1,999 with Jetson T4000 and opens GR00T N1.6 and Cosmos Reason 2 at CES

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.

7 sourcesNVIDIAHugging FaceBoston DynamicsVLARobot Foundation Models
Jan 4, 2026
ProductKR

LG enters the robot joint business with its AXIUM actuator brand as the CLOiD home robot makes its CES debut

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.

6 sourcesLG ElectronicsHyundai Motor GroupBoston DynamicsElectric ActuatorsVLA
Dec 3, 2025
ProductUS

Medtronic wins FDA clearance for its Hugo surgical robot in urology, opening a US challenge to Intuitive's 10,763 da Vinci systems

The FDA cleared Medtronic's Hugo robotic-assisted surgery system for prostatectomy, nephrectomy and cystectomy on December 3, 2025, after a 268-day 510(k) review. The clearance rests on the 137-patient Expand URO study, which reported a 98.5% surgical success rate, and gives Medtronic its first US entry against Intuitive's da Vinci after years of selling Hugo in more than 30 other countries.

5 sourcesMedtronicIntuitiveTeleoperation
Nov 20, 2025
ProductUS

Figure retires Figure 02 after an 11-month BMW run tied to 30,000 cars, handing the job to Figure 03 and a 12,000-a-year BotQ line

Figure AI said its Figure 02 humanoid contributed to the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles over an 11-month deployment at Spartanburg before being retired. The company is replacing it with Figure 03, launched on 9 October 2025 with faster cameras, palm cameras, 3-gram tactile fingertips and 2 kW wireless charging, built for a BotQ line rated at up to 12,000 robots a year.

0 sourcesFigure AIBMW GroupSkild AIVLATactile Sensing
Nov 5, 2025
ProductCN

XPeng unveils a next-generation IRON humanoid with 82 degrees of freedom and sets end-2026 for mass production

XPeng used its 2025 AI Day in Guangzhou on 5 November to show a redesigned IRON humanoid with 82 degrees of freedom, 22-degree-of-freedom hands, three in-house Turing AI chips and an all-solid-state battery. The carmaker said it aims for large-scale mass production by the end of 2026, starting with guide and retail roles, and named Baosteel as an industrial partner.

4 sourcesXPENGUBTECH RoboticsFigure AIVLARobot Foundation Models
Oct 27, 2025
ProductUS

1X puts a price on the home humanoid, opening NEO pre-orders at US$20,000 or US$499 a month with US deliveries in 2026

1X Technologies opened pre-orders on 27 October 2025 for NEO, a home humanoid priced at US$20,000 or US$499 a month, with US deliveries from 2026 and international expansion from 2027. The 66-pound robot runs 1X's Redwood AI onboard and relies on remote 1X experts for chores it has not yet learned.

4 sources1X TechnologiesFigure AIApptronikTeleoperationDexterous Manipulation
Oct 23, 2025
ProductUS

Amazon unveils Blue Jay, a multi-arm robot that merges three workstations, and Project Eluna, an agentic AI for warehouse managers

At its Delivering the Future event on October 22, 2025, Amazon showed Blue Jay, a multi-arm system it said could pick, stow and consolidate about 75% of the item types at a South Carolina test site, and Project Eluna, an agentic AI piloted at a Tennessee fulfillment center. Amazon said Blue Jay went from concept to production in just over a year, but an update dated February 25, 2026 states the company no longer uses it in operations.

1 sourceAmazonDexterityExotecSim-to-Real TransferFleet Orchestration Software
Oct 20, 2025
ProductCN

Unitree unveils the H2, a 182 cm humanoid with 31 joints and a bionic face, now listed at US$29,900

Unitree Robotics unveiled the H2 humanoid on 20 October 2025, a 1,820 mm, roughly 70 kg machine with 31 degrees of freedom and leg joints rated at up to 360 Nm. Its product pages now list the base model at US$29,900 before tax and shipping, or RMB 199,000 including tax, the only published price among the full-size humanoids compared here.

6 sourcesUnitree RoboticsBoston DynamicsFigure AIElectric ActuatorsEdge AI Compute
Sep 30, 2025
ProductUS

DoorDash unveils Dot, an in-house road and sidewalk delivery robot, and an AI dispatcher to run it alongside Dashers

DoorDash on September 30, 2025 introduced Dot, an all-electric delivery robot built by DoorDash Labs that travels up to 20 mph on bike lanes, roads, sidewalks and driveways. Early access starts in Tempe and Mesa, Arizona, with an Autonomous Delivery Platform that assigns each order to a Dasher, Dot, drone or sidewalk robot.

6 sourcesDoorDashServe RoboticsStarship TechnologiesFleet Orchestration SoftwareBattery Systems
Aug 25, 2025
ProductUS

NVIDIA puts a Blackwell brain inside robots with the $3,499 Jetson Thor as Figure, Agility and Boston Dynamics sign on

NVIDIA made its Jetson AGX Thor developer kit and Jetson T5000 production modules generally available on 25 August 2025, pricing the kit from $3,499 and claiming 7.5 times the AI compute of Jetson Orin with 128 GB of memory. Figure, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics and Amazon Robotics are among eight named early adopters, while 1X, OpenAI and Physical Intelligence are evaluating the computer.

3 sourcesNVIDIAFigure AIAgility RoboticsEdge AI ComputeVLA
Aug 6, 2025
ProductCN

Fourier unveils GR-3, a 55-joint 'Care-bot' humanoid that takes the rehabilitation specialist into companionship and eldercare

Shanghai-based Fourier on 6 August 2025 introduced GR-3, a 165 cm, 71 kg humanoid with up to 55 degrees of freedom, 31 tactile sensors and a padded exterior, which it calls its first full-size 'Care-bot'. The third model in its GRx line is aimed at public service settings, children and older adults, with rehabilitation and health monitoring named as later uses. Fourier did not disclose a price.

7 sourcesFourierUBTECH RoboticsUnitree RoboticsTactile SensingDepth Vision
Jul 30, 2025
ProductUS

Skild AI unveils the Skild Brain, a single robot foundation model it says can drive quadrupeds, humanoids and arms alike

Skild AI on July 29, 2025 named and described its robotics foundation model, the Skild Brain, a two-layer system pre-trained on simulation and internet video that the company says runs across quadrupeds, humanoids, table-top arms and mobile manipulators. The launch carried no customers or prices, but set out the body-agnostic strategy that later underpinned a $14 billion-plus valuation and more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

4 sourcesSkild AISoftBank GroupFigure AIRobot Foundation ModelsSim-to-Real Transfer
Jun 24, 2025
ProductUS

Google DeepMind moves Gemini Robotics onto the robot itself and opens it to fine-tuning with as few as 50 demonstrations

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.

3 sourcesGoogle DeepMindApptronikGoogleVLARobot Foundation Models
Jun 18, 2025
ProductSE

Hexagon unveils AEON, a measurement-led industrial humanoid, with Schaeffler and Pilatus lined up as first pilot sites

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.

4 sourcesHexagonSchaefflerPilatus AircraftSim-to-Real TransferRL
May 19, 2025
ProductUS

NVIDIA upgrades its humanoid model to GR00T N1.5 at Computex and says world-model video cut a three-month data job to 36 hours

NVIDIA introduced Isaac GR00T N1.5 and the Isaac GR00T-Dreams blueprint at Computex 2025 in Taipei, saying its researchers used Cosmos-generated video to build the model's training data in 36 hours instead of nearly three months of human data collection. The 3-billion-parameter model, opened on June 11, 2025 for non-commercial use, doubled language-following accuracy on Fourier's GR-1 humanoid in NVIDIA's own tests, while AeiROBOT, Foxlink, Foxconn and NEURA Robotics signed on to parts of the stack.

4 sourcesNVIDIAAeiROBOTAgility RoboticsRobot Foundation ModelsVLA
May 7, 2025
ProductUS

Amazon unveils Vulcan, its first robot with a sense of touch, to pick and stow about 75% of warehouse items

Amazon introduced Vulcan at its Delivering the Future event in Dortmund, Germany, on May 7, 2025, a fulfillment robot whose grippers carry force sensors so it can feel its way into crowded storage bins. The company said Vulcan can handle about 75% of the item types in its fulfillment centers and was already working in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany, with wider rollout in Europe and the United States planned over the next couple of years.

4 sourcesAmazonDexterityNimble RoboticsTactile SensingDexterous Manipulation
Mar 19, 2025
ProductUS

NVIDIA opens Isaac GR00T N1, a 2.2-billion-parameter humanoid robot model, at GTC 2025 and teams with Google DeepMind and Disney Research on the Newton physics engine

NVIDIA on 18 March 2025 released Isaac GR00T N1, a dual-system vision-language-action model for humanoid robots, as downloadable weights on Hugging Face and GitHub, with 1X, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Mentee Robotics and NEURA Robotics named as early-access partners. It also announced Newton, an open-source physics engine under development with Google DeepMind and Disney Research, a synthetic manipulation-data blueprint and a 15-terabyte open physical AI dataset.

5 sourcesNVIDIAGoogle DeepMind1X TechnologiesRobot Foundation ModelsVLA
Mar 12, 2025
ProductGB

Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics, turning Gemini 2.0 into a robot controller and signing Apptronik as its humanoid partner

Google DeepMind on 12 March 2025 introduced Gemini Robotics, a vision-language-action model built on Gemini 2.0 that issues motor commands, and Gemini Robotics-ER, a spatial reasoning model for robot makers. The lab said the action model more than doubles performance on a generalization benchmark against other leading models, named Apptronik as its humanoid partner and opened Gemini Robotics-ER to four trusted testers including Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics.

2 sourcesGoogle DeepMindGoogleApptronikVLARobot Foundation Models