Humanoids, home robots, drones and machines entering the physical world.
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.
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.
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.
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 instead of stitched-together controllers. DeepMind reports success rates up to 92% on fine dexterity tasks like knot tying with 22-degree-of-freedom hands, and says the model adapts to a new robot body in a few hours with fewer than 200 examples. ER 2 is available in Google AI Studio; the action models go to early-access partners.
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 reveal lands the same week the US banned imports of new Chinese humanoid and quadruped robots on national security grounds, cutting off China's largest export market.
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.
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.
On July 21, 2026, Samsung Electronics created the Robotics Experience (RX) Business Promotion Office, reporting directly to the CEO and led by robotics veteran Dongkun Lee, with plans to invest 19 trillion won (about $13 billion) in humanoid manufacturing facilities in Gumi, South Korea, and start producing humanoids within this year. The first robots go onto Samsung's own production lines in H2 2026 to collect data, on the way to AI autonomous factories by 2030.
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 50 cents expected, profit fell 57 percent, 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.
Researchers from KAIST and Stanford unveiled robotic garments with soft, air-powered vine robots woven into the fabric: pressurize them and the clothing climbs up the body like ivy, dressing the wearer in about 10 seconds (reported by Reuters, July 2026). The vines grow from their tips instead of dragging the whole garment, so the system works while the wearer is moving and needs no complex AI control. The team built it for people who cannot easily dress themselves and for jobs where suiting up fast matters, such as cleanrooms, firefighting and hazmat.
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.
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.
On July 16, 2026, live combat began in EngineAI's URKL (Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend) league at Shenzhen's Nanshan Cultural and Sports Center, with 32 teams selected from more than 200 entrants and a Grand Final set for December 2026 into January 2027. Every team competes on the same EngineAI T800 humanoid, a 173cm machine, so the contest is decided by software for balance, perception and impact response. The champion takes a 10kg pure gold belt valued at 10 million yuan, roughly $1.45 million.
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.
On July 3, 2026, China's CSRC approved Unitree Robotics for a Shanghai STAR Market IPO set to raise about $619 million (4.2 billion yuan), with trading expected as early as late July 2026. Unitree shipped roughly 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, around a third of the global market, and grew adjusted net profit about 674% year over year. It is one of the largest public-market bets yet on humanoid robots and embodied AI.