A 1.2 billion yuan bet on trackless robots for China’s chip fabs

Jieluo Intelligent Equipment (Suzhou) has broken ground on a headquarters project in Suzhou’s Wuzhong district, a 1.2 billion yuan bet on the robots that move wafers around the world’s cleanest factories. The site covers 42.5 mu and about 70,000 square metres, and is designed to build 2,000 trackless-navigation robots (AMRs) and 500 wafer-intelligent-storage systems a … Read more

The lidar mower that actually makes money: inside Naisilao’s bet

A Chinese yard-robot company just made the case that lidar, not RTK, is the profitable path for robotic mowers — and that the real competition is no longer the sensor, but the shelf. Naisilao Intelligent Technology, whose brands MOVA and NexLawn sell lidar mowers, paused an RTK prototype back in 2022 because satellite signals drop … Read more

A humanoid robot just assisted in surgery — and scored 2.5 out of 5

In July 2026, Nature published a breakthrough: a UC San Diego team had doctors teleoperate a Unitree G1 humanoid to perform two laparoscopic gallbladder removals on live pigs — the first time a general-purpose humanoid did the main steps of standard laparoscopic surgery on a living subject. The trigger was Elon Musk. After his April … Read more

Yuanli Lingji built a Great Wall from 82,000 blocks to prove one point about embodied AI

At WAIC 2026, Yuanli Lingji drew a crowd with an unusual demo: four desktop arms and two wheeled Apex robots worked 15 hours to assemble a 3.5-metre-by-1.5-metre Great Wall model from nearly 82,000 micro-blocks, some under 1 centimetre, at sub-millimetre precision. The point was not the toy. Founded by Tang Wenbin, co-founder and former CTO … Read more

Humanoid robots are done with the demo. Now they are fighting for position.

Roland Berger’s new report, “Humanoid Robots 2026: The Convergence Moment of a New Market,” marks a shift in the debate. The question is no longer whether humanoids are a bubble, but who grabs the position if the industry actually takes off. Three variables converged at once. AI capability — vision-language models, generative AI, edge computing, … Read more

After tearing down a Chinese humanoid, Japanese engineers conceded defeat

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

Benmo sells robot joints for the price of a lemonade, and still wins backing

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

Ant Group’s robotics arm Lingbo is raising 1.5 billion yuan for the robot brain

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

Ant Group’s robotics arm Lingbo is raising 1.5 billion yuan for the robot brain

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

Shanghai’s Kepler Robotics skips the IPO queue and chooses a merger instead

Why Kelin picked Kepler The power and electricity track is the most certain, largest humanoid landing spot, and State Grid tenders are concentrated in the tens of billions of yuan, shifting competition toward scenario fit and scaled delivery. Kelin has spent years in the grid and energy system, holding national grid government-enterprise channels, industry access … Read more