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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...

Skild AI has unveiled a new post-training approach for embodied intelligence that uses physical self-play to teach humanoid robots highly dynamic skills. In a demonstration centered on soccer, the company showed a robot defending, dribbling past opponents and scoring—abilities acquired largely through self-competition rather than hand-coded rewards. The robot tracks the ball closely and denies the human opponent possession. After briefly losing focus and conceding an interception, it recovers, turns, runs with the ball and finishes into the goal. The significance is not robot soccer itself, but the use of physical self-play. Most robot foundation models are pretrained on human data. Skild’s S1 model, released last month, follows that pattern and can learn tasks from in-context demonstrations, similar to prompt-based...

The global market value of industrial robot installations has reached an all-time high of $16.7 billion, according to the International Federation of Robotics, or IFR. The Frankfurt, Germany-based organization predicted that a number of technological innovations, market forces, and new fields of business will drive future demand. Here are the top five trends the IFR identified for the robotics industry in 2026. 1. AI gives robots greater autonomy Robots that use artificial intelligence to work independently are becoming more common. The main benefit of AI in this context is the increased autonomy of robots empowered by AI. Different types of AI drive this trend: Analytical AI helps to process large datasets, detect patterns, and provide actionable insights. For example, it...

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...

The California State Athletic Commission has sent a letter to technology startup REK ordering it to stop staging unapproved fights after it held a human-versus-robot match last month. On Sept. 18, Frankie LaPeña faced one of REK’s humanoid robots. The robot was remotely controlled by a human through a virtual reality system, according to the report. REK describes itself on its website as a “humanoid robot fighting league.” The robot in the match may have been an EngineAI product fitted with a head resembling the robot in “The Terminator.” REK CEO Sixx Liiv posted the commission’s notice on X on Sept. 30. The commission determined the earlier match was unapproved and told Liiv and REK not to hold, promote or...

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...

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...