Topic
Field of designing and commercializing human-like, bipedal or wheeled robots, led by makers like Unitree and LG.
Researchers report an iontronic skin with more than 10,000 sensors at 1,110 per square centimetre, read out at 100 frames per second. On humanoid robots it resolved surface features of 300 micrometres, according to the paper's abstract in Nature.
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Hong Kong opened its first Embodied AI International Applications Hub on Oct. 15 with seven technology partners and eight scenario partners. Crypto Briefing reported two funding plans alongside it, HKD 1 billion for AI subsidies and HKD 10 billion for an industrial fund.
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Boston Dynamics says its prototype team can build an Atlas humanoid in about a day and is aiming for about an hour next year. Interesting Engineering says the figures describe the prototype shop and set no production rate or delivery date.
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Swedish startup 120ft raised 576,000 euros from 22 angels to bill brands per finished product on shared humanoid-robot lines. It has not yet reached commercial production and has shown one product, a lamp, so the offer is still a plan.
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Hyundai Motor's market value has fallen about 89.8 trillion won since June 1 as the share price lost 58.2%, en.sedaily.com reported. Seventh place on the KOSPI now rests on a lead of about 7.4 trillion won over KB Financial.
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DeepSeek has agreed to lead a seed round that would value Winverse AI, a robotics-AI startup, at about $400 million, Bloomberg reported. The deal is not final, and DeepSeek's Unitree stake is firmer evidence of a move into robotics than a startup that has not disclosed product plans.
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RoboParty debuted RP1 at IROS 2026, calling it the first full-stack open-source bipedal humanoid, with joint torque peaking at 160 Nm. Labs weighing it against closed robots will need its license terms and published file list before counting on the right to change it.
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ETH Zurich engineers trained an off-the-shelf, 20-joint robot hand to walk on its uneven fingertips across 14 indoor and outdoor environments. Earlier walking hands only balanced after their fingers were rebuilt to one length, while this one keeps the thumb and uneven fingers that make a hand good with tools.
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FCC's Covered List has restricted new imports of humanoid and four-legged robots since July, in a market where Chinese firms ship 80 to 97% of humanoids. The cost to US builders turns on whether the list grows to cover the Chinese actuators and magnets they still buy.
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Three down sessions took the stock back toward what a Chinese listing normally does on day one. The valuation it is falling from has barely moved.
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OpenAI's careers page now lists 27 robotics openings, up from 11 in May, with published base pay running from $177,000 to $500,000. The top of that range attaches to data infrastructure work, and the robotics software job tops out at $325,000.
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Three weeks after Unitree's Shanghai debut rose fivefold and then gave most of it back, the CSRC has told robotics applicants to show recurring revenue and a path to profit, a test two pending applicants fail.
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The two-person, YC-backed startup has published enough of HALE 1.0's spec sheet to check the machine, down to 22 actuators and nine pounds of lift per arm, while the hourly rate it quotes still needs a duty cycle before anyone can price it.
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The company says its Digit 5 humanoid can work safely beside people, holds more than $300 million of multiyear orders, and does not expect general availability until the end of 2027. It plans to list at $2.5 billion.
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China's National Data Administration says it will develop standards for embodied AI data, ten days after seven companies asked for exactly that. More than 70 Chinese sites are already recording the hours.
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Mecka AI pays people to wear sensors while they make coffee or fix cars, and two people told TechCrunch that Sequoia is leading a round at about $500 million, three months after a $60 million round. The terms are not final.
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Crunchbase counted 29 additions to its unicorn board in August, worth about $63bn, and across the nine AI, software and semiconductor entrants with disclosed terms, every dollar of new cash set roughly eight dollars of paper.
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The floor on Figure's compute commitment is about twice all the equity it has disclosed raising, and the vendor writing that contract now owns a piece of the customer owing it. Whether the $3.5bn is take-or-pay is undisclosed.
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The contract value is public and the size of Nscale's stake in Figure is not, which leaves anyone reading a $51bn backlog ahead of a US listing unable to tell how much of that line the seller helped pay for.
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State money is arriving faster than autonomy, and inside the training centres the unit of production is still a human hour rather than a robot hour, which is what actually sets the price of the data.
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