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
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
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
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
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
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
Not a border ban Unitree secured CSRC approval for its listing on 2 July, but under the FCC rule its new US-bound products face fresh access questions. It flagged the US market risk in its updated prospectus on 31 July. The US was 18.39, 19.54 and 13.30 per cent of revenue in 2023, 2024 and … Read more
The bottleneck everyone argues about The hand is the most visible choke point of embodied intelligence. As early as 2018 OpenAI admitted that contact, friction and damping are hard to simulate accurately, and Musk has said the forearm and hand are harder to build than the rest of the robot combined. Every gain in degrees … Read more