INTELLIGENCE · /updates
Releases, research, open-source activity and industry developments across humanoid robotics. Every entry links to its original source and is reviewed before publishing.
6 updates · newest first
AGIBOT and Chimelong launched phase one of a theme-park deployment with more than 300 AGIBOT robots across entertainment, education, guest services and hotels; the 20,000th robot off AGIBOT's line was delivered to Chimelong.
Figure released Helix 2.5, a model pretrained from scratch on its Index human-video dataset and adapted to three whole-body behaviours (tidying, towel folding, bed making). Figure reports these were evaluated in 30 Bay Area homes with no data collected there, and that Index pretraining raised zero-shot success from 9% to 56%.
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on 15 September 2026, describing it as its first humanoid engineered to work in close proximity to people without physical safety barriers. The company cites a new leg design with cycloidal actuators for repeated 50 lb (22.7 kg) lifts and a new battery with a 90-minute runtime, and says it had more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 orders as of May 2026, subject to contractual milestones. Early access is expected in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027.
AGIBOT announced AGILE 2.0, a second-generation framework combining visual perception, whole-body locomotion and manipulation in one real-time loop, demonstrated in the 'Acrobat BOT' film with X2 humanoids.
XPENG announced on 8 September 2026 that its humanoid robot production lines in Guangzhou had been commissioned and that the first IRON robot had walked off the line on its own. The company says more than 80% of core processes are automated, that mass production is scheduled by the end of 2026 with initial use in its own stores and campuses, and that market launch and delivery in China and overseas are planned for 2027.
Galbot opened pre-orders for ET1, a 1.25 m, 32 kg interaction humanoid with 26 DoF (plus 12 with dexterous hands) powered by its AstraBrain-Agent and AstraBrain-WBC models.
HISTORICAL RECORD
Developments WBH recorded after the fact, dated by their original publication. They are part of the timeline, not current news.
Figure made its data-collection app public as Index on Google Play and the App Store. Figure says 'Creators' have uploaded over 16M videos, been paid $15M, and that it will spend over $1B in the next 12 months on data and compute. The dataset is Figure-exclusive, not a public release.
1X published an engineering write-up of NEO's new hands: 25 DoF (22 in fingers and palm plus 3 at the wrist), quasi-direct-drive tendons at roughly 5:1-15:1 gear ratios, fully backdrivable and force-controlled, with tactile and shear sensing. 1X says these hands will ship on every NEO.
Apptronik unveiled Apollo 2 in bipedal and wheeled-base configurations and opened a ~90,000 sq ft Robot Park in Austin, where Apollo 2 fleets collect teleoperated and autonomous data for Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models. It named Apollo 3 as its next-generation commercial product.
Figure says Figure 03 arrived in Hall 52 at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, moving from Figure 02's sheet-metal loading to a parts-sequencing use case that includes pulling a heavy cart, run by Helix 02.
AGIBOT's security centre lists advisory SA-2026-0001: the MQTT service on AgiBot X2 Ultra v0.9.7 allowed unauthenticated subscribe/publish (medium severity), fixed in v1.0.0; mitigation is disabling unauthenticated access on port 1883.
Figure announced a commercial agreement to deploy humanoids in Catalyst Brands' logistics network, starting in Reno, Nevada. Brookfield is an investor in both companies.
EngineAI reports that the first batch of T800 full-size humanoids rolled off its production line, framed as a step toward 10,000-unit-scale delivery. The T800 was introduced at CES 2026.
Humanoid signed a binding phased deployment and supply agreement with Schaeffler. The first phase runs December 2026 to June 2027 at two German sites, with a target of a four-digit number of wheeled units by 2032; Schaeffler becomes a preferred actuator supplier.
1X said its NEO Factory in Hayward, California has begun full-scale production, with initial robots going to its R&D lab and internal home testing and first customer shipments planned for 2026. The company claims capacity for 10,000 NEOs per year with plans for more than 100,000 by the end of 2027, and says it sold out its first-year capacity of over 10,000 units within five days of the October 2025 launch. Early Access costs $20,000, with a $499/month subscription option.
Figure reports its BotQ facility delivered over 350 Figure 03 robots and went from one robot per day to one per hour in under 120 days, with end-of-line first-pass yield above 80%. The same post adds perception-conditioned whole-body control (S0 using stereo from head cameras) trained in simulation.
At its 2026 Partner Conference AGIBOT introduced the A3 humanoid (173 cm, 55 kg, 10 h endurance, 10-second battery swap) alongside G2 Air, OmniHand 3 Ultra-T, the D2 Max quadruped, the MEgo data-collection system and eight foundation models.
AGIBOT introduced Genie Operator-2 (GO-2), a successor to GO-1 that unifies reasoning and action in one architecture, trained on tens of thousands of hours of interaction data; AGIBOT says core parts were accepted at CVPR 2026 and ACL 2026.
AGIBOT released AGIBOT WORLD 2026, a heterogeneous real-world robot dataset using free-form teleoperated collection in commercial, home and everyday scenes, on Hugging Face. Theme 2 and Theme 3 (real-world RL, 2026-09-03) followed.
UBTECH's 2025 annual results announcement on HKEX reports roughly RMB 820 million revenue from full-size embodied humanoid products and services and 1,079 units sold in 2025.
At AWE 2026 in Shanghai, Noetix founder Jiang Zheyuan handed over Bumi units to customers, and Noetix and JD.com announced deeper cooperation on consumer humanoid sales.
Helix 02 extends Figure's VLA from upper body to the full body, adding System 0, a learned whole-body controller that Figure says was trained on over 1,000 hours of human motion data plus sim-to-real RL and replaces 109,504 lines of hand-written C++.
The Fauna Robotics team introduces Sprout as a developer platform emphasising safety, expressivity and developer accessibility, with compliant control and soft exteriors.
1X described 1XWM, a text-conditioned video world model integrated into NEO as a robot policy, which it says generalises to novel objects and tasks without large-scale robot pretraining data.
NEURA Robotics showed the next generation of 4NE1, designed with Studio F.A. Porsche, and a compact 4NE1 Mini at CES 2026. Reservation pages list 98,000 € (1-19 units) for 4NE1 Gen 3.5 with availability expected end of 2026, and 19,999 €/29,999 € for 4NE1 Mini Standard/Pro.
At its 2025 AI Day in Guangzhou, XPENG presented the next-generation IRON humanoid with a humanoid spine, bionic muscles and flexible skin, 82 degrees of freedom, 22-DoF hands, three Turing AI chips and an all-solid-state battery. XPENG said it aims for large-scale mass production of advanced humanoids by the end of 2026.
1X launched NEO for pre-order with a $20,000 Early Access purchase (priority 2026 delivery) or $499/month subscription, shipping first in the US in 2026 and other markets from 2027. 1X later said it booked a year of capacity (10,000 units) in five days.
Figure introduced Figure 03 with a redesigned camera system, palm cameras, in-house fingertip tactile sensors, soft washable covers, 2 kW wireless inductive charging through the feet and a design for high-volume manufacturing at BotQ.