The Belt 
Details of Xiaomi’s next-generation humanoid have leaked via the Daily Economic News: about 1.70 metres tall, 66 kilograms, with 66 degrees of freedom, and half of those in the hands. The company plans to show it publicly for the first time at the 2026 World Robotics Conference, which opens on 19 August, before taking it … Read more
Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Lab has published RoboHarness, a system built to solve a problem the robot field keeps hitting: it has plenty of capable models and almost no way to make them cooperate. RoboHarness wraps VLA, world-action, reinforcement-learning and task-and-motion-planning policies in a coding agent that decides which one should act. The design leaves every … Read more
Nvidia is still the runaway leader in AI chips, and roughly 80 per cent of the world’s AI is trained on its CUDA stack. But the one thing Nvidia fears just showed up on Huawei’s roadmap: a performance cadence that could close the gap faster than expected. At Huawei Connect, deputy chairman and rotating chief … Read more
On 31 August, Unitree refreshed its fire and emergency-response lineup with a slogan that leaves little to the imagination: robots built for people, on a mission to serve, into the fire and duty bound. This is not Unitree’s first move into the sector. In April it showed a fire-recon robot dog built with Bawei Tong, … Read more
Figure, the humanoid builder now valued close to US$40 billion, has shipped three moves in quick succession that together look less like product updates and more like a bet on when embodied AI tips into the home. The headline is Helix 2.5. The company rented 30 residences around the Bay Area and let its robot … Read more
A brain-inspired world model claims better navigation with far less data On 14 September Shanghai-based EBKernel released Cog-WM 1.0 at a brain-inspired embodied intelligence forum it hosted during the 2026 Pujiang Innovation Forum, described as the first dedicated forum on the topic. Cog-WM raised navigation success on HM3D from 78.50 to 86.89 per cent against … Read more
China’s August top ten was an all-electric clean sweep for the first time The ten best-selling passenger cars in China in August were all electric. Not just all new energy, but all battery-electric, with combustion and plug-in hybrid models shut out entirely. A Chinese motor show. For the first time this year, every one of … Read more
A star robotics company has entered bankruptcy, and the lesson is not about technology DeepBlue Robotics, once a fixture at technology exhibitions and treated as a new force in Chinese robotics, has formally entered bankruptcy liquidation. The Shanghai campus of DeepBlue Robotics. A court in Pudong has accepted the liquidation case. (Source: OFweek) The People’s … Read more
Why General Motors renewed its SAIC venture for another 20 years On 5 August SAIC Motor and General Motors signed an extension in Shanghai, pushing the term of their SAIC-GM joint venture out by another 20 years, to 2047. The number is symbolic. Founded in 1997, SAIC-GM has run for nearly three decades, and China’s … Read more
Huang Renxun revisits AI doomerism: many of those predictions were simply made up On 14 September, at the All-In Summit 2026 in the United States, Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun sat with four hosts, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks and David Friedberg, to discuss AI safety, extinction talk, recursive self-improvement, open versus closed models and … Read more