The Belt 
The first dexterous hand that can take a pulse, from a company that only does touch Embodied intelligence has remained one of the most watched early-stage sectors in 2026. Competition across bodies, models, scenarios and applications keeps intensifying, and the upstream sensor layer has heated up along with it. Tactile sensing is one of the … Read more
Japan is building robots to cut China out of its training data Tetsuya Ogata, a professor at Waseda University, said something unusually candid in Tokyo. Facing prototype machines from seven Japanese companies at the Physical AI Summit, he put it plainly. If geopolitical problems make Chinese data-collection robots unavailable, the development of Physical AI becomes … Read more
Huawei’s Guo Ping: a 1.4bn-person market sustains us, supply chain should learn from Apple, AI must become Nvidia Fast Technology reports that Huawei’s internal “Heart Voice” community recently published the full minutes of a discussion between board supervisor Guo Ping and new employees. Across nearly 10,000 words, Guo gave plain-spoken replies on artificial intelligence, large-model … Read more
D-Robotics raises USD 400 million to become the Wintel of robotics On 17 September D-Robotics announced a USD 400 million Series C. Mirae Asset led the round, with Meituan’s strategic investment arm, Hefei State Investment, Nanshan Zhanshi Investment and Jingquan Capital joining from local government platforms, while existing backers Hillhouse Venture Capital, Five Source Capital, … Read more
Capital dives into underwater robotics, betting on the next Unitree of the deep Off Fujian, a cargo ship sits at anchor under a crust of barnacles. Cleaning its hull by hand takes two weeks. A robot called Orca, built by Shihang Intelligent, does it in 10 hours, roughly 50 times faster than a dive team. … Read more
Leapmotor’s Zhu Jiangming: no concept-chasing, we already built our own robot At Leapmotor’s 2026 technical launch on the evening of 16 September, founder, chairman and CEO Zhu Jiangming confirmed that Leapmotor has made a small but real investment in embodied intelligence and has built a fully self-developed robot. The firm is exploring an application scenario … Read more
Agility’s Digit 5 removes the safety cage and takes USD 300 million of orders Agility Robotics has released the Digit 5, and the claim it makes is a specific one. The company says it is the first humanoid robot able to work closely alongside people without a physical safety fence. A Digit humanoid at work … Read more
Wall Street is repricing Tesla Semi as a software terminal, not a truck Can a smart heavy lorry keep earning after it has been sold? Morgan Stanley thinks so, and the arithmetic it published alongside Tesla’s European Semi launch is far larger than the hardware it sits on. Tesla’s European-specification Semi was unveiled on 11 … Read more
NIO’s Qin Lihong: the range-extender dividend is fading, pure electric will soon pass 50 per cent In the first half of 2026 China’s car market advanced through pressure and change at once. Domestic passenger-vehicle registrations fell about 20 per cent year on year even as nearly 500 new models launched. The mismatch compressed the hot-selling … Read more
Xspark AI’s Ding Wenbo: touch cannot replace vision, but robots need their own ‘spinal cord’ Embodied intelligence has entered its “tactile era,” and Ding Wenbo proposes a “spinal cord” architecture to fix the physical-interaction gap in robots. Ding is hard to pin down with one word: communications PhD, materials postdoc, machine-tactility scholar. In 2025 he … Read more