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
How the lead was built The share is the product of a complete high-end equipment chain. The core parts a robot needs, 3D vision, precision reducers, servo motors and control systems, all have mature domestic suppliers with high efficiency, fast iteration and low production cost. On the demand side, an ageing population and rising manufacturing … 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
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
Why Chinese homes needed their own dataset Embodied intelligence ultimately has to enter homes, but home environments are complex and personal, demanding training across hugely varied real scenarios. The new dataset holds 300,000 structured real floor plans, 5,000 complete home simulation scenes and 50,000 physically simulated interactive object assets, filling a gap in large-scale, high-fidelity, … Read more
Galaxy General’s Galbot S1 has run 7×24 in CATL’s battery-pack lines for over 90 days, fully autonomous. The demo-to-production leap China’s humanoid race has been promising.