News

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

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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

LimX Dynamics closes $200M Pre-IPO round, valuation reaches 15 billion yuan

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General-purpose humanoid robot maker LimX Dynamics has closed a Pre-IPO financing round of nearly 200 million US dollars, lifting its post-money valuation to 15 billion yuan and putting it among China’s super unicorns. The company has raised 400 million US dollars across the past six months, building a war chest for its next capital-market move. … Read more

Panic blockade: can America’s play really wall off China’s robotics expansion

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On 28 July, the Trump administration’s FCC updated its controlled list, adding two categories of foreign-made equipment: advanced robots and networked power inverters. The FCC argues such products pose an unacceptable risk to US national security or public safety. An exemption path exists: the Defence Department, and for inverters the Homeland Security Department, can grant … Read more

Estun, from ‘number one in the East’ to a profit squeeze: an industrial-robot leader at its breaking point

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A good name can hide a company’s ambition. Estun spells out its own: ‘Est’ from the Spanish for east, ‘un’ for one. The ‘number one in the East’ vision looked bold in the 1990s, when overseas giants monopolised China’s industrial-robot market. Estun made it real. Its 2025 report shows eight consecutive years as the top … Read more

Still losing money on e-drives, Schaeffler bets on robotics with a 350 million euro order book

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Among foreign component suppliers, Schaeffler has been unusually forward-leaning on robotics. Its latest quarterly results put the humanoid-robot order backlog at 350 million euros, a figure it discounts heavily, applying at least a 50 per cent haircut to customer forecasts borrowed from automotive life-cycle maths. That 350 million covers only three OEMs. One is named: … Read more

Crossing the unmanned sea: Sinian Intelligent Driving steers out of ports toward the long haul

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For years, Sinian Intelligent Driving was known almost entirely for port autonomy. Compared with robotaxi and city navigation, port driving is the silent corner of the autonomous sector, a closed scenario with a limited market and long, fussy delivery cycles. That changed when Sinian closed a 300 million yuan Series C from Xingzheng Capital and … Read more

Dialogue with Cui Dixiao: nationwide L4 driverless trucks may never happen

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Cui Dixiao joined autonomous-truck startup PlusAI in 2017, straight from a lectureship at Xi’an Jiaotong University, where he earned a doctorate under autonomous-driving pioneer Zheng Nanning. Seven years later, in 2025, he left as chief scientist. What he learned reshaped how he sees the industry. ‘I underestimated the complexity of autonomous driving,’ he says now. … Read more

Leapmotor breaks 100,000 in a month as BYD and Chery storm overseas and seven EV upstarts slip

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On 1 August, fourteen carmakers published July sales. The picture splits cleanly between camps. Among new-energy startups, three more than doubled year on year: Leapmotor at 101,300 (up 102 per cent), Zeekr at 35,800 (up 111 per cent) and Arcfox at 23,500 (up 150 per cent). Leapmotor, the sales leader among startups, set a record … Read more

China sets binding L3 and L4 safety rules, and compute demand decides the architecture

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China’s long-awaited mandatory national standard for L3 and L4 autonomous driving has finally got a launch date. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has opened the draft compulsory safety standard for autonomous driving systems to public comment. The standard replaces a voluntary guideline and, for the first time, sets a legally binding floor for … Read more

A ten year old upstart now out-sells Great Wall and Chery at home, while their export glow hides a softening core

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Great Wall Motor and Chery Group have each been out-sold in China’s domestic market by a younger rival. The July sales sheets, published in early August, hold a striking detail. Leapmotor delivered 101,300 vehicles globally in July, up 102 per cent year on year and its first month above 100,000, making it the first Chinese … Read more