MicroWatt Controls has launched the ExR-2.5, the first inspection robot certified under the new UL 6260 framework for potentially explosive industrial environments in North America, targeting oil and gas, LNG, and chemical facilities where worker exposure to hazardous conditions drives adoption.
Scientists at Nanyang Technological University Singapore have developed a 3D-printed diving suit that allows remote-controlled cyborg cockroaches to survive underwater for up to three hours, following their deployment during Operation Lionheart after the March 2025 Myanmar earthquake.
Researchers at Keio University and MIT Media Lab have developed a soft floating robot that uses helium buoyancy and flapping fins to hover silently indoors, establishing the first systematic design framework for soft floating robots as residential companions.
1X Technologies has unveiled NEO Hands, a 25-degree-of-freedom tendon-driven robotic hand system for its NEO home humanoid, combining distributed tactile sensing, AI-assisted manipulation, and fast actuation loops to enable dexterous handling of everyday objects in residential environments.
Robbyant, an embodied AI company within Ant Group, has unveiled LingBot-VA 2.0, an autoregressive world model built from scratch for physical-world robot control rather than adapted from digital video generation, achieving 150 Hz closed-loop control on a single GPU and adapting to new tasks with as few as 20 demonstrations.
Researchers have published ThorArena, a simulation-based benchmark that evaluates humanoid robots under realistic physical forces by replaying human interaction data against virtual robots, revealing substantial performance differences that conventional empty-space benchmarks conceal.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs is working with ITRI and six industry partners to develop indigenous four-legged robot technology, trained on NVIDIA’s Taipei-1 supercomputer across 4,000 virtual robots, targeting the global quadruped market projected to grow from under $1 billion to over $4 billion by 2035.
MIT and EPFL engineers have built a 300-gram flapping-wing robot that swims through water and transitions to flight without paddling, published in Science, inspired by diving birds and targeting oceanographic data collection in environments too dangerous for conventional vessels.
UC San Diego researchers have completed two minimally invasive gallbladder removal surgeries on live pigs using a teleoperated Unitree G1 humanoid robot, published in Nature, in what is described as the world’s first surgery performed by a humanoid robot controlled remotely by a surgeon.
Mistral has released Robostral Navigate, an 8B embodied navigation model that achieves 76.6% on the R2R-CE unseen benchmark using only a single RGB camera, outperforming systems that use LiDAR, depth sensors, or multiple cameras, while running on wheeled, legged, and flying robots.
Robot.com has been named the official robotics partner of LEAP East in Hong Kong, where it will deploy its R-kiwi autonomous robots for brand activations using its R-ads platform, extending a fleet that has now completed 2.5 million tasks across 20 countries.
The 2026 World Robot Conference opens in Beijing on August 19 with more than 300 exhibiting companies, a 36% increase in exhibitors from 2025, as China accounts for 90% of global humanoid robot shipments and its robotics sector revenue exceeds 90 billion yuan in the first five months of 2026.
Rémi Cadene, who developed Tesla’s Optimus AI from scratch and pioneered LeRobot at Hugging Face, has unveiled an early prototype of Northstar, UMA’s humanoid robot, targeting European manufacturing plants, logistics warehouses, and homes, with 50 potential customer conversations already underway.
UBTECH has revealed pricing for its U1 companion humanoid at a Shenzhen launch event, ranging from 119,800 yuan for the torso-only Lite version to 990,000 yuan for the full-body Ultra, as orders crossed 10,000 units and UBTECH shares jumped 17% on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Weave Robotics has launched Isaac 1, a wheeled home robot priced at $7,999 or $449 per month that handles room tidying and laundry autonomously with remote human operator backup, with California deliveries beginning fall 2026 and a U.S. rollout through 2027.