A modified Unitree G1 humanoid robot named Pemba reached the summit of Ecuador’s Chimborazo volcano at over 6,000 meters altitude, walking independently on sections below 30 degrees incline during a 16-hour climb, as the team sets its sights on Mount Everest.
BMW has launched its Leipzig humanoid robot pilot with Hexagon’s Aeon platform targeting battery assembly and component manufacturing, while publishing detailed results from the Spartanburg deployment with Figure AI in which a Figure 02 robot supported production of 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles over ten months.
Australian startup Aquila has set two world records in laser power transfer – the highest power ever beamed by laser and the longest sustained delivery – by continuously powering a moving warehouse robot for 24 hours using 4 kWh of wirelessly transmitted energy.
ASUS has unveiled two AI-powered robots at Computex 2026 – the Kairo autonomous service robot for healthcare and commercial environments, and a next-generation companion robot for home elder care – both orchestrated by the company’s new Maestro AI platform.
China is developing an autonomous operation robot for its Chang’e-8 lunar mission, planned for around 2028, designed to deploy instruments, collect samples, and support infrastructure construction near the Moon’s south pole using a wheeled chassis with a humanoid torso and dual robotic arms.
Computex Taipei has introduced a dedicated AI robotics section for the first time at its 2026 edition, with exhibitors including E Ink, Hiwin Technologies, and Intel showcasing physical AI hardware, robotic arms, and edge computing platforms across a four-day program at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center.
EngineAI has opened a smart manufacturing facility in Shenzhen’s Honghualing district capable of producing one T800 humanoid robot every 15 minutes, with a second 10,000-unit capacity plant planned for Zhengzhou following a $200 million Series B that valued the company at over $1.4 billion.
China’s National and Local Co-Built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center will open a 5,000 square-meter training facility in Shanghai in July, hosting over 100 robot types from more than a dozen manufacturers to build shared cross-platform training data.
Across delivery, medicine, construction, agriculture, and defense, robots are moving from controlled pilots into real-world operations at the same time – a convergence economist Richard Baldwin has called “Globotics”, the combined force of globalization and robotics reshaping how work gets done.
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.
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.
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.
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.