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Dyna Robotics’ Taku tackles an hour-long laundry workflow, combining mobile manipulation with task planning as the company prepares for customer-site testing.

Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas hand has four fingers and 13 degrees of freedom, combining tool-use dexterity with a design built for simulation and manufacturing.

Figure retires most of its F.02 fleet in a Finnish foundry, with Arnold Schwarzenegger joining the film as newer humanoids take over.

Yanxi Technology’s Yansyn-X2 robot demonstrated crying on command at the 2026 Inclusion Conference in Shanghai, using a three-layer system combining conversational AI emotion detection, bionic facial actuators, and a microfluidic tear-dispensing mechanism, as part of a broader affective computing push in Chinese consumer humanoids priced from 400,000 yuan.

Unitree says 19 humanoid robots performed alongside 120 dancers at the WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 opening ceremony. The company’s video showcases coordinated movement in a live production before an audience it puts at more than 10,000.

Around 30 robots including Agibot A3 humanoids and quadrupeds marched outside Poland’s digital affairs ministry in Warsaw, chanting slogans demanding AI labor market regulation in an event organized by Democratism and met by Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski.

Tesla has begun producing Optimus robots at its Fremont factory, using the space previously occupied by Model S and X production, with initial output focused on internal factory deployment through an “Optimus Academy” rather than commercial sales, as Musk describes the scaling challenge as the hardest manufacturing problem Tesla has ever faced.

Elon Musk told the G20 meeting that humanoid robots will begin producing other robots, creating exponential self-replication, and that more than one billion humanoid robots will exist within ten years, with each robot producing approximately five times the economic output of a human worker.

Generalist AI has released GEN-1.5, a robot foundation model that achieves 59% average success on new physical tasks from a single 3-12 second demonstration with no training, rising to 83% with 10 gradient steps on 5 minutes of data, representing the first broad one-shot physical skill learning to emerge at scale.

Unitree Robotics has unveiled Superman, a new humanoid robot that achieves a standing jump of over 2 meters – exceeding the human world record of 1.90 meters – and a top speed of 12.66 meters per second, surpassing Usain Bolt’s peak of 12.42 meters per second, developed in just over three months.

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.

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.

Shanghai-based Run Robotics has unveiled a centaur-configuration robot combining a humanoid upper body with a wheeled-legged lower body, capable of carrying 100-120 kg continuously and up to 210 kg statically, designed for nuclear plants, steel mills, oil fields, mining, and emergency response.

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.

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.