This is getting unreal. "A huge humanoid robotics wave... is about to arrive 👀" Chinese robotics company AheadForm just unveiled one of the world's most lifelike humanoid robots at WAIC 2026 in Shanghai. This AI-powered humanoid can hold natural conversations, maintain eye contact, blink, display realistic facial expressions and synchronize its speech with lifelike head and facial movements.show more

In the future, it might just be humanoid robots... doing the refueling!🤖⛽️ Sinopec plans to introduce humanoid robot workers across its gas stations. They will handle tasks like fueling, picking up items, restocking, and inspections,working alongside human staff, especially during peak holiday periods in China to ease service pressure. With more than 30,000 gas stations across the country (most of them equipped with convenience stores), this implies a deployment of at least 30,000 humanoid robots. The robot is a wheeled humanoid developed by Beijing-based company FIVEAGES.show more

The two humanoid robots (Niya) at the Zhongguancun Forum... Information Desk are in a dormant state. When the meeting starts, they will continue to receive participants. This humanoid robot with humanoid design is specially made for consultation, reception, welcoming and social companionship. It is driven by AI and provides information services and emotional value.show more

There are currently 61 humanoid companies spanning 13 countries... with a total of 88 humanoids Spent my free time creating an extensive display of humanoid companies to learn the current landscape Opinions: - Super saturated, every developed country fund and build humanoid robots, even developing countries like Vietnam has their own humanoid. - Software is the moat. Breakthrough in software will explode adaptation of robots in both consumer and industry. Observation: - Naming: Robots tends to be named in the following formula: Name + Generation (i.e. MagicBot Gen 1, Vanar Gen 1) or Name + Random Letter + Number (i.e. Jaka K1, Kinisi 01, Unitree G1). - Two diversion in use case: One side focus on utility (Figure, X1, etc.), the other focus on companionship (Enchanted Tools, Andromeda, etc.) Category imo: - Unique Design: Fourier, Enchanted Tools, Slightly Overdone Robotics, Pollen Robotics. - Unique Actuator: Clone Robotics - Best Capabilities: too soon to tell, too much online cherry picked demos instead of real life demonstration. - Most Natural Motion: Cartwheel Robotics, Pollen Robotics. - Highest Cost: Tesla. Hmu or comment below if you want the list.show more

Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics(X-Humanoid) just closed a... massive 700M RMB ($97M) funding round. 💰🤖 They’re also teasing the "TienKung" 3.0, coming off the back of some wild performance milestones from their current fleet. ➤ The Funding: Backed by big names like Baidu and Beijing’s AI Industry Fund, this round shifts the center from R&D into serious commercial scaling. ➤ Proven Track Record: Their "TienKung Ultra" already bagged the first-ever humanoid half-marathon and holds a 21.5s 100m sprint record. ➤ Industry Ready: Their TianYi 2.0 platform is already hitting the floor in factories and warehouses through partnerships with companies like Cummins and Bayer. ➤ What’s Next: This cash is going straight into making their "TienKung" and "HuiSi" platforms fully autonomous and ready for real-world labor. It’s clear they aren't just building lab projects anymore—these bots are headed for the assembly line. Source: Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics(X-Humanoid) #Robotics #Humanoid #AI #EmbodiedAI #PhysicalAI #TienKung #XHumanoidshow more

Robots from China are ready to become your soul... companion. 🤖 Today (June 30), Chinese robotics company UBTech officially launched the U1 Series — a full-size ultra-bionic humanoid robot. Equipped with a nurturing emotional AI model, it features soft synthetic skin, incredibly realistic facial features and appearance. I touched its “skin” — it’s soft, glossy, and elastic, but cold to the touch, lacking the warmth of a real human body. How much would you pay to take one home? #UBTech #U1Robot #HumanoidRobot #AICompanionshow more

China is scaling humanoid robotics at an insane speed.... Super realistic robots from Ex-Robots are now reportedly entering mass production 🤖 - Not prototypes. - Not lab experiments. - Actual production. The biggest shift happening in robotics isn’t just intelligence anymore. It’s making robots look and behave socially acceptable around humans. And honestly… we’re reaching the point where some people may not immediately realize they’re talking to a robot. Exciting future or uncomfortable future? Media : Ex-Robots ⚠️ This content is shared for informational purposes only. CTO Robotics Media is a media platform and does not own or develop the technology shown. Credit belongs to the original creators.show more

At CES 2026, the world’s largest annual consumer electronics... show in Las Vegas, USA, Booster humanoid robots K1 from China took the stage with a lively lion dance performance, blending robotics, rhythm, and cultural flair. 🤖 A moment where technology meets tradition and steals the spotlight! Chinese firms accounted for the vast majority of the roughly 13,000 humanoid robots shipped globally in 2025, according to research firm Omdia. Zhang Heqing tphuang Li Zexin 李泽欣 Olala🇻🇳 🇨🇳 🇷🇺show more

A new wheeled humanoid robot DARWIN-01 From Shenzhen Standard... Robotics. This is a humanoid robot for industrial manufacturing and warehouses. The foldable body can adapt to a variety of spatial operations, and the end effector can also be switched to adapt to personalized business goals. The maximum load is 10kg. The universal wheels can shuttle between shelves, workshops and assembly lines at will, with a speed greater than 2m/s. Automatic charging or battery replacement, with a battery life of 12 hours.show more

Genesis AI just unveiled Eno. It's humanoid robot that... challenges everything the industry assumed about what robots should look like. Forbes just called it 'the iPhone moment for humanoid robots'. No head. No face. No exposed motors or cables. 22 degrees of freedom per hand with different finger lengths (like actual human hands). Back-drivable for safety. Onboard cameras and tactile sensors. In demos: bundling wires with tape (genuinely hard, tape is sticky and unpredictable), performing lab automation with millimeter precision on unmodified equipment. Optional chest screen shows the robot's reasoning before it acts, a visual window into its mind to build trust. Powered by Genesis AI GENE foundation model. Payload 3-5kg per arm, 4-6 hours battery. Industrial deployments late 2026, homes much later. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

teleoperator kicking himself over not programming Asimov's Laws of... Robotics... Worth considering if we should base today's reality on the science fiction musings from the past. Testing with humanoid robots is a very interesting new challenge. Historically robots have been confined to keep out zones with rigid walls and laser barriers, lock-out/tag-out, etc. This is the easy way to ensure people don't get hurt by very capable machines. But the more we integrate humanoid robotics into collaborative roles with humans the more we need to remove those barriers by nature of the work.show more

The next manipulation tool may not live on your... screen. It may stand in front of you look into your eyes and convince you that it understands. Would you rather face a humanoid robot strong enough to hurt you or one designed well enough to make you trust it? This robot copies blinking, eye contact, head movement and facial expressions to create the illusion of human presence. That may look impressive but it also opens a darker question. When a machine can look concerned appear friendly and imitate emotion people may start trusting signals that contain no real feeling no empathy and no moral responsibility. So which is more dangerous a robot with physical power or a robot that can manufacture trust? #HumanoidRobot #Robotics #AIshow more

Korean robotics leader ROBOTIS has unveiled the 'AI Sapiens'... humanoid, a direct challenge to Unitree’s G1 and R1 models. - 4'3" (130 cm) tall and weighing 34 kg. - Features 23 DOF, powered by the brand-new Dynamixel-Q actuators. The robot is a fully open-source hardware system designed to serve as a reliable hardware platform for advanced Physical AI research. AI Sapiens is slated for an H1 2026 launch, with a price point expected in the mid-to-low 10 million KRW range (~$7,000 – $8,700 USD).show more

Even Bloomberg and Reuters—two of the most relentlessly anti-China... media outlets—could not avoid revealing the truth in their own question: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on imports of humanoid robots without naming any country. Yet China is currently the dominant supplier. What is China’s response? The funniest part is this: China holds six of the world’s ten most innovative humanoid-robotics start-ups, including a clean sweep of the top five, while the United States is falling behind. So competition was renamed “national security.” China’s response was unusually direct: Protectionism will not make the United States more competitive. It will only hurt American companies and consumers. The message is simple. If American robotics were genuinely competitive, Washington would not need to remove Chinese firms from the market by decree. A ban may keep Chinese robots out of America. It will not stop Chinese companies from dominating the rest of the world. You can close your market. You cannot legislate away an industrial trend. America is not banning Chinese robots because they failed. It is banning them because American robots did.show more

🚨 BREAKING: NVIDIA just announced the Isaac GR00T Reference... Humanoid Robot. The first fully open humanoid robot reference design built on Jetson Thor, and it's going straight to the world's top research institutions. This is Jensen Huang's bet on open physical AI infrastructure. The hardware stack is serious: → Unitree H2 Plus chassis, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 31 degrees of freedom → Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, 22 degrees of freedom, bringing total to 75 across the full body → NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor onboard compute, 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, 128GB unified memory → Multi-view sensing, stereo head camera, wrist cameras, IMU Alongside this announcement, Unitree also introduced the H2 Plus as a standalone product, a frontier humanoid combining Unitree's own body, Sharpa's five-finger hands and NVIDIA Robotics Jetson Thor compute into one fully integrated research platform. The full Isaac GR00T software stack ships with it, teleoperation for data capture, open foundation models, Isaac Sim for training, Isaac Lab for evaluation, and accelerated ROS middleware for deployment. The complete loop from data to real-world robot in one unified platform. ETH Zürich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego and Ai2 are already on board as launch research partners. NVIDIA Robotics did to AI what it's now doing to robotics, build the platform, open the ecosystem, let the world build on top of it. Whoever owns the infrastructure layer wins. NVIDIA knows this better than anyone. 👀 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Check out the new interactive humanoid robot, Yogi, introduced... by Cartwheel Robotics. Yogi is designed as a companion for everyday life, offering help and companionship in settings from hospitals to living rooms. It features soft silicone skin for safe touch, precision actuators for predictable movement, and simple, natural interaction. The robot continuously learns new abilities for greater utility. Cartwheel's founder, Scott LaValley, has a deep background, having developed over four humanoid systems. His expertise includes nearly a decade developing the Atlas robot at Boston Dynamics, followed by five years at Disney leading the team that created the Groot robot. This extensive, hands-on experience is key to Cartwheel Robotics' innovations.show more

The most dangerous part of a humanoid robot may... be the face. UBTECH’s Walker shows how a machine can use gaze stillness and humanlike expression to create trust before proving judgment reliability or accountability. Should robots be allowed to look this human in public spaces? Putting the debate aside this is clearly a work of art. Congratulations to UBTECH for this achievement. Walker looks so refined that I may need to buy one fast before the stock runs out lol. Credit : UBTECH Roboticsshow more

Robot football is getting too close to kickoff. A... humanoid controlling the ball in a lab already looks like a World Cup side quest. Imagine this thing walking into the opening ceremony and scoring the first goal. 🤖⚽ #WorldCup #FIFAWorldCup #WorldCup2026 #FIFAWorldCup2026 #FWC26 #WeAre26 #MexicoVsSouthAfrica #Mexico #SouthAfrica #Goal #Football #Soccer #FIFA #OpeningCeremony #HumanoidRobot #Robotics #AI #PhysicalAIshow more

I spent a month in Shenzhen visiting factories and... robotics companies, and the contrast with the U.S. was striking. While Figure and Boston Dynamics hide their humanoids behind closed doors, Chinese companies have massive showrooms open to the public. But what really stood out wasn't just the transparency, it was how good they are at selling. Take UBTech: they've already sold 1,200 humanoid units at $200k each to factories. And here's the kicker, these robots aren't even that useful yet. They can only pick up and drop boxes at 1/10th the speed of a human, and factories still need to hire system integrators to train them for specific tasks. My theory is that these factories are terrified of getting left behind in the robotics/AI wave. They're investing in new tech not because it's ready, but because they can't afford to wait. The second surprise was the breadth of their robotics portfolio. These companies aren't just building humanoids, they're deploying service robots everywhere: restaurants, hotels, apartments. Consumer robots are cleaning houses, pools, pet waste, dishes. They're covering the entire spectrum. But the education piece shocked me most. I picked up what I thought was a high school or college robotics textbook, it was for primary school. The government mandated AI and robotics education starting in elementary school. Almost every single school in China now has AI and robotics curriculum, complete with education robots so kids can learn by building. They're creating a generation that grows up fluent in robotics and AI. China owns the supply chain and the hardware stack. But here's what I think people are missing: the race isn't just about who can build robots faster or cheaper. The U.S. advantage has always been in the layer between hardware and human, the interaction design, the software intelligence, the intuitive interfaces that make complex technology feel natural. China is building the physical infrastructure, but they're also learning fast. Every deployed service robot, every classroom full of kids building with education kits, every factory running humanoids, that's all data collection at scale. The window for the U.S. to establish its wedge is narrowing. It's not enough to be better at AI or software anymore. We need to be building the integration layer, the intelligence that makes physical AI actually useful, not just impressive in a showroom. Because right now, China isn't just manufacturing robots. They're manufacturing a robotics-native culture, and that might be the most defensible moat of all.show more

CES was an enormous success. We saw thousands of... people and a few dogs interacting with our agents and robots. We booked this booth at the last minute, mainly to book next year’s booth. Truly extraordinary what our team was able to put together on such short notice. Next year we reserved one of the largest booths at CES in the highest traffic location for AI and Robotics. We plan to unveil something extraordinary. Until the next show, we will be debuting the first custom models that will emerge from the first humanoid robotics hot rod shop. These models will be walking around, talking and interacting at tradeshows all over the world over the next few months. We are in the process of acquiring every humanoid robot available on the market to modify these as well. Stay tuned for more updates, the future is here and it’s rapidly accelerating.show more

Something big is happening in robotics - and it’s... hiding in plain sight. This post is not about dancing robots but in the data that powers them. Open robotics datasets have exploded this year, turning the field into a more scalable and collaborative ecosystem. In just two years, Hugging Face datasets grew from 11k to over 600k - and robotics is by far the fastest-growing segment. We went from 1k robotics datasets in 2024 to 27k in 2025! For comparison, text generation, the second-largest category, has only around 5k datasets in 2025. That gap is massive. Open datasets are important because robotics lives and dies by real-world robot data - video, actions, sensors, failures. By making this data easy to upload, reuse, and benchmark, researchers, startups, and large players are now releasing real-robot datasets that would have stayed locked inside labs just a few years ago. Major contributors include NVIDIA, LeRobot initiative, and a rapidly growing maker community. This surge is also enabled by cheaper video storage, better tooling, and an open-source AI culture now spilling into the physical world. And it really matters: open robotics data dramatically lowers entry barriers, accelerates learning-by-doing, and speeds up progress toward generalist and humanoid robots. Robotics won’t scale through hardware alone - but to a large extent through shared data. Viz below from AI World - link to the story and more viz/filters in comment.show more