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Chinese robot maker Unitree has unveiled the G1+, an upgraded version of its G1 humanoid robot, delivering six improvements across motion performance, perception and interaction while retaining the G1’s affordability at 95,000 yuan including tax. The G1+ gains two extra degrees of freedom in the neck, giving a pitch range of -25 to 36 degrees and a yaw range of plus or minus 110 degrees for flexible head movement, the company said. Motors across the robot have been comprehensively upgraded: peak torque of the shoulder and waist motors rose 110%, with heat generation down 72% at the same torque; arm motors saw peak torque up 43% and heat reduced 30%; and thigh motors cut heat generation by 28% at the...

The 2026 Inclusion Bund Summit closed on Friday after a four-day run in Shanghai’s Huangpu World Expo Park, showcasing AI’s accelerated shift from technological iteration to large-scale commercial implementation, industrial empowerment and inclusive public application. Bringing together more than 600 scholars, scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, alongside over 300 global tech exhibitors, the event consolidated industry consensus on AI-driven real economic growth amid evolving industrial and market landscapes. Hosted under the theme “Building the AI Economy Together”, the summit featured a 15,000-square-meter tech exhibition and a full lineup of industrial activities, including thematic forums, Developer Day, Innovators’ Stage, tech competitions, a venture capital meetup, a specialized job fair and the inaugural Inclusion AI Art Festival. Over 50 cutting-edge technologies, products and...

Robots on display at this year’s 2026 Inclusion · Conference on the Bund are not performing flashy stunts. Instead, Ant Lingbo Technology showcased practical deployments: autonomous medicine picking for pharmacies, logistics sorting and industrial loading tasks, highlighting a pivotal shift in the robotics industry. For years, the sector’s most eye-catching demos centred on dynamic robot movements. Yet rolling robots into pharmacies, warehouses and factories demands more than pre-programmed motions. Machines must interpret unstructured environments, understand tasks, adapt to unexpected changes and operate reliably around the clock — the core challenge Ant Lingbo aims to address with its natively embodied general AI brain. The centrepiece exhibit is a replica smart pharmacy, built in partnership with Shanghai Guoda Pharmacy and already live...

UBTECH Robotics has officially opened its super smart factory for industrial humanoid robots in Liuzhou, Guangxi, billed globally as the first benchmark manufacturing facility built to support annual output of up to 10,000 humanoid units. Spanning 14,000 square meters with a height of 13.8 meters, the plant will primarily produce the firm’s Walker S and Cruzr series embodied AI industrial humanoid robots. Under its designed production cycle, one humanoid robot can roll off the assembly line every 10 minutes, with a planned annual capacity exceeding 10,000 units. Powered by intelligent planning via industrial simulation systems and full-domain orchestration through a digital “smart brain”, the facility realises a new quality productive forces model of “robots building robots”. The milestone marks China’s...

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...