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Chinese embodied AI startup PHANES AI, in partnership with Tinno Mobile, launched SeePhys Hub, a wearable full-body multimodal data collection system for robot training. The system comprises a four-camera headband, two wrist bands, three waist-and-leg motion trackers and a tactile glove. PHANES said it can simultaneously collect first-person 360-degree visual data, full hand data including hand pose tracking and high-density touch, and full-body motion data including pose and force. The launch comes as robot data collection has moved from teleoperation to UMI and Ego, with devices becoming lighter and collection simpler. But PHANES said that simplification has come at a cost: Ego can record what the hands are doing, but it struggles to fully capture whole-body movement and cannot sense...

China’s AGIBOT showcased humanoid robots performing real industrial tasks at the 26th China International Industry Fair on Monday, saying its AGIBOT G2 machines are moving from single-task trials to stable, scaled deployment. The Shanghai-based company organized its exhibit around “industrial deployment,” demonstrating autonomous work in precision manufacturing, flexible assembly, semiconductor packaging and testing, and warehouse logistics. It said the display covered the full chain from data and robot bodies to production-line deployment. In optical module insertion, AGIBOT said the G2 used high-precision force-controlled arms, joint torque sensors and an in-house real-machine reinforcement learning framework to handle sub-millimeter tasks and protect gold-plated contacts. Using its Genie Studio Agent platform, a full task deployment can be set up in two to three...

Chinese embodied AI startup Astribot has raised 1 billion yuan in a new funding round, valuing the rope-driven robot maker at 15 billion yuan. Toposcend Capital, a unit of Shenzhen Investment Holdings, led the round. Hongtai Fund, Ninghai Xingtaihe Fund managed by Guanghua Sunshine, Soliton Capital and existing shareholder Xianmu followed on. It was Astribot’s fourth round in six months. Its valuation rose from 10 billion yuan to 15 billion yuan in three months, a rare pace even in China’s hot humanoid robot sector. Astribot said proceeds will fund model upgrades, hiring, commercial deployment, capacity and its three-in-one full-stack architecture spanning an AI model, embodied operating system and rope-driven body. Founder and CEO Lai Jie said investors were important “fellow...

Chinese researchers said they have developed MEgoVista, a framework that converts first-person, or ego, video into 4D motion data for training embodied AI models, addressing a gap between the growing supply of ego video and the precise motion data robots need. The paper was produced by Maniformer Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University and Xi’an Jiaotong University. Ego video has become an important source of pretraining data because it can be captured in homes, workplaces and other real environments rather than specialized laboratories. But recording an action does not automatically produce usable 4D data, meaning three-dimensional motion over time. Systems must identify the wearer’s hands, reconstruct finger poses and measure how far the hands move in space. MEgoVista is designed as an...

DexForce, an Chinese embodied-AI developer, has unveiled UNITAS, a 3D-native world action model for robot manipulation, saying it is designed to give robots a unified representation of the physical world. The company described UNITAS as the first robot-task-native 3D world model. UNITAS is built on a central premise: just as large language models unify diverse knowledge through text, embodied AI needs a native space for physical experience. DexForce argues that space should be the 3D physical world itself, rather than 2D images or latent features from which 3D relationships must be inferred. The model jointly represents observation, action and scene change in a single 3D coordinate system. Observation corresponds to the 3D positions of objects; action flow corresponds to the...

UBTECH Robotics ranked 11th with a total score of 115 on the 2026 Fortune Future 120 list, jointly released by Fortune and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), making it the highest-ranked Chinese company on the list. The list, which focuses on companies’ organic growth vitality, selected 120 companies from more than 3,500 globally based on three dimensions: growth ambition, talent density and growth culture. U.S. tech giants on the list included Nvidia at No. 16, OpenAI at No. 18, Apple at No. 55, Tesla at No. 87 and Meta at No. 120. Eleven Chinese companies were selected. UBTECH said its first-half 2026 revenue was 1.27 billion yuan, up 104.2% year on year. Overall humanoid robot sales volume rose 268.3%. Revenue from...

Anhui province unveiled an embodied intelligence innovation center on Oct. 10 at a conference held at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei. The conference, themed “AI Empowers Jianghuai, Embodied Future,” focused on technological innovation, commercialization, talent cultivation and industrial applications in embodied intelligence. It brought together academicians, university research teams, executives from leading companies, investors and alumni from home and abroad. Embodied intelligence is a key direction in the deep integration of artificial intelligence and robotics, enabling intelligent systems to move from the information space into the physical world and to perceive, decide and act in real environments. The Anhui Embodied Intelligence Innovation Center is an open ecosystem platform for embodied intelligence and robotics in...

UBTECH Robotics, dubbed China’s first listed humanoid robot firm, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Xiamen C&D Inc. in Xiamen, setting up a joint venture to build the Fujian headquarters of its UBTECH Ecosystem Technology Centre. The partners aim to sell no fewer than 10,000 UBTECH humanoid robots by 2030 and scale the real-world industrial deployment of embodied AI. Embodied AI has emerged as a key frontier for fostering new quality productive forces. China included the technology on its priority list for future industries in the 2025 Government Work Report for the first time. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission have jointly launched a real-scene training initiative, targeting the capacity to...

China’s National Intellectual Property Administration has published an appearance-design patent for an “embodied intelligent robot,” naming BYD Co Ltd as the patent holder, in the first official look at the automaker’s self-developed humanoid robot. The patent description says the design is for an intelligent robot capable of walking, balancing and interaction, with potential applications in service, education or industrial settings. Patent drawings show a humanoid robot with a black-and-white body. Its head is rounded and curved, with no display screen. The torso, arms and legs feature multiple joint structures, suggesting high motion flexibility. The design closely resembles “Xiaodi,” the humanoid robot BYD previously teased.

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...