China has launched the Humanoid Full Lifecycle Management Service Platform, assigning every humanoid robot a unique digital ID from production through recycling, with more than 28,000 robots across 200 models already registered under the national initiative.
JD.com has announced the world’s first humanoid robot auction as part of its 2026 618 shopping festival campaign, with Unitree Robotics and Noetix Robotics among companies already integrated into JD’s JoyInside robotics platform.
A Unitree humanoid robot fell twice and had to be dragged off stage while performing Michael Jackson’s moonwalk at an event in Shenzhen, in a video that accumulated more than 5 million views and renewed debate about the gap between demonstration capability and real-world reliability.
UK-based Humanoid has signed a manufacturing agreement with Bosch following a successful proof of concept at Bosch’s logistics facility in Bühl, Germany, with Bosch to serve as contract manufacturer for the HMND 01 humanoid robot for the European market.
GigaAI has unveiled the SeeLight S1, China’s first general-purpose household humanoid robot, with plans to deploy it free of charge in Wuhan family homes in the first half of 2027 and a target hardware price below 100,000 yuan by June of that year.
Ouster has launched Rev8, the world’s first mass-produced native color lidar sensor, capturing 3D spatial and color data simultaneously on a single chip, eliminating the need for separate camera calibration and reducing the complexity of autonomous sensing stacks.
Elon Musk predicted at Forbes’ Innovator 250 Celebration that between 100 million and one billion humanoid robots will arrive within five years and that digital intelligence will surpass all human brainpower by 2031, as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang separately forecast AI driving global GDP to $500 trillion.
Boston Dynamics has published a technical blog explaining how Atlas learned to lift and carry objects exceeding 100 pounds using reinforcement learning trained across millions of GPU-parallelized simulations, with the behavior developed within weeks of the robot’s public debut.
Hyundai Motor Group has outlined plans to deploy more than 25,000 Atlas humanoid robots across Hyundai and Kia manufacturing facilities, targeting 30,000-unit annual production capacity by 2028 and domestic U.S. actuator manufacturing at 300,000 units per year.
Figure AI staged a 10-hour parcel sorting contest between an intern and its Figure 03 humanoid robot. The human won by 192 packages but finished with a near-broken forearm. Figure AI’s CEO Brett Adcock declared it the last time a human will win.
South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT has launched a 50.4 billion won program to develop a domestic AI humanoid platform for medical and caregiving settings, with LG Electronics, KAIST, and ten other institutions participating under KIST’s leadership.
A video of a Unitree humanoid and an EngineAI robot trading punches and kicks in a San Francisco Bay Area storefront has gone viral, billed by organizers as the first public fight between robots from two different manufacturers.
Unitree Robotics has unveiled the GD01, a manned mecha the company describes as the world’s first production-ready civilian mecha vehicle, weighing approximately 500 kilograms including the driver and starting at 3.9 million yuan ($650,000).
Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology have developed a soft robotic arm modeled on the elephant trunk’s muscular architecture, capable of handling fragile objects and heavy loads with the same system, using 3D-printed pneumatic actuators and integrated optical sensing.
UBTECH Robotics and Hitachi China have signed a strategic cooperation agreement to deploy Walker S2 humanoid robots across Hitachi’s manufacturing operations, with elevator production already in active testing at Hitachi Elevator’s facility.
