RobotHOT

Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center Co., Ltd. brought its NAVIAI humanoid robots to the 16th Smart City and Intelligent Economy Expo, which opened in Ningbo on Friday, showcasing real-world applications in apparel manufacturing and smart retail. The company said its robots are moving into real scenarios to perform real tasks, backed by a full-stack, self-developed product system. It is targeting two ends of the market: production sites that demand efficiency, precision, production-line compatibility and stable operation, and consumer settings that require natural interaction, environmental adaptability and flexible service. In apparel manufacturing, Zhejiang Humanoid has focused on flexible production, where soft fabrics are prone to wrinkling, collapsing and unpredictable deformation. Over two years, it said it moved from template-machine operations to...

At the JDDiscovery 2026 main forum, JD.com projected its five-year procurement targets on screen: 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles and 100,000 drones. The audience included more than 100 hardware manufacturers and dozens of investment firms, many expecting humanoid robots to feature on the list. None appeared. On exhibition zones flanking the stage, JD’s Wolf-series machines handled warehouse tasks: Dilang shuttled goods between racks, Canglang picked orders in narrow aisles, and Dulang completed campus deliveries. Not a single bipedal robot was on display. JD unveiled six new Wolf-series robot models at the event. The omission of humanoids was no oversight. With China’s largest fulfillment network, JD’s procurement blueprint signals a clear verdict: humanoid robots are not yet commercially viable...

Robot training data startup XDOF is in late-stage talks for a Series B round at a valuation of about $1.2 billion, led by 8VC, just three months after closing a $70 million Series A. Annualized revenue has approached $50 million, serving about 20 clients, including several frontier AI labs. Founded in 2024 by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO), XDOF collects real-world teleoperation data to train general-purpose robots. Unlike large language models, robots have no internet-scale off-the-shelf data to draw on. XDOF’s business is to fill that gap.

What happens if robot model training data is expanded from 300 hours to 30,000 hours? Can robotic systems, similar to large language models, continuously gain new capabilities as datasets grow? AGIBOT’s newly released native World Action Model (WAM), GE-Act 2.0, systematically answers that question for the first time. Unlike mainstream approaches that build upon existing video generation models, every parameter of GE-Act 2.0 — including core modules for visual representation, future prediction and action forecasting — is initialized from scratch and trained end-to-end on embodied manipulation data. After pre-training, the model undergoes zero-shot real robot tests on unfamiliar scenes and unseen objects without fine-tuning or demonstration for benchmark tasks. The evaluation covers 100 atomic tasks, 20 skill categories and two...

Maven Robotics, a California-based startup developing general-purpose robots for industrial work, said on Thursday it raised $100 million in Series A funding to expand its logistics and manufacturing platform. The round included RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures, among others. Maven will use the proceeds to scale deployments and advance its system as it moves beyond palletizing and tote handling into broader industrial tasks. The company cited U.S. labor shortages expected to worsen as demand grows. It says its platform combines hardware, software and AI across robot, fleet and factory levels, and connects deployment data through a Maven network designed to share learning across systems. It targets industrial applications requiring reliable performance over multiple shifts. CEO Hamza Derbas, who...

Lightwheel and Peritas AI announced they have formed a strategic partnership to bring robots into perioperative healthcare workflows by combining infrastructure and orchestration technologies to enable deployment in clinical environments. According to the companies, the collaboration will integrate Peritas AI’s orchestration platform with Lightwheel’s physical AI infrastructure, allowing robotic systems to be trained, validated and operated within real-world hospital workflows. The companies said the multi-phase initiative, valued at about $56 million, could support deployment of up to 200 humanoid robots across 2026 and 2027. The companies noted healthcare operations, particularly in perioperative settings, remain highly fragmented, spanning sterile processing, operating rooms, logistics and equipment coordination across disconnected systems. The partnership is designed to address those gaps by enabling continuous, real-time...

Chinese robotics company Unitree said it has fully open-sourced an upgraded version of its general-purpose humanoid foundation model, UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, setting new state-of-the-art results on multiple global open-source embodied model benchmarks. The model can perform both tabletop manipulation and whole-body mobile manipulation with a single model, enabling cross-task and cross-end-effector generalization, Unitree said. It achieves a “one-model-driven, whole-body coordination” effect, the company added. Unitree said UnifoLM-WLA-1.0 was trained on large-scale general-purpose multimodal perception and understanding datasets and incorporates interaction-centric world modeling, significantly strengthening spatial perception and scene understanding. It outperformed several open-source competitors in China and overseas on multiple embodied reasoning benchmarks, with some capabilities comparable to mainstream closed-source models, according to the company. In real-robot tests, a single model completed...

Inclusion 2026, officially the 2026 Inclusion · Conference on the Bund, runs Sept. 9–12 in Shanghai under the theme “Building the AI Economy Together”. Hosted annually by Ant Group since 2020 with official government support, the four-day event convenes over 600 global academics, entrepreneurs and investors, alongside 300 tech exhibitors, cementing its international standing as a key AI industry summit. The event comprises a 15,000-square-metre tech exhibition, one main forum and 40 themed sessions, plus Developer Day, VC meetups and a new tech talent fair. It also debuts its first AI Art Festival, merging tech innovation with digital art creation. Top global speakers headline the conference, including Nobel laureates Thomas Sargent and Philippe Aghion, leading Chinese academicians, and executives from...