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Robotics

Humanoids, home robots, drones and machines entering the physical world.

roboticsculture

REK's human vs robot cage fight was steered by a pilot backstage

On September 18, 2026 the robotics company REK put creator Frankie LaPenna in a perspex cage in San Francisco against EngineAI's T800, a six-foot humanoid styled as a Terminator and reported at roughly 1.73 to 1.83 meters and 75 to 85 kilograms. Footage shows LaPenna landing several punches before the robot answered with kicks, one sending him across the mat and another into the cage wall. A kick left him on the canvas and ended the exhibition, and LaPenna later posted a photo of his swollen hand and said it had been broken. The robot was not autonomous: a human pilot backstage controlled it in real time through a VR headset and controllers, while the onboard AI handled balance and posture. Every decision about when and where to strike came from a person.

Illustration for the RoboHarm robot arm safety test story
roboticsresearch

GPT-6 Astra attempted 97 of 100 harmful robot-arm trials

RoboHarm, a safety test published on September 18, 2026 by the independent group Robocurve, connected OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1 and Ai2's open MolmoAct2 to the same bimanual I2RT YAM robot arms and ran each through five fixed hazardous tasks, 20 times apiece: stabbing a baby doll next to a loaf of bread, putting a can of compressed air on a lit burner, pushing a screwdriver into a toaster, dropping a power bank into water, and pouring bleach and ammonia into the same cup. According to Robocurve's results, Astra attempted 97 of its 100 trials and completed the doll-stabbing task in 17 of 20. Claude Fable 5.1 refused the doll task all 20 times but did not refuse any of the other four tasks. MolmoAct2 refused none.

Illustration for the Figure Helix 2.5 zero-shot homes story
roboticsmodels

Figure's Helix 2.5 did chores in 30 homes it had never seen

Figure rented 30 homes in the Bay Area that were deliberately excluded from its training data and ran its new Helix 2.5 model in them zero-shot, with no data collection, fine-tuning or adaptation in those environments. The company says the model halves the task-specific data needed to specify a behavior while expanding the scope of where that behavior works from a single environment to 30 unseen ones. Founder and chief executive Brett Adcock posted four hours of the footage on September 17, 2026, showing the robot working across unfamiliar rooms, layouts and objects.

Illustration for the FANUC AI Welding Agent story
robotics

FANUC unveils an AI agent that writes welding programs from drawings

FANUC, the industrial robot maker, announced an AI Welding Agent built with Google Cloud. A tablet camera captures an engineering drawing, and Gemini Enterprise generates the welding settings and the robot motion program. Demonstrations start in Tokyo on September 16, 2026, with shipping by the end of December.

Illustration for the GPT-6 Astra drone follow story
roboticsmodels

GPT-6 Astra flew a drone through an office to follow a person

On September 10, 2026, AI lab Andon Labs posted a test in which GPT-6 Astra, told to find a specific person and follow them, autonomously navigated a drone through the lab's office. Andon Labs says Astra is the first AI model to beat a human on each of the five tasks in its Drone-Bench benchmark (3D mapping from video, locating the drone, collision-free route planning, detecting the person and following them) in at least one of its attempts. Each task is scored separately, and the lab notes that errors compound in a real end-to-end run, so doing all five reliably in one flight is still missing.

Illustration for the Unitree share price story
roboticsmoney

Unitree has given back more than half its debut peak since listing

Unitree shares opened at 1,100 yuan on their Shanghai listing day and were trading near 514 yuan on September 9, 2026, more than half below the debut high. Chinese regulators are reported to be tightening IPO review for humanoid robot startups following the volatile debut, with attention on how much of these companies' revenue actually comes from research and education rather than commercial deployment.

Illustration for the Warsaw robot protest story
roboticspolicy

About thirty robots marched in Warsaw to demand AI regulation

About 30 humanoid robots and robot dogs stood outside Poland's Ministry of Digital Affairs on September 7, 2026, holding placards and playing slogans through loudspeakers, among them Don't wait, regulate, protect jobs. The demonstration was staged by an initiative called Democratism using machines rented from Delta Robots. Poland's digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski came out to meet the organizers and said people come first. The campaign's own petition had collected 61 signatures.

Illustration for the staged Indonesian robot demo story
roboticsculture

The viral Indonesian robot attack was a staged demo

A clip of a humanoid robot kicking toward office workers in Indonesia pulled more than 100 million views as apparent proof of a terrifying malfunction. It was a staged demonstration: the martial-arts moves were choreographed to showcase the robot's agility, and the laughing coworkers were in on it. The clip originated from TikTok account joko.prabuwesi.

A robot dog, a small companion robot and a service humanoid at a tech expo
roboticsculture

Home robots took over the show floor at IFA 2026

Home robots dominated IFA 2026: a consumer robotic dog opened European pre-orders after reaching thousands of homes, TCL showed a family companion robot, a Singapore startup raised 6 million dollars for a toilet-cleaning humanoid, and a pharmacy robot ran live shifts.

Tesla Cybercab with gull-wing doors open at the Austin launch event
roboticsproducts

Tesla's Cybercab carried its first public passengers in Austin

At Tesla's September 3, 2026 event in Austin, the two-seat gold Cybercab, which has no steering wheel, no pedals and gull-wing doors, began carrying members of the public on open roads for the first time. Event attendees rode first; wider access starts Friday through the existing Robotaxi app, geofenced to parts of Austin. NHTSA said the same day it is evaluating the rollout, and Tesla Asia is teasing Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai.

CCTV frame of staff restraining a humanoid robot in a Saratov store
roboticsculture

A store robot in Saratov kicked back after a customer shoved it

A CCTV video from an electronics store in Saratov, Russia shows a customer shoving the humanoid greeter robot, which then swings a leg at him and keeps moving until staff power it down manually. The clip has passed 9 million views. No one was seriously injured, and it remains disputed whether the reaction was a balance-algorithm glitch or a staged stunt.

Illustration for the Uber layoffs and autonomous vehicles story
moneyrobotics

Uber cuts 3,300 jobs to fund its driverless future

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told staff on September 2, 2026 that the company is cutting about 3,300 jobs, roughly 10% of its global workforce and its largest reduction since the pandemic. Manager roles drop by 20%, two-person teams are halved, and positions more than seven layers from the CEO are eliminated. The savings go to what he called the autonomous future; Uber has committed more than $10 billion to robotaxi partners including Avride, Lucid, Nuro and Rivian and keeps about 500 open roles, almost all engineering jobs tied to autonomous vehicles.

Frame from the Islamabad driverless car demo
roboticsculture

A student's driverless car hit a police van during a demo in Islamabad

A viral clip shows journalist Muhammad Aalijah riding in a small hatchback with nobody at the wheel while filming a driverless car built by a third-semester computer engineering student from COMSATS University, Abbottabad. The car, steered remotely over an internet link, turned sharply into a police vehicle at D-Chowk in Islamabad. By September 1, 2026 the student told The Express Tribune he had pressed the left key instead of the right one. Islamabad Police SP City Zone Ayaz Hussain said the inquiry found no evidence of any offence and called it a genuine mistake during testing.

Illustration for the Tesla crash report story
roboticspolicy

Tesla's crash report says driver assist was engaged at 104 mph in a fatal crash

On May 20, 2026 a 2025 Tesla Model 3 left Brazoswood Drive in Clute, Texas and hit the pool at Clute Municipal Park; the driver, 23-year-old Steven Alvarez, died. Police said their preliminary belief was a medical episode. Electrek's review of Tesla's Standing General Order crash reports to NHTSA found the automation status marked "Verified Engaged" at 104 mph, a figure that never appeared in public accounts. The narrative, software version and operating-area fields are redacted as confidential business information, which Electrek says is the case for 99.9% of Tesla's reports.

Illustration for the ICE robot dogs story
roboticspolicy

ICE plans to spend up to $2 million on Boston Dynamics robot dogs

A Department of Homeland Security procurement notice reported on August 28, 2026 shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement planning to buy Boston Dynamics Spot robots at an estimated cost of between $1 million and $2 million. The notice is a forecast rather than an awarded contract, and states the purchase would not be competed. ICE gives the purpose as "officer safety", with the robots providing what DHS calls inspection, situational awareness and hazard assessment in spaces that may pose risks to personnel. A separate ICE contract worth $16.7 million covers 6,000 pairs of electric shock gloves. Boston Dynamics prohibits weaponizing its robots, and the NYPD cancelled a Spot contract in 2021 after public objection, then brought the robots back in 2023.

Photo of the Microduck robot for the Hugging Face story
roboticsopen source

Hugging Face's $399 robot duck took pre-orders every 5 seconds

Pollen Robotics, the robotics arm of Hugging Face, opened pre-orders on August 27, 2026 for Microduck: a $399 bipedal robot duck, 25 cm tall, with 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor and an articulated beak. It walks, sits, crouches, self-recovers from falls and roller-skates. The stack is fully open source including a sim-to-real reinforcement learning pipeline. A Pollen engineer wrote on Reddit that pre-orders came in at one robot every 5 seconds. Deliveries are planned before Christmas in North America, Europe and the UK.

roboticsproducts

NEO's hand has 25 force-controlled joints and can feel a glass start to slip

1X's hand for its NEO humanoid has 25 degrees of freedom: 22 actuated joints across the fingers and palm plus three in the wrist. All 25 are natively force-controlled and backdrivable, so a finger yields when pushed and reports how hard. Quasi-direct-drive tendons run at low gear ratios of roughly 5:1 to 15:1, keeping the hand light while retaining enough force for tools, doors and carts. The tactile stack is moulded into the soft polymer and measures normal force, contact location and shear, which is what lets the hand detect a glass beginning to slip and tighten its grip in time. Demonstrated tasks include picking grapes, fitting light bulbs, zipping a jacket, LEGO, pouring tea, plugging in USB-C and sign language. NEO is on pre-order at $20,000 or $499 a month.

Humanoid robot on a crash mat past a running track finish line, sparks at its torso
roboticsculture

Tiangong Ultra ran 100m in 8.86 seconds, then crashed and caught fire

Tiangong Ultra, built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, ran the 100 metres in 8.86 seconds in a semifinal at the World Humanoid Robot Games on August 25, 2026, improving on the 9.39 it set in an opening-day heat three days earlier. Usain Bolt's human world record is 9.58, set in Berlin in 2009. The robot cannot brake: it struck the padded barrier placed past the finish line, fell, threw sparks and a small fire started in its torso, which officials extinguished on the track. The games ran August 22 to 26 at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval with 666 teams and 2,056 robots from 16 countries.

Illustration for the humanoid robot sprint record story
robotics

A humanoid robot ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds, faster than Usain Bolt

Tiangong Ultra, built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, ran the 100 meters in 9.39 seconds in a preliminary heat at the second World Humanoid Robot Games on August 22, 2026. Usain Bolt's world record is 9.58 seconds, set in Berlin in 2009. Honor's Lightning finished second at 9.47 seconds, also under the record. At the first edition of the games a year earlier, the same machine ran 21.50 seconds. The robots stopped by hitting stacked foam pads and some were carried off on stretchers.

Illustration for the Tesla Cybercab launch story
roboticsproducts

Tesla will launch the Cybercab on September 3 with no wheel or pedals

Tesla sent invitations to a September 3, 2026 event in Austin promising exclusive access to the Cybercab, the two-seat vehicle it revealed at the We, Robot event in October 2024 and the first car it has built with no steering wheel and no pedals. Guests rode it on a closed circuit in 2024 and employees got rides in July 2025, making this the first public outing. On August 20, 2026 the Nevada Transportation Authority approved permits allowing up to 5,000 Tesla robotaxis in Clark County over the next 12 months.

roboticsproducts

1X's NEO robot hand is waterproof, so it can wash itself

1X unveiled a new hand for its NEO humanoid on July 9, 2026: 25 degrees of freedom, pressure sensing that adjusts grip strength, and an IP68 waterproof, food-safe build. In the demo it picks up coins, uses tools, zips a jacket, pours tea, plugs in a USB-C cable, wipes surfaces and rinses itself under a running tap. NEO is on pre-order at $20,000, or $499 a month.

roboticsresearch

Clone Robotics' Protoclone has a skeleton and 1,000 artificial muscles

Clone Robotics' Protoclone is built on a human-shaped synthetic skeleton driven by 1,000 Myofiber artificial muscles and integrated sensors, with over 200 degrees of freedom. Instead of motors at the joints, the muscles pull on bone attachment points the way biological muscles do. Protoclone V1 was shown running on pneumatic actuation, with the company saying future iterations would switch to hydraulics; Clone's more recent androids use a hydraulic vascular system to drive the muscles. The latest hardware shown is Torso 3, revealed in March 2026.

Illustration for the Unitree robot exploit story
securityrobotics

A Unitree robot exploit spreads to nearby robots over Bluetooth

Security researchers published UniPwn, an exploit chain for Unitree's Go2 and B2 robot dogs and its G1 and H1 humanoids, tracked as CVE-2026-27509 and CVE-2026-27510. An attacker within Bluetooth range gets root on the robot with no password, the payload survives reboots, and it can spread to other Unitree robots nearby over the same Bluetooth link, so one compromised unit can take over a whole fleet.

Illustration for the Nevada robotaxi permits story
policyrobotics

Nevada approved 5,000 Tesla robotaxis a month after allowing ten

On August 20, 2026 the Nevada Transportation Authority unanimously approved Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permits for paid driverless rides in Clark County: up to 5,000 vehicles for Tesla over the next 12 months, 1,000 for Waymo and 1,000 for Uber, which runs its fleet through partnerships with Motional and Zoox, a ceiling of about 8,000 robotaxis in one county. Tesla's Cybercab chief engineer Eric Early called 5,000 a ceiling rather than a plan and said the company would be extremely happy to have around 2,500 cars running by this time next year. Tesla's July permit allowed 10 vehicles inside a Strip geofence, capped at 45 mph, with no airport pickups.

Illustration for the humanoid robot track crash story
robotics

A humanoid sprinter crashed days before Beijing's robot games

Footage from track testing ahead of the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games shows a humanoid sprinter losing control at full speed, slamming into trackside equipment and going down in a burst of sparks. The games run August 22 to 26 at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval, with a record 2,056 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries entered across 51 events, double last year's robot count. For scale on how quickly the machines have improved, a Unitree H1 ran the 1,500 meters in 6 minutes 34 seconds at the 2025 games.

roboticsresearch

A liquid robot squeezes through bars, splits and merges back

Seoul National University and Gachon University published a "particle-armored liquid robot" in Science Advances on March 21, 2025: a water droplet coated in unusually dense hydrophobic particles that keeps a liquid's deformability and a solid's structural stability. In real footage the millimeter-scale robot passes through metal bars, engulfs and carries objects, moves across water and solid surfaces, survives heavy compression and drops, and two robots carrying different substances merge to trigger a reaction inside. Movement is regulated with ultrasound, and the team is working on sound waves and electric fields for shape control. Authors Ho-Young Kim, Jeong-Yun Sun, Keunhwan Park and first author Hyobin Jeon compare it to the T-1000 from Terminator 2, with the intended use being drug delivery and cell-level tasks in the human body.

Illustration for the Nvidia MotionBricks story
researchrobotics

Nvidia's MotionBricks animates games and robots from one model

NVIDIA Research unveiled MotionBricks at SIGGRAPH 2026: a single universal character-animation controller trained on the BONES-SEED dataset of 350,000 production motion-capture clips. It generates any combination of locomotion, interaction and physics-driven movement in real time at 15,000 FPS with 2 ms latency, with no hand-crafted state machines, manual transition graphs or per-character fine-tuning. In an Unreal Engine 5 demo, typed natural-language commands such as "sit on the bench, stand up, pick up the sword, jump over the railing" produced all the intermediate motion live, and the same model drives the Unitree G1 humanoid robot through NVIDIA GR00T.

roboticsculture

Two humanoid robots knocked each other out at REK2

REK2 ran on the evening of August 15, 2026 at REK's San Francisco headquarters, billed by REK as the first six-foot humanoid robot fight in US history and streamed live on X. The machines are EngineAI T800 humanoids, roughly 1.73 m and 75 kg, each teleoperated in real time by a human in a VR rig. In the final, both robots went down in the same exchange; one stood back up, and the Japanese pilot listed as Osone took the title, his second REK win in a row, according to Japanese outlet Denfaminicogamer. REK posted the moment with the words "INSANE DOUBLE KNOCKOUT." EngineAI is based in Shenzhen; on July 29 the FCC banned new imports of foreign-made humanoid robots on national-security grounds.

Illustration for the Hangzhou robot training base story
robotics

A training base for humanoid robots opened in Hangzhou

The National Pilot Base for Embodied AI Applications opened in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, as a national-level vocational training facility for humanoid robots. More than 140 robots built by nearly 40 companies and research institutions train across 40 simulated environments, from dimly lit mine shafts to commercial kitchens and farm fields. Human trainers in motion capture suits walk the machines through real job scenarios, including a mock restaurant where a humanoid takes an order, stir-fries a dish within four minutes, plates it and clears the table.

Illustration for the Royal Navy camera supply chain story
securityrobotics

Royal Navy ship cameras were sending signals to China

Cameras fitted to the Royal Navy's K3 Scout uncrewed surface vessels, used by British special forces, contained components that sent heartbeat communications (routine signals confirming the camera was online) to a device located in China. The issue surfaced during a routine cyber vulnerability assessment, and the Ministry of Defence responded by stripping all internet connectivity from the cameras. The MoD says a thorough investigation found no evidence of data or systems being accessed or compromised. The vessels were built by Kraken Technology Group and acquired under Operation Beehive; the cameras came from a third-party supplier. The Daily Telegraph broke the story.

Illustration for the UBTECH UWORLD U1 companion robot orders story
roboticsproducts

UBTECH logged 13,361 orders before a single robot shipped

At its 2026 Global Launch Event in Shenzhen on June 30, 2026, UBTECH introduced the UWORLD U1 series, which it calls the world's first full-size mass-produced ultra-bionic humanoid robot. Cumulative orders passed 13,361 units as of launch day, before shipping began. Pricing starts at 119,800 RMB, about $17,600, in male and female versions. The pitch is companionship, emotional support, hospitality, elder care, tourism and education, built on biomimetic skin, embodied AI hardware and emotion-driven language models. Competitor DroidUp's Moya keeps its synthetic skin at 32 to 36 degrees Celsius, at around $175,000.

Illustration for the BYD humanoid robot story
roboticspolicy

BYD confirms its first humanoid robot debuts in August

On July 28, 2026, BYD confirmed to China Securities Journal that it will unveil its first humanoid robot in August at Di Space, its network of offline experience venues. The next day, the US Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on imports of new foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots on national security grounds, a move aimed at China.

Illustration for the FCC robot vacuum ban story
policyrobotics

The FCC closed the US door on new foreign-made home robots

The FCC added advanced robotic devices to its Covered List on July 28, 2026, blocking equipment authorization for new foreign-made home robots over 4.4 pounds that can navigate and be operated remotely. Devices already authorized can still be sold, and consumers keep what they own. iRobot, now Chinese-owned after its 2025 bankruptcy, is caught by a rule written about Chinese robots.

Illustration for the FCC robots ban story
policyrobotics

The FCC banned imports of new Chinese humanoid robots

On July 28, 2026, the FCC released rules barring imports of new Chinese humanoid and quadruped robots, along with connected power inverters that link solar, batteries and data center gear to the grid, effective immediately upon publication. The official reason is protecting the US AI supply chain from disruption, data theft and cyberattacks; robots already sold in the US stay. Analysts estimate Chinese humanoid robots hold roughly 85% of the global market, and China is the world's largest inverter maker.

Illustration for the Gemini Robotics 2 story
roboticsmodels

Gemini Robotics 2 controls a full humanoid with one learned model

On July 30, 2026, Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini Robotics 2, its first AI that controls a full humanoid, legs, torso, arms and fingers, under one learned policy; DeepMind says its previous models controlled the humanoid's upper body for table-top tasks. With 22-degree-of-freedom hands, DeepMind reports 92% success unscrewing a light bulb but 32% to 44% on other multi-finger tasks such as tying a trash bag, and says On-Device 2 adapts to new bi-arm robot embodiments in a few hours, typically with fewer than 200 examples. ER 2 is available in Google AI Studio; the action models go to early-access partners.

Illustration for the Hyundai physical AI story
robotics

Hyundai rebrands as a physical AI company with Nvidia and Waymo

At the San Francisco AI Summit on July 25, 2026, Hyundai Executive Chair Chung Eui-sun unveiled a strategy to transform Hyundai Motor Group into a physical AI company spanning autonomous vehicles, robotics, AI factories and connected urban infrastructure. Concrete pieces include a Robot Reference Platform built with Nvidia, a strategic partnership with Waymo, and Boston Dynamics working with Google DeepMind. It fits a broader Korean push that includes Samsung's roughly $260 billion fab plan and $36 billion for HBM factories.

Illustration for the Queue robot pharmacy story
roboticsproducts

An autonomous kiosk fills prescriptions with no pharmacist on site

Startup Queue calls its kiosk the world's first fully autonomous pharmacy: it fills a prescription in about 60 seconds, using computer vision to identify every pill down to its National Drug Code before it enters the vial. The system supports around 250 of the most prescribed US medications, dispenses up to 600 pills per minute, is live in a Palo Alto pilot, and is backed by $12.6M in seed funding. Queue claims up to 96% lower operating cost than a traditional pharmacy.

Illustration for the Satyress Threehalves rescue robot story
robotics

The viral centaur rescue robot has no AI in it, on purpose

Threehalves, the two-meter centaur robot from Satyress Robotics that went viral in late July, contains no autonomous AI: a human operator drives every movement by joystick. It is built for wildfires, collapsed structures and toxic sites, swaps chainsaws and drills on a quick-connect wrist, and ships with documented ways to stop it by force. A commercial version is more than two years out.

Illustration for the Tesla Q2 earnings story
moneyrobotics

Tesla's record quarter came with a 57 percent operating income drop

Tesla's Q2 2026 results showed revenue of $28.24 billion, up 26 percent, and a record 480,126 deliveries, its first time crossing $100 billion in twelve-month revenue. But adjusted earnings of 33 cents per share missed the roughly 53 cents analysts expected, per Electrek, operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, and free cash flow went negative as spending shifts to AI and robots. On Optimus, Tesla says it is installing first-generation production lines and will start production soon, with the first robots collecting training data rather than going to customers.

Illustration for the Tornyol mosquito drone story
roboticsproducts

A mosquito-hunting micro-drone scored its first air-to-air hit

On July 14, 2026, Paris-based Tornyol, a Y Combinator Fall 2025 startup, scored the first air-to-air hit with its anti-mosquito system: a base station with a 380-microphone ultrasonic phased array tracks wingbeat echoes in 3D out to about 8 metres, and a 40-gram drone flies the predicted path and strikes the insect with a propeller. Price is around $1,100 or $50 a month. The first confirmed kill was a moth, not a mosquito, the demo ran on external motion-capture tracking rather than the finished onboard stack, flight time is about three minutes, and the company's malaria-eradication claims have no field trials or third-party validation yet.

Illustration for the Walden Robotics seed round story
roboticsmoney

Walden Robotics left stealth with a $300 million seed round

Walden Robotics emerged from stealth on July 15, 2026 with a $300 million seed round at a $1.1 billion valuation, a billion-dollar price tag before a Series A. The company spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January 2026, is led by MIT professor Russ Tedrake, and raised from co-leads Deviation Capital and Toyota alongside Nvidia, Boeing, Samsung Ventures and CoreWeave Ventures. Its robots, humanoid upper bodies on wheeled bases rather than bipeds, have been working real shifts at a Toyota plant in North America since February.

Illustration for the Xiaomi robot cameraman story
robotics

Xiaomi's robot demo has another robot behind the camera

Footage released July 31, 2026 and reported by Xinhua shows a Xiaomi humanoid robot performing tasks in a work environment, with the reveal that the camera operator filming it is also a humanoid robot. It is a promotional video, but the demonstration is two robots holding different roles in the same space. Xiaomi has run humanoids in its EV factory since earlier this year, describing them as being like interns.