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SuperDog: 5,000 Orders at IFA and a Sunrise Chip Under the Hood
Vbot booked over 5,000 SuperDog orders from 16 partners at IFA 2026. The quadruped carries 12 kg, navigates with LiDAR and UWB, and runs on a D-Robotics Sunrise chip. Cumulative sales top 13,000 units.
Palladyne AI and FANUC America Partner on Industrial Robot AI
Palladyne AI and FANUC America announced a collaboration around the Palladyne IQ platform for industrial robots. Scope covers motion planning, teleoperation and simulation training. No figures, dates or model names.
Humanoids at the Front: China and the US Test Combat Robots
An analysis of 100+ Chinese military documents shows PLA work on humanoids for urban combat. Norinco showed the 90 kg Fuxi, while the US has one firm in the niche. The barrier is the battery, not the law.
Dynamic Creatures Exits Stealth as Boston Dynamics' Entertainment Arm
Boston-based Dynamic Creatures is now Boston Dynamics' official entertainment and hospitality partner. A former CSO and a former research lead from that company run it, with Marc Raibert among the angels. The round size was not disclosed.
Figure's Index Hits 69,943 Weekly Users and 35 Minutes a Second
Figure's Index grew from 44,000 to almost 70,000 weekly users in ten days. The app pays people to film everyday tasks on their phones — $15M disbursed so far. The data feeds the Helix model.
Video as Policy: Markov Robotics Controls a Hand With LTX-2.5
Markov Robotics uses the LTX-2.5 video model as a manipulation policy: the robot generates footage of the completed task and executes the motion it implies. A 1:192 compression ratio makes it computable, but no benchmarks have been published.
Tokenmaxxing: Firms Burn AI Budgets They Cannot Justify
Uber burned its annual AI coding budget by April with no demonstrated link to product quality. Gartner forecasts $207 billion in agentic software spend for 2026.
OpenAI Targets an Automated AI Researcher by March 2028
The share of OpenAI's research compute going to internal coding inference rose a hundredfold in six months. Kelsey Piper argues losing control of AI is not a side effect but the plan.
XPENG's IRON Enters Production: 76 DOF and 2,250 TOPS
The first IRON humanoid has rolled off the line in Guangzhou. 76 degrees of freedom, 2,250 TOPS across three Turing chips and 85% of the supply chain shared with XPENG's cars. External customers wait until 2027.
Zhipu and MiniMax: Similar Losses, a Fourfold Valuation Gap
Both Chinese labs reported H1 2026 results. Zhipu is valued four times higher than MiniMax despite a comparable business scale.
Dreamer's Author Left DeepMind to Build Planning Agents
Danijar Hafner, author of the Dreamer series, runs a stealth startup in San Francisco. He is betting on world models rather than LLM scaling — today's one serious alternative for agents acting in the physical world.
Aletta, an Autonomous Blood-Draw Robot, Clears the FDA
Dutch company Vitestro received FDA De Novo authorization for Aletta. First-stick success was 94.5% across a trial of more than 1,600 patients.