The Belt

Sudu shows its scaling path at WAIC: from one skill to ten-plus in three months

by

At WAIC 2026 the embodied-intelligence zone was again the busiest. Sudu’s booth drew a different crowd: robots stood quietly at a workbench doing plain things, grabbing items, wrapping an object with a cloth using both arms, inserting a part into its hole. No showmanship, but the stability, success rate and generalisation stood out. This is … Read more

Guangxin unveils AI stereo-vision suite for physical AI, targets transparent and reflective surfaces

by

As multimodal and VLA models mature, embodied intelligence is racing toward industry. Robots reason better, but in real homes, factories and shops, what decides capability is not only how smart the brain is, but how accurately they perceive the physical world. Navigation, fine grasping and human interaction all rest on reliable three-dimensional vision. Guangxin Technology … Read more

Zhongke Huiling bets on task-built dexterous hands over parameter chasing

by

As robots flood factories, homes and public spaces, what decides whether they can actually work is shifting from movement to manipulation. Carrying, inspection and simple pick-and-place are maturing, but on finer dexterous tasks, grasping parts, turning tools, inserting components, robots still struggle. The industry used to rank a hand by parameters, degrees of freedom, load, … Read more

DeepSeek says it will raise API prices substantially, warns users to plan ahead

by

On 6 August, DeepSeek said it plans to raise the pricing of its API services overall in the near term, with a substantial increase expected, and advised users to arrange their usage sensibly. Specifics will follow an official notice. DeepSeek currently runs a peak-and-off-peak schedule. On weekdays, peak hours, Beijing time 09:00 to 12:00 and … Read more

Apple pulls China-site guide linking Apple Intelligence to Alibaba’s Qwen, less than a day after going live

by

On 9 August, Apple’s China website briefly published a Mac support guide stating that the China-version Apple Intelligence would work with Alibaba’s Qwen large model, which the market read as a sign that Apple’s China AI was finally landing. The document was taken down in under a day, and the site now keeps only the … Read more

Ant Group leads strategic round in Daimon Robotics as tactile sensing becomes the new variable

by

On 11 August, Daimon Robotics announced a several-hundred-million-yuan strategic round led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders oversubscribing. The raise came only about two months after its previous financing: a 100-million-yuan A round in June led by Inovance Industrial Investment and China Telecom. The string of capital injections has built Daimon an investor roster spanning … Read more

Oaknut Robotics closes angel round led by China Merchants and NIO Capital, bets on instinct not data

by

On 10 August, Oaknut Robotics announced an angel round co-led by China Merchants Venture and NIO Capital, with the Tsinghua alumni seed fund following on. Four months after a near-100-million-yuan seed round in March, the company has now closed two rounds for a combined several-hundred-million-yuan raise. Oaknut was founded in late 2024 and calls itself … Read more

Hikrobot ships its 200,000th mobile robot, two years after the 100,000th

by

On 6 July 2026, as a fork-lift robot rolled off the line, Hikrobot formally announced that cumulative output across all its mobile-robot categories had passed 200,000 units. It took the company only two years to go from its 100,000th unit in May 2024 to the second hundred thousand. By the latest count from the Mobile … Read more

Xiaomi open-sources Robotics-U0, a unified model for the embodied-data bottleneck

by

All over the world, people are acting as preschool teachers for robots. In Indian factories, workers wear cameras while assembling, sorting and moving goods, recording first-person footage of complete operations. Inside Tesla’s Optimus training arena, staff wear helmet- and backpack-mounted camera rigs, repeatedly picking up cups, wiping tables and drawing curtains. Data firms pay ordinary … Read more