Humanoid robots from Figure, Unitree, Tesla Optimus and others, plus robot arms, embodied AI and self-driving cars.
Unitree just teased a new humanoid robot nicknamed "Superman" that can hit a top speed of 12.66 m/s and jump 2 meters high from a standing start. With 0.85-meter legs and just over three months in development, the company claims it already beats all human records, with more performance gains expected soon.
PaXini AI just launched the PXCap Pro, a 300g data collection glove designed to capture high-quality human hand demonstrations for robot training. It packs tactile sensors sensitive down to 0.1 Newtons, a wrist-mounted 165° wide-angle camera, and magnetic-resistant joint encoders. By outputting standardized physical data straight from hardware, it tackles the real bottleneck of teaching robots delicate tasks like packaging or lab handling.
Chinese startup Arkshel Robotics just revealed a shapeshifting robot prototype called MX01. The machine can switch between a bipedal humanoid and a four-legged walker, then dock with an industrial drone module for aerial transport, with a wheeled mode in the works. Why it matters: it offers extreme terrain flexibility for complex missions, though packing so many configurations into one machine inevitably multiplies mechanical points of failure.
Dyna Robotics just unveiled DYNA-2, a world-action model trained on over 1 million hours of first-person human video with zero robot data in pre-training. By watching how objects react to human hands, the system builds physical intuition and transfers to real robot hardware after just a few hours of fine-tuning. It shows robots can skip tedious teleoperation data and learn directly from the way we move.
Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot can now navigate back to a charging station and swap its own depleted battery in less than three minutes. Standard charging takes around 90 minutes for a four-hour runtime, so quick autonomous swaps remove a major bottleneck for running non-stop factory shifts.
Google DeepMind just launched Gemini Robotics ER 2, an embodied reasoning model designed to act as a high-level brain for robots. It tracks tasks via live video with 91.3% moment-finding accuracy, plans next steps while moving, and coordinates multiple robots at once. Why it matters: it eliminates the awkward "stop-and-think" pauses that keep physical AI stuck in labs.
The Trump administration just directed the FCC to ban imports of new Chinese humanoid and quadruped robots, alongside connected power inverters. Officials claim the hardware poses cybersecurity and data theft risks to the U.S. AI buildout. The move aims to wall off critical data center supply chains while forcing manufacturing back stateside.
Lunar Outpost just announced its next moon rover will use Nvidia Jetson chips to run its lidar system, potentially putting the first GPU on the lunar surface. Slated to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket before the end of the year, the mission will test if commercial physical AI chips can survive cosmic radiation and freezing lunar nights on minimal power.
Black Forest Labs just teamed up with mimic robotics to turn its new FLUX 3 multimodal foundation model into FLUX-mimic, a video-action AI running on robots in Audi factories. By tapping into the physics FLUX learns during video generation, a lightweight decoder translates scene dynamics into physical manipulation in under 80ms on a single RTX 5090.
Spatial intelligence startup World Labs just acquired robotics company SceniX to bring its models into physical systems. The team argues the next robotics breakthrough relies on combining spatial intelligence, world models, and real-world learning loops. Detailed capabilities from SceniX will be shared soon.
Unitree just demonstrated UnifoLM-OminiA-0.3, an omni-modal AI model designed to handle real-time home-care tasks through whole-body mobile manipulation. The autonomous system can interpret multimodal inputs while resisting physical disturbances, successfully performing chores like adjusting a hospital bed. It is a tangible step toward putting robotic caregivers into real homes.
Nvidia and Stanford researchers just unveiled RoboTTT, scaling a robot's visuomotor context to 8,000 timesteps—roughly five minutes of continuous real-time control. By using Test-Time Training to compress action history into fast weights without adding inference latency, the robot aced a 10-stage assembly task where traditional baselines failed. Why it matters: Context length is emerging as the next big scaling law for physical AI.
YC-backed startup Tornyol just revealed an autonomous drone that uses ultrasonic sonar to track mosquito wingbeats and suck them into tiny propellers. Built by an ex-missile engineer, each drone covers up to five acres per charge. While a demo showed it intercepting a moth, proving it against tiny, erratic mosquitoes in the wild remains a challenge.
Robotics startup 1X just unveiled a breakthrough 25-degree-of-freedom hand for its NEO humanoid robot. Driven by low-gear tendons, the IP68-rated hand features human-level dexterity that can assemble LEGO bricks, sort grapes, and screw in light bulbs. Why it matters: It turns the hand into an active perception instrument rather than a blind gripper, clearing the hardware ceiling for physical AI.
Mistral AI just introduced Robostral Navigate, an 8B embodied AI model that guides robots through unfamiliar environments using only a single RGB camera—ditching LiDAR and depth sensors entirely. It scored a 76.6% success rate on unseen R2R-CE benchmarks, outperforming leading multi-sensor systems across wheeled, legged, and flying robots.
UBTech just rolled out its U1 bionic humanoid robot series, featuring lifelike silicone skin, visible blood vessels, and emotion-driven AI that recognizes over 20 feelings. Starting at around $18,000 for a torso model and scaling up to full-body versions, it racked up over 13,000 preorders on day one.
Chinese company Yueban just debuted Xiaoban, an autonomous toilet designed for elderly and mobility-impaired users. Borrowing lidar and ultrasonic navigation from robot vacuums, the device rolls directly to users via voice or remote commands, cleans itself, and autonomously empties waste into a drainage dock or regular toilet. It is expected to cost 28,999 yuan (around $4,300) in China.
MIT researchers just developed DAAAM, an AI system that equips robots with a timestamped "4D scene graph" tracking what they saw, where, and when. Smart-batching allows it to run 10x faster in real time, letting robots answer natural-language questions about past events and boosting navigation accuracy by 28%.
Anthropic just revealed results from Project Fetch Phase Two, where Claude Opus 4.7 autonomously completed quadruped robodog setup tasks roughly 20 times faster than the fastest human team. Operating without human help via Claude Code, it wrote 10 times less code with high first-try success. It still struggles with nuanced physical fetching, but Anthropic notes we are entering the early era of physical agentic AI.
Droidup just showed off Moya, a companion humanoid robot featuring an artificial spine, body-temperature silicone skin, and a claimed 92% human gait. The bot tracks expressions and mimics chores, though observers noted the face looks stiff and demo footage appears heavily edited.
