China

Chinese robotics company Unitree Robotics has launched a new five-fingered dexterous hand, the Dex5-S, featuring 22 degrees of freedom per hand and a design that matches the size of a human hand. It is priced from 39,900 yuan. In a demonstration video released by Unitree, the Dex5-S picked up a spoon, cut paper with scissors and tossed and caught a lemon, showing capabilities in fine object manipulation, multi-finger coordination and dynamic grasping. The Dex5-S upgrades the earlier model in both degrees of freedom and dimensions. All 22 motors support direct drive, backdriving and dual-encoder control, according to Unitree. It also adds a roll degree of freedom for the little finger, which the company said improves whole-hand dexterity. Unitree said the...

A humanoid robot weighing 37.15 kg pulled a 1,434 kg car 9.92 metres on two legs in Beijing, setting a Guinness World Record for the heaviest vehicle pulled by a humanoid robot under 40 kg, its developers said. The robot was powered by Thor, a whole-body control model jointly developed by Chinese robotics firm XYZ Embodied AI Co. (XYZ), Ltd. and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). The challenge took place in Beijing’s Yizhuang. Developers said the feat was not merely a display of brute force. The core difficulty was maintaining balance and coordinating the whole body while withstanding a large, changing external force. Unlike running, jumping or dancing, pulling a car is a strong-interaction task: the robot’s movement...

Beijing-based embodied AI startup Livsyn Robotics said it has completed a Series A funding round of more than 100 million yuan, jointly invested by Huafang Capital, Daohe Yuanqi under Daohe Longterm, Suwen Electric Energy and an unnamed leading strategic industrial investor in the embodied AI sector. Founded in February 2023, Livsyn positions itself as an embodied AI infrastructure provider. It focuses on RUDA (Robotics Unified Device Architecture), a fully self-developed unified architecture for embodied models that aims to build a cross-embodiment general foundation for robots. RUDA forms a self-evolving closed loop covering data collection, model training, robot execution and feedback. Its general Harness system supports heterogeneous hardware including humanoid robots, various dexterous hands and industrial grippers. Within the system, RUDA...

PITTSBURGH, Sept 27 – The International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2026, a major robotics conference, opened in Pittsburgh on Sept. 27, with Chinese sensor maker LinkTouch showcasing a full product matrix that put Chinese-made robot core components in the spotlight. Six-axis force/torque sensors are a key sensing component for flexible robot manipulation and are often described as a crown jewel of high-end equipment manufacturing. Overseas companies long monopolized the technology, keeping prices high and delivery cycles long and limiting mass commercialization of humanoid robots. Chinese firms such as LinkTouch have pushed the mass-production cost of high-end six-axis sensors down to the tens of thousands of yuan level through independent innovation and scaled manufacturing, the company said, removing...

ZHUHAI, Sept 24 – China’s AGIBOT ranked first globally in humanoid robot shipments and revenue in the first half of 2026, as the global market extended explosive growth, according to a new report from IDC. Global humanoid robot shipments approached 25,000 units in H1 2026, up 432.1% year on year, IDC said, as the industry accelerates from technology validation to commercial application. China’s shipments exceeded 19,000 units, accounting for about 77.9% of the global total. AGIBOT shipped more than 8,600 units, giving it a runaway lead globally. The company is deploying flagship projects in factories, cultural tourism and retail, backed by its fully self-developed, full-stack “Three Intelligences in One” technology framework and large-scale mass production and delivery capabilities, IDC said. IDC’s...

A robotic hand developed by Chinese firm AGILINK has been taught foundational Suzhou embroidery techniques by master craftswoman Fu Xianghong, including separating silk threads, threading a needle, stretching fabric on an embroidery hoop and stitching. The demonstration puts a robotic hand to work with one of the most delicate and deformable materials it can encounter: silk. A silk thread can bend, slip and change shape with slight changes in contact. Splitting silk requires one finger to separate individual strands while others maintain support and tension; twisting thread requires opposing fingertips to maintain contact while allowing the thread to turn. Threading a needle and stitching add further demands on positioning, force and coordination. The OmniHand 3 Ultra combines 21 active degrees...

BEIJING, Sept 28 – Chinese embodied AI company Astribot announced the winning apps from the second stop of its Astribot OS hackathon, where 15 teams produced runnable robot applications in 36 hours under a format that generates robot apps from a single sentence. The apps covered elderly care, entertainment and scientific research. Astribot said all were deployed on real robots without teams writing low-level control systems from scratch, marking a step from embodied AI research toward scenario-based applications. Organizers and mentors said the event showed a shift from expert customization to platform assembly. Developers built on Astribot OS’s packaged Meta/Skill modules, SDK, motion control and safety capabilities, rather than handling motion control, communications and hardware drivers themselves. “This is not...

LimX Dynamics and Kyland Technology on Monday unveiled what they called China’s first humanoid robot equipped with a domestically developed electronic architecture, marking the first end-to-end integration of domestic industrial-grade real-time communications in a complex humanoid robot system. The launch event was held in Yichang, Hubei province. The companies said it was the first time a domestic electronic architecture had entered a complete humanoid robot system, calling it a milestone in the development of embodied intelligence. Humanoid robots need to transmit large volumes of data and commands among perception, decision-making and motion-control systems in real time to operate autonomously in complex real-world settings. Communication latency, jitter and system coordination efficiency can directly affect control precision, dynamic stability and task safety,...

SHANGHAI, Sept 23 – Maniformer Chairman and CEO Yao Maoqing launched Mifengpai, which the company calls the world’s first full-category, high-quality physical AI data crowdsourcing service platform, at a global launch event in Shanghai. Mifengpai opens physical AI data collection tasks to the public. Users take tasks through the Mifengpai app, wear MEgo devices to perform designated operations in real scenarios such as retail, warehousing, manufacturing and homes, and receive payment based on the duration of validated effective data, becoming “robot trainers.” “The best teacher of physical AI is everyone who lives life earnestly,” Yao said. Mifengpai aims to turn real operating experience scattered across daily life and industries into data that robots can learn, train on and reuse, he...