Tag: Embodied ai

The humanoid dilemma: Chinese robots in the US — espionage risk or essential hardware?

Unitree G1 at $13,500 is flooding US labs, but experts warn of data exfiltration risks. The dilemma: China makes the cheapest hardware, the US wants to build the AI brains. The American Security Robotics Act attempts to resolve this.

Physical AI brings new governance demands for autonomous systems

As physical AI systems scale across factories and infrastructure, a critical governance gap is emerging: who defines the boundaries of AI that can issue instructions to machines, and how? The industry is still working out the answers.

Eka Robotics Exits Stealth with VFA Model — Betting on Force, Not Imitation

Cambridge startup Eka Robotics unveiled the Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model, training robots in simulation using force sensing rather than human imitation. Founders include MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, co-creator of the SAC algorithm.

Figure AI Opens Its Campus: Never Fall Protocol, Offline AI, and a $500/Month Home Robot Lease

Figure AI has opened its Sunnyvale campus to journalists, revealing the Never Fall resilience protocol, 2kW wireless charging, and a $400–$600/month home robot lease model. CEO Brett Adcock detailed the Vulcan AI system and the planned Figure 4.

Meta Acquires Assured Robot Intelligence to Build the Android of Humanoid Robotics

Meta Platforms has acquired ARI, a startup building AI models for humanoid robots. The team joins Meta Superintelligence Labs as the company bids to become the foundational hardware and software platform for the entire robotics industry.

ROBOTERA Closes $280M Round as Thousands of Humanoids Deploy in Logistics

Beijing-based ROBOTERA closed a $280 million strategic round led by SF Group, bringing two-month fundraising to $350 million and valuation past $1.4 billion. Thousands of L7 humanoid robots are already deployed across Chinese logistics centers operated by China Post and SF Group.

Unitree Expands R1 Line with Dual-Arm Platform Starting at $4,290

Unitree Robotics has launched the Dual-Arm Humanoid Robot series, a modular dual-arm platform in fixed and wheeled configurations starting at $4,290. The pricing targets AI researchers and developers building embodied intelligence systems.

Figure scales to one robot per hour at BotQ: the Figure 03 production breakthrough

Figure has scaled Figure 03 production 24x in 120 days, from one robot per day to one per hour at its BotQ facility. Over 350 units have been produced, and the new System 0 AI model enables zero-shot stair traversal via vision-conditioned whole-body control.

MagicLab Bets $1 Billion on a Robotics Developer Ecosystem

Chinese robotics firm MagicLab took the stage in Silicon Valley to unveil a next-generation humanoid, a foundational world model called Magic-Mix, and a $1 billion developer ecosystem program. The announcements, made at the company's own Global Embodied Intelligence Summit, represent one of the most operationally detailed strategic pivots from a Chinese robotics company in 2026.

World Action Models: What They Are and How They Work

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become the dominant approach to building AI-driven robot control systems over the past several years. Their emerging successor — the World Action Model (WAM) — represents a distinct architectural category that replaces direct image-to-action mapping with video generation as an intermediate planning mechanism. DreamZero, developed by a team at NVIDIA and published in February 2026 as a research paper on arXiv, is the first publicly described system of this class to operate in real time on a real robot. Understanding how it works matters because it points toward a plausible direction for the next generation of robotic foundation models.

ShengShu unveils Motubrain: one AI brain for every robot platform

ShengShu Technology has unveiled Motubrain, a World Action Model that unifies video generation, world modeling, and action control in a single Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. Backed by a $293M Series B from Alibaba Cloud, the model tops RoboTwin 2.0 with 96% success across 50 randomized tasks.

AI² Robotics otwiera platformę dla deweloperów robotów humanoidalnych. Jaki jest status tej chińskiej firmy?

Roboty humanoidalne w fabrykach: co już robią, a czego jeszcze nie potrafią w 2026 roku

Maniformer oficjalnie startuje: chińska platforma danych dla robotów wchodzi na rynek z własną infrastrukturą

AGIBOT ogłasza Genie Envisioner 2.0: modele świata stają się symulatorem fizyki

Generalist AI przedstawia GEN-1: Czy to koniec ery programowanych robotów?

Europejski wyścig humanoidów: Czy roboty uratują przemysł UE?

Japonia stawia na „Physical AI”: Powstaną globalne centra badawcze robotyki nowej generacji

WIRobotics jedynym producentem humanoidów w prestiżowym programie AWS i NVIDIA

Sim2Real: Przenoszenie algorytmów sterowania AI z symulacji do świata rzeczywistego