The Belt 
Shenzhen just gave its street-cleaning robots a digital ID, and a regulator can now watch them work Shenzhen’s street-cleaning robots just got licence plates, and a regulator can now watch each one work. On 16 September the city issued its first batch of identifiers for AI sanitation robots. A machine printed with the code SS·xxxxx … Read more
Leapmotor’s tech day promised a second brand and a self-built robot, with a jab at being the ‘Apple of cars’ A carmaker that keeps pitching itself as the cheap one just showed a self-built robot and an operating system, and aimed a line at Apple. At its 16 September tech day in Huzhou, Leapmotor founder … Read more
Lenovo’s venture arm just backed a Shenzhen exoskeleton maker for the fourth time Lenovo’s venture arm has now backed a Shenzhen exoskeleton maker four times, and the bet is on ageing, not athletics. MetoRobot, founded in 2016 by a team of returnee PhDs, has closed a roughly RMB 100 million strategic round from CSC, a … Read more
More than 40 robotics firms showed up to actually work, and the hard part is just starting The wind in robotics is shifting in a way that matters more than any new demo. At the recently closed 2026 Bund Conference, more than 40 embodied-AI vendors appeared together, but the detail worth noting was not whether … Read more
A once-hyped Chinese robot unicorn just went into liquidation, and the lesson is about showrooms A Chinese robot unicorn that once filled exhibition halls has just been pulled into liquidation, and the filing reads like an industry warning. DeepBlue Robotics, the core robotics subsidiary of DeepBlue Technology, is in bankruptcy liquidation after the Pudong People’s … Read more
A Shanghai lab says stop brute-forcing compute, and built a brain-inspired world model for robots China’s embodied-AI crowd is starting to ask whether pumping more data and compute is the whole answer, and a Shanghai lab just bet it is not. At the Pujiang Innovation Forum on 14 September, EBKernel launched Cog-WM 1.0, a brain-inspired … Read more
InTime Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Fudan open-sourced HandEdit, a dexterous-hand editing benchmark Training a robot hand used to mean owning the robot, and that bottleneck is exactly why progress stalled. InTime Robotics, with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University, has now open-sourced HandEdit, a dataset and benchmark that turns ordinary first-person videos of … Read more
Samsung and BYD both backed PaXini, and its tactile-sensor war chest just passed USD 560 million Two of Asia’s most controlling manufacturers just bought the same bet on a robot’s sense of touch, and neither is known for impulse. On 16 September, PaXini, a Shenzhen firm building tactile sensors and perception for humanoid robots, completed … Read more
D-Robotics closes a USD 400 million Series C as Horizon’s robotics arm bets on the compute floor China’s robotics builders are about to get a great deal more silicon underneath them, and the capital is arriving from Seoul and the Gulf as much as from Shenzhen. On 17 September, D-Robotics, the robotics-computing arm spun out … Read more
Shenzhen’s embodied-AI ‘little giants’ get a policy backstop to go global Global demand for embodied intelligence is surging, and Shenzhen’s commercial-robotics firms are racing to claim overseas ground on the strength of hard tech. But longer payment cycles, opaque foreign buyers and the risk of default or bankruptcy still top the list of worries for … Read more