DeepSeek has invested 140.8 million yuan in Unitree’s Shanghai IPO, acquiring a 2.31% strategic placement stake, and the two Hangzhou-based companies have agreed to jointly develop AI models for humanoid robots, targeting the physical-world reasoning capability that current language models lack.
The UK government has opened a £20 million funding round for field robots capable of planting, tending, and harvesting crops, as part of its Farming Innovation Programme targeting seasonal worker shortages and a broader £200 million farming technology investment by 2030.
Researchers have developed Milo, an autonomous robotic guide dog priced below $2,000 to manufacture, designed to help blind and visually impaired people navigate indoor and outdoor environments without pre-mapped routes, cloud connectivity, or an internet connection.
FedEx is expanding its use of Dexterity’s AI-enabled trailer-loading robot at its Hagerstown, Maryland hub, while Pickle Robot and Ambi Robotics have integrated their systems to provide an end-to-end trailer-to-warehouse automated solution for Fortune 500 logistics customers.
Unitree Robotics is expected to be valued at more than 50 billion yuan following its Shanghai IPO, according to sponsor Citic Securities, as the company reports first-half 2026 revenue of approximately 1.1 billion yuan, up 35-45% year-on-year, ahead of its planned listing this month.
Agile Robots, which supplies automation to Foxconn and Tata Electronics for iPhone production in India, has acquired a majority stake in Bengaluru-based XNG Automation, a 200-person system integration specialist with clients including Bosch and Toyota, to expand local production capacity.
BYD will unveil its first humanoid robot at its Di Space showrooms in August 2026, presenting a functional production model that attendees can interact with, as the EV and battery giant enters the humanoid race with manufacturing scale as its primary competitive advantage.
New York state senators have introduced legislation that would prohibit AI-enabled humanoid robots from performing teaching responsibilities in public schools, following a New York Focus report on Salamanca City Central School District’s plan to deploy a Realbotix humanoid as a classroom teaching assistant.
Reimagine Robotics, founded by former Google DeepMind Applied Robotics team leaders, has emerged from stealth with robots that workers can train, correct, and adapt without specialist programming, with deployments already active in plastics manufacturing and hard drive disassembly.
A LexisNexis report ranking global humanoid robot startups by patent asset strength places six Chinese companies in the top ten, with the top five all from China, as Chinese patent filings in control and planning architectures grew fivefold over the past decade.
Google DeepMind has launched Gemini Robotics 2.0, a three-model suite covering embodied reasoning, robot action generation, and on-device inference, with a new ASIMOV-Agentic safety benchmark and the on-device model adapting to new robot hardware with around 200 examples.
DoorDash has earned FAA Part 135 air carrier certification and launched DoorDash Air, its in-house drone delivery program, becoming one of only eight drone operators in the U.S. to clear the five-stage federal certification process.
Google DeepMind has launched Gemini Robotics ER 2, its most capable embodied reasoning model for robotics, introducing multi-robot collaboration, continuous video-based task progress classification, and precision moment-finding, now available to developers via the Gemini API and Google AI Studio.
The FCC has blocked new foreign-produced humanoid and quadruped robot models from entering the US market, with Chinese manufacturers expected to face the greatest disruption.
PNDbotics has demonstrated its Adam humanoid riding a robotic horse and firing an arrow at a target from 20 metres, highlighting advances in whole-body coordination and dynamic balance.