Topic
Field of designing and commercializing human-like, bipedal or wheeled robots, led by makers like Unitree and LG.
RoboParty debuted RP1 at IROS 2026, calling it the first full-stack open-source bipedal humanoid, with joint torque peaking at 160 Nm. Labs weighing it against closed robots will need its license terms and published file list before counting on the right to change it.
Reality
ETH Zurich engineers trained an off-the-shelf, 20-joint robot hand to walk on its uneven fingertips across 14 indoor and outdoor environments. Earlier walking hands only balanced after their fingers were rebuilt to one length, while this one keeps the thumb and uneven fingers that make a hand good with tools.
Reality
FCC's Covered List has restricted new imports of humanoid and four-legged robots since July, in a market where Chinese firms ship 80 to 97% of humanoids. The cost to US builders turns on whether the list grows to cover the Chinese actuators and magnets they still buy.
Reality
Three down sessions took the stock back toward what a Chinese listing normally does on day one. The valuation it is falling from has barely moved.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
OpenAI's careers page now lists 27 robotics openings, up from 11 in May, with published base pay running from $177,000 to $500,000. The top of that range attaches to data infrastructure work, and the robotics software job tops out at $325,000.
Reality
Three weeks after Unitree's Shanghai debut rose fivefold and then gave most of it back, the CSRC has told robotics applicants to show recurring revenue and a path to profit, a test two pending applicants fail.
Reality
The two-person, YC-backed startup has published enough of HALE 1.0's spec sheet to check the machine, down to 22 actuators and nine pounds of lift per arm, while the hourly rate it quotes still needs a duty cycle before anyone can price it.
Reality
The company says its Digit 5 humanoid can work safely beside people, holds more than $300 million of multiyear orders, and does not expect general availability until the end of 2027. It plans to list at $2.5 billion.
Reality
China's National Data Administration says it will develop standards for embodied AI data, ten days after seven companies asked for exactly that. More than 70 Chinese sites are already recording the hours.
Reality
Mecka AI pays people to wear sensors while they make coffee or fix cars, and two people told TechCrunch that Sequoia is leading a round at about $500 million, three months after a $60 million round. The terms are not final.
Reality
Crunchbase counted 29 additions to its unicorn board in August, worth about $63bn, and across the nine AI, software and semiconductor entrants with disclosed terms, every dollar of new cash set roughly eight dollars of paper.
Reality
The floor on Figure's compute commitment is about twice all the equity it has disclosed raising, and the vendor writing that contract now owns a piece of the customer owing it. Whether the $3.5bn is take-or-pay is undisclosed.
Reality
The contract value is public and the size of Nscale's stake in Figure is not, which leaves anyone reading a $51bn backlog ahead of a US listing unable to tell how much of that line the seller helped pay for.
Reality
State money is arriving faster than autonomy, and inside the training centres the unit of production is still a human hour rather than a robot hour, which is what actually sets the price of the data.
Reality
Figure is buying compute the way a frontier lab buys it. The announcements skip the numbers that matter most: how much of the ceiling the initial money covers, and how many megawatts Barstow will draw.
Reality
Getting Tesla from $1.43tn to $8.5tn means adding $7.07tn. A $1tn option package against that gap works out to 14.1 cents of every new dollar - cheap if it buys a million robotaxis, expensive if it merely buys an executive's attention.
Reality
Chinese issuers are raising money into a domestic bid that then multiplies it by five, which says more about rationed supply than about durable AI earnings. Shein, the non-AI name in the queue, got the residual.
Reality
The Verge's tally from five days in the National Speed Skating Oval is worth more to anyone buying a humanoid than an edited demo reel, because it shows the spread of outcomes instead of the best take.
Reality
Beijing is funding humanoid output at electric-vehicle scale, but the data that makes the machines useful still arrives one teleoperated attempt at a time, and the yield on those attempts is what sets the schedule.
Reality
Videos of collapsing sprinters travelled further than the entry list, though it is the entry list an automation roadmap has to price, with 12,800 Chinese-built humanoids behind it last year, about nine in ten worldwide.
Reality
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