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18:00Aug 20, 2026

ResearchCN

Tsinghua's vision-driven soccer humanoid makes the cover of Science Robotics, trained entirely in simulation

A Tsinghua University team working with ByteDance Seed and China Agricultural University published a reinforcement learning controller in Science Robotics on August 19, 2026 that links a humanoid's camera directly to its legs. On Booster Robotics' T1, the authors report a 46% cut in ball-position error, up to 64% faster time-to-kick and about 90% kick success in frontfield positions, with no real-world fine-tuning.

4 sourcesBooster Robotics Unitree Robotics NVIDIA RL Sim-to-Real Transfer

16:00Aug 20, 2026

ResearchUS

Generalist's GEN-1.5 learns robot tasks from a single 3 to 12 second demonstration, reaching 59% without fine-tuning

Generalist AI said on August 19, 2026 that GEN-1.5 can learn a new manipulation task from one demonstration of 3 to 12 seconds placed in its context, averaging 59% success over 10 tasks with no fine-tuning and 83% after 10 gradient steps on about 5 minutes of data. The company says the ability emerged from more than eight months of pretraining, but calls the tasks simple and the skills brittle, and has named no customers.

1 sourceGeneralist AI Skild AI Physical Intelligence Robot Foundation Models Imitation Learning

01:30Aug 19, 2026

MarketCN

Unitree lists on Shanghai's STAR Market after raising RMB6.1 billion at 219 times earnings

Unitree Robotics began trading in Shanghai on August 19, 2026 under code 688836 after selling 40.4 million new shares at RMB150.80, raising gross proceeds of RMB6,099.32 million. The issue price values the Hangzhou humanoid and quadruped maker at about RMB60.99 billion, or 219.23 times 2025 earnings, against an industry average of 38.56 times cited in its own listing document.

3 sourcesUnitree Robotics UBTECH Robotics Figure AI Electric Actuators Robot Foundation Models

00:00Aug 14, 2026

PartnershipKR

LG and NVIDIA sign robotics pact; LG to unveil bipedal humanoid built with group parts in early 2027

LG Group and NVIDIA signed a strategic collaboration MOU on Aug. 13 covering robots, AI factories and mobility, LG Corp. said. LG will unveil a bipedal humanoid on Jetson Thor and Isaac GR00T in the first quarter of 2027 using LG Electronics actuators, LG Innotek sensors and LG Energy Solution batteries, and will test its wheeled CLOiD on a Tennessee washing-machine line this year.

2 sourcesLG Electronics NVIDIA Hyundai Motor Group Robot Foundation Models Edge AI Compute

05:00Aug 13, 2026

BusinessNO

AutoStore revenue jumps 43% on North American demand and signs a global supply framework with Amazon

AutoStore reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $192.1 million, up 43.4%, and order intake of $217.6 million, up 44.7%, on August 13, 2026. The Norwegian cube storage maker disclosed a global strategic supply agreement with Amazon that sets a framework for future procurement without purchase commitments, launched a buyback of up to $75 million and guided 2026 revenue to about $700 million.

6 sourcesAutoStore Fleet Orchestration Software Battery Systems

07:00Aug 7, 2026

BusinessJP

Harmonic Drive Systems' orders jump 55.7% to ¥24.1 billion as robot, surgical and chip demand returns, and it lifts its profit forecast by 37%

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.

3 sourcesHarmonic Drive Systems Nabtesco Leaderdrive Harmonic / Strain-Wave Gears Electric Actuators

20:05Aug 6, 2026

MarketUS

Symbotic swings to a $55 million quarterly profit as revenue rises 22% to $721 million

Symbotic reported revenue of $720.8 million for its fiscal third quarter ended June 27, 2026, up 22% from a year earlier, and net income of $55 million against a $21 million loss. The warehouse robotics maker guided fourth-quarter revenue to $760 million to $780 million and adjusted EBITDA to $100 million to $105 million.

1 sourceSymbotic Fleet Orchestration Software

16:00Jul 31, 2026

ProductUS

Google DeepMind ships Gemini Robotics 2, taking its robot models to whole-body humanoid control

Google DeepMind on July 30 released Gemini Robotics 2, a family of three models covering whole-body humanoid control, high-level embodied reasoning and on-device inference. The reasoning model ER 2 is available to developers through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, while the action models remain limited to early-access partners and trusted testers.

3 sourcesGoogle DeepMind Apptronik Boston Dynamics VLA Robot Foundation Models

13:00Jul 30, 2026

PartnershipUS

FedEx takes Dexterity's Mech trailer loaders beyond the pilot stage at its Hagerstown hub

FedEx and Dexterity said on 30 July 2026 that they are expanding autonomous trailer loading at the FedEx Hagerstown Hub in Maryland, moving Dexterity's dual-armed Mech robot and its Foresight world model from an earlier pilot site to a significantly larger operation. Neither company disclosed robot numbers, financial terms or a completion date.

12 sourcesDexterity FedEx Corp.Boston Dynamics World Models Dexterous Manipulation

20:05Jul 29, 2026

MarketUS

Teradyne's robotics arm grows 33% to $100 million as AI test demand doubles group revenue

Teradyne reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $1,329 million, up 104% from a year earlier, with its Robotics group, home to Universal Robots and MiR, contributing $100 million against $75 million in the second quarter of 2025. The company guided third-quarter revenue to $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion.

2 sourcesTeradyne FANUC Doosan Robotics Electric Actuators Fleet Orchestration Software

06:00Jul 24, 2026

PolicyEU

EU moves AI-driven machinery out of the AI Act's main track and gives robot makers until August 2028

The EU's Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, was published on July 24, 2026 and took effect on July 27. It delays high-risk AI obligations to December 2, 2027 for stand-alone systems and August 2, 2028 for AI built into products, and shifts machinery, including industrial robots, into a lighter AI Act regime whose substance will instead be written into the Machinery Regulation by delegated act.

6 sourcesNeura Robotics ANYbotics Robot Foundation Models RL

20:05Jul 23, 2026

BusinessUS

Tesla clears Fremont's Model S and X lines for Optimus and sends its first robots to an in-house academy as quarterly capex jumps to $5.8 billion

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.

3 sourcesTesla Figure AI Agility Robotics Electric Actuators Robot Foundation Models

07:00Jul 21, 2026

FundingGB

London's Humanoid raises $152 million at a $1.35 billion valuation as Schaeffler and Bosch buy in

Humanoid, a two-year-old London robotics company, closed a $152 million Series A led by Prime Movers Lab at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation, with industrial partners Schaeffler and Bosch joining the round. The company says the money will fund mass manufacturing of its wheeled humanoid, a Beta fleet from the fourth quarter of 2026 and its KinetIQ AI software.

3 sourcesHumanoid Neura Robotics Figure AI Electric Actuators Fleet Orchestration Software

16:00Jul 21, 2026

ProductUS

NVIDIA opens Cosmos 3 Edge, a 4-billion-parameter world model that plans robot actions on a Jetson Thor

NVIDIA released Cosmos 3 Edge on July 20, the smallest member of its Cosmos 3 physical-AI model family, as open weights on Hugging Face. The 4-billion-parameter model runs on Jetson Thor and generates 32 robot actions per inference, and Doosan Robotics, Siemens, Agile Robots and Skild AI are evaluating it.

5 sourcesNVIDIA Doosan Robotics Skild AI World Models Robot Foundation Models

02:00Jul 20, 2026

PolicyCN

China expects embodied AI robot output to exceed 100,000 units in 2026, MIIT says

China's industry ministry said on July 20, 2026 that more than 230 companies have released over 400 embodied AI robot models and that full-year output of complete machines is expected to exceed 100,000 units. Official data show industrial robot output rose 28% in the first half and 29.0% to 729,352 sets in the first eight months, as Beijing pushes humanoids into real factories through a joint programme with the state asset regulator.

5 sourcesUBTECH Robotics Unitree Robotics Figure AI Robot Foundation Models Imitation Learning

00:00Jul 17, 2026

ResearchUS

MIT's NeuralActuator lets low-cost robot arms feel force without sensors, winning RSS 2026's systems award

NeuralActuator, a model from MIT's Computational Design and Fabrication Group with Amazon, won the Outstanding Systems Paper Award at RSS 2026. It learns how cheap servo motors really behave from motor current, voltage and temperature, and estimates external force with a reported mean error of 0.12 N, against 0.66 N to 1.41 N for classical baselines.

4 sourcesElectric Actuators Sim-to-Real Transfer

00:00Jul 17, 2026

ResearchKR

RSS 2026's top paper, FlashSAC, cuts humanoid walking training on one GPU from hours to minutes

FlashSAC, an off-policy reinforcement learning method from a team spanning Holiday Robotics, KAIST, KRAFTON, TU Darmstadt, KTH and others, won the Outstanding Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney. The authors report training a Unitree G1 walking policy in about 20 minutes on a single RTX 5090, against about three hours for the standard PPO method.

5 sourcesUnitree Robotics NVIDIA RL Sim-to-Real Transfer

20:05Jul 17, 2026

BusinessUS

Intuitive places 468 da Vinci robots as upgrades to da Vinci 5 accelerate, and raises its margin outlook for a second time

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.

6 sourcesIntuitive Medtronic Johnson & Johnson Teleoperation Harmonic / Strain-Wave Gears

06:00Jul 16, 2026

PartnershipJP

Fujitsu enlists FANUC, Yaskawa and Kawasaki to build a sovereign physical AI platform on NVIDIA technology

Fujitsu said on July 16 it had begun exploring physical AI businesses with three of Japan's largest robot makers, FANUC, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, using NVIDIA Cosmos, Omniverse, Isaac and the Newton physics engine. Fujitsu will build a common software platform and hardware interfaces, with manufacturing, retail and logistics, and healthcare as first targets. No timeline or financial terms were given.

4 sourcesFujitsu FANUC Yaskawa Electric World Models Sim-to-Real Transfer

13:00Jul 15, 2026

FundingUS

Toyota research spinout Walden Robotics launches with $300 million seed at a $1.1 billion valuation

Walden Robotics, spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January 2026, emerged from stealth on July 15, 2026 with a $300 million seed round at a $1.1 billion valuation co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital. The Cambridge, Massachusetts company says its robots, driven by large behavior models, have been doing production work at a Toyota plant in North America since February, and on July 28 it added Samsung SDS as a manufacturing partner.

5 sourcesWalden Robotics NVIDIA Skild AI Robot Foundation Models Imitation Learning