A Nikkei teardown of a low-cost Chinese humanoid has stirred debate in Japanese engineering circles, with veteran roboticists conceding that China’s mass-production logic, not raw component precision, now sets the tempo of the field. The details that stung The engineers were struck less by headline tech than by unglamorous choices. The screw threads felt unusually … Read more
Learning the outcome, not the motion HOST, for Human-to-robot One-Shot Skill Acquisition, has the robot watch an average 29-second human video and reproduce a new skill with 62 per cent success. The key design choice is to ignore the exact human movement and instead understand the task’s outcome, the change in the world, then plan … Read more
Skipping the reducer Founder Zhang Di, a student of ‘DJI godfather’ Li Zexiang, made a deliberate call in 2020: abandon the precision reducer long monopolised by Japanese giants and use direct-drive technology, where the motor outputs torque directly. The result is lower noise, longer life and fewer failures. Benmo now holds a 61.1 per cent … Read more
The brain, not the body Lingbo was founded in December 2024 as a wholly owned Ant Group unit with 100 million yuan of registered capital. Its thesis mirrors that of US firm Physical Intelligence: do not build the hardware, build the general intelligence that any robot can run. In July it released the LingBot 2.0 … Read more
The brain, not the body Lingbo was founded in December 2024 as a wholly owned Ant Group unit with 100 million yuan of registered capital. Its thesis mirrors that of US firm Physical Intelligence: do not build the hardware, build the general intelligence that any robot can run. In July it released the LingBot 2.0 … Read more
Four years in the making DJI first started a ground-cleaning robot project in 2020, and reports of an imminent launch have circulated since late 2024. The Romo family is expected to span standard, advanced and flagship tiers with features such as auto water refill, and pre-orders have already opened. DJI’s pitch leans on a simple … Read more
From testing to ecosystem The move marks a shift in how Shenzhen frames autonomous driving. After a city-wide pilot plan in 2024 and a ‘4123’ blueprint in 2025, the 2026 ‘five-party’ model adds a governance-and-operation structure on top of the technology. The city is explicitly moving from a phase of proving the vehicles work to … Read more
Counterpoint Research reports that global smartphone SoC shipments fell 15 per cent in the first half of 2026, hit by surging memory prices, cautious inventory control and longer replacement cycles. MediaTek held the top share at 32 per cent, Qualcomm was second at 22 per cent, Apple 19 per cent, UNISOC 13 per cent and … Read more
Calls and downloads ‘Calls’ mean individuals who lack local deployment pay per token to use a model online. ‘Downloads’ are organisations, banks, governments and energy firms pulling models in to embed in their own systems, the core ‘AI plus’ indicator, and China leads there as well. Across Africa, with 1,500 to 3,000 languages, many local-language … Read more
The forerunner’s bet Liao frames the past 30 years as two vertical lines, the processor line from CPU to AI and the connectivity line from telephone to mobile network, with a counter-intuitive proposition: the more successful and monopolised the application layer, the more the underlying chip withers, because a dominant customer sets direction and a … Read more