Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.
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In September 2026, live events such as IMTS, ROSCon, and iROS brought a flood of robotics developments.
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.
As humanoid robots move from research labs into factories, warehouses, homes, and other shared spaces, accurate physical feedback becomes crucial.
A robot can follow its safety rules and still act on manipulated information. See what this means for robot safety and how teams can strengthen their testing and evidence.
Boston Dynamics has redesigned the hand on its Atlas humanoid with a thumb and three fingers, 13 degrees of freedom and direct-drive actuators packed into the joints instead of tendons or cables, IEEE Spectrum reported from the company's blog. Each actuator pack can be swapped as a single unit and can be back-driven so the hand yields on contact, choices the company said favour reliability, manufacturability and cost over a human-like look. Alberto Rodriguez, who directs robot behavior at Boston Dynamics, said the aim is a hand that can use tools such as drills and welding torches, be simulated cleanly and be trained from human demonstrations, with a production target of 100,000 hands a year.
Santa Clara startup Maven Robotics, founded in 2024, intends to have a couple of hundred of its mobile manipulators working under production contracts within a year and thousands by 2028, CEO Hamza Derbas said after the company's $100 million Series A in September. The robot, now in its fourth iteration, carries two seven-axis arms, lifts 30 kg and reaches 3 metres high and 48 inches into a pallet, starting with mixed-case palletizing and tote handling. Maven rents the machines out as a service and said its first production contract is signed, with a move to round-the-clock operation planned before the end of 2026.
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.
Skild AI's $1.4 billion Series C, led by SoftBank, and Figure AI's $1 billion Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital, are the two largest humanoid and embodied-AI rounds in MEKAWIRE's verified records since January 2025, and together make up 41% of the $5.86 billion disclosed across 22 rounds. Humanoid makers took 70% of disclosed money in 2025, but developers of robot foundation models have taken 71% in 2026 so far, and NVIDIA joined seven rounds without leading one.
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.
ANYbotics designed Shift to help maintenance teams run industrial inspections, detect failing equipment, and turn data into work orders.
Swiss legged-robot maker ANYbotics has released Shift, a four-module platform that plans robot inspection rounds, analyses the readings and pushes findings into plant systems such as SAP and IBM Maximo. The company says Shift already analyses more than 120,000 inspections a month across over 1,000 industrial assets.
Destro AI, founded by NYU Tandon robotics graduate Manthan Pawar, came out of stealth on Sept. 30 with an $8 million seed round led by Base10 Partners and Bonfire Ventures, with CoFound Partners also investing, TechCrunch reported. The startup sells software rather than robots: a vision system built on open-weight vision-language-action models and an orchestration layer that directs people, carts and trucks in cross-dock operations, currently paired with Miva Robotics cart movers. Customer Yusen Logistics grew a three-robot pilot at a Pacific Northwest site to 26 robots and has started a 17-robot pilot in Southern California. Pawar said the company expects to turn cash-flow positive by the end of 2026.
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.
Anthropic economists scored about 19,000 O*NET job tasks and concluded that robots can technically perform 74% of physical tasks in the US, yet beat human labour on cost for only 0.3% of tasks. At the historical 3% annual decline in robot prices, the study estimates it would take 40 years for that share to reach 10%.
Runway announced Praxis-1 on 30 September 2026, an open-weight world action model that converts its large-scale video pretraining into control for real robots. Early tests run with Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra on bimanual, six-axis arm and mobile-base hardware, and public weights are promised in the coming months.
Zhuhai-based Amicro, which designs robot-specific chips, sensors and navigation software for cleaning and service robots, published its post-hearing information pack on the Hong Kong exchange on 30 September 2026 and is seeking a Main Board listing under Chapter 18C. Revenue rose 42.3% to RMB406.7 million in 2025 on more than 3.5 million solution sets sold, while the net loss widened to RMB155.1 million.
Tangent Robotics, a New York company spun out of Columbia Engineering, said on 30 September 2026 it raised a $4.5 million pre-seed round co-led by Fly Ventures and Toyota Ventures. It is building robot hands with light-based touch sensors and learning methods for fine assembly tasks such as connector mating and gear meshing.
Data engineering company Innodata Inc. has opened a motion-capture laboratory in New Jersey to gather real-world movement data for training humanoid robots and other physical AI systems, The Robot Report reported on Sept. 30. The lab uses Vicon infrared optical tracking cameras that record the 3D motion of human and robot bodies with sub-millimeter accuracy and millisecond latency. Innodata said it will sell ready-made motion datasets, run custom collection projects, retarget data across robot platforms and offer independent performance and safety validation of robots.