The Belt 
Humanoid robotics in 2026 is caught in a paradox. The hardware has raced ahead, with full-size robots landing backflips, street-dance combos and martial-arts sequences, yet the industry’s base layer has barely moved. Every maker uses its own body shape, joint configuration, sensing interface and calibration. A grasping policy trained for years on one company’s hardware … Read more
Meta launched Muse Spark 1.3 on 3 September, its fourth flagship model release in five months, and within hours the new model had leapfrogged the Gemini 3.8 Flash that Google had unveiled the same day. The duel marks the fastest cadence of frontier releases the industry has seen, with model rankings now turning over in … Read more
Shenzhen’s UBTech (09880.HK) turned its full-size humanoid business into its largest revenue source in the first half of 2026, selling 921 full-size embodied humanoids and more than tripling the share of total income that line represents. A UBTech full-size humanoid robot. (Source: Gasgoo) UBTech: the commercialisation question, answered For the half year, UBTech posted revenue … Read more
NEO may be the most contradictory humanoid on the planet. When 1X Technologies opened pre-orders in October 2025 at USD 20,000 a unit or USD 499 a month, the first year’s capacity sold out in five days and bookings passed 10,000. A year on, in September 2026, no unit is confirmed delivered to a ordinary … Read more
Inspire Robotics, working with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University, has open-sourced HandEdit, a dataset and benchmark for first-person human-to-robot dexterous-hand image editing. Inspire’s RH56DFX dexterous hand operating an espresso machine. (Source: OFweek Robotics) What HandEdit actually is The task: take a first-person human-operated video and replace the hand or arm with a specified … Read more
LionBot (Shenzhen) Robotics has closed a tens-of-millions-yuan strategic round led by Shenzhen Lifud, with Yunyue Capital as exclusive adviser, and struck a research partnership with a team at Southern University of Science and Technology. LionBot’s approach to industrial embodied-data capture. (Source: OFweek Robotics) The gap is the middleware The team came from UBTech and Pudu, … Read more
On 31 August, Unitree released an upgraded firefighting and emergency solution with a blunt slogan: robots are made for people, built to serve, to charge into fire and danger. A Unitree quadruped deployed for firefighting and emergency response. (Source: OFweek Robotics) From reconnaissance to water cannon Unitree is not new to the field. In April … Read more
While the industry idolises human-shaped machines, Benmo Technology took the opposite bet in 2020: give a robot wheels and legs, then throw it into the messy places where neither wheels nor feet alone will do. A Benmo wheel-leg robot navigating unstructured outdoor terrain. (Source: OFweek Robotics) Direct drive, no gearbox Founded by Zhang Di, a … Read more
On 1 September, XtronRobot (XTRONROBOT), a specialist in embodied intelligence for hazardous industry, closed a tens-of-millions-yuan A1 round from Qianhai Ark, Xihu Sci-Tech Venture and Guangyang Shares. The money funds its XBOT-AEGIS embodied system, multi-configuration explosion-proof robots, and domestic and overseas expansion. An XtronRobot explosion-proof embodied system for hazardous plants. (Source: OFweek Robotics) Built for … Read more
Li Xiang wants to be a top-three brand in China’s above-RMB-200,000 passenger market. On 26 August, at the second-quarter earnings call, he and president Ma Donghui laid out exactly how: two pure-electric flagships in two weeks, an in-house battery rolling out across the range, and a first appearance in Europe. Li Auto’s Q2 2026 financials. … Read more