JD unveils six Wolf robots from warehouse to pharmacy at its 2026 technology summit

Robot Forward reported on 9 September that at the JDD 2026 JD Global Technology Explorer Conference, JD pointed the next decade of AI at the physical world. Cao Peng, chairman of JD’s technology committee and president of JD Cloud, said the smart economy will migrate from the digital world to the physical world over the … Read more

XPeng closes a US$900 million robot round and rolls its first humanoid off an in-house line

XPeng’s robot business has moved a step closer to volume production. On 8 September XPeng’s own line completed automated final assembly of its first high-end general-purpose humanoid, and the machine walked off the line by itself, marking the shift from research build to line manufacturing. XPeng IRON humanoid on the company’s newly opened automated assembly … Read more

SuDu’s WAIC debut: from one skill to ten-plus, chasing a scaling path for general-purpose robots

At WAIC 2026 the embodied-intelligence zone was again among the most crowded. Robots made coffee, took photos and danced. The SuDu Technology booth drew a crowd too, but the mood was different. A few robots stood quietly at workstations doing unglamorous things: picking items, wrapping an object with a cloth using both hands, inserting a … Read more

PaXini closes another RMB 1 billion round, pushing cumulative tactile-sensing funding to RMB 3.5 billion

PaXini has closed another RMB 1 billion strategic round, bringing cumulative financing to RMB 3.5 billion, the largest cumulative total in global tactile sensing and a clear, gap-leading position in the embodied-perception race. This round was co-led by a trillion-scale global consumer-electronics and semiconductor giant, BOC International Investment, the Kunpeng Fund (a national big-data fund) … Read more

HandEdit: an open-source dataset that turns first-person human video into robot dexterous-hand training data

HandEdit, a dataset and benchmark built by Inspire-Robots together with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University, has been open-sourced. The project tackles first-person human-to-robot dexterous-hand image editing: replacing the human hand or arm in a frame with a specified robot configuration while preserving the original scene, object, viewpoint and interaction as much as possible. … Read more

A RMB 1 billion raise and a 10,000-robot order: who actually cashes in on China’s robot boom?

Guangdong Tianji Intelligent Systems recently closed a RMB 1 billion Series B and B-plus round at a post-money valuation near RMB 10 billion. Hillhouse Venture and Meituan’s strategic arm co-led, with Tencent, Gaorong Venture, Photosynthesis Venture and GGV Capital following. Tianji does not make just one kind of robot. Its products span collaborative robots, horizontal … Read more

Agibot stands up its own AI-compute arm as China’s ‘intelligent computing’ land grab accelerates

XiYuan Zhisuan (Shanghai) Technology has been registered, with corporate records showing it is wholly owned by Zhiyuan Innovation (Shanghai) Technology, the core entity behind Agibot Robotics. Its stated business scope covers AI theory and algorithm software, AI foundational software, AI application software and general AI application systems. No data-centre operations category has appeared yet. Agibot … Read more

A CMU-linked startup is building the Android moment for humanoid robots with a USD 1,500 open hardware kit

In 2026 the humanoid-robot race entered an odd paradox. Hardware is racing: full-size humanoids now backflip and street-dance, with Unitree’s G1 on the OmniXtreme framework hitting a 96.36 per cent backflip success rate and sub-10-millisecond end-to-end latency, numbers unimaginable three years ago. A humanoid robot demonstration at a 2026 event. (Source: Leiphone) But the ecosystem’s … Read more

LinkerBot pulls together a 20-company Tier 1 alliance to standardise China’s embodied-robotics stack

On 2 September, initiated by LinkerBot and Xingyuanzhi, more than 20 core supply-chain firms including Orbbec, FAORobot, Fulai New Materials, Hesai, Huaweike, Livox, Langyi, Linghou, Rokae, Mailivision, Nuwa Create, Quanzhibo, Senyun, RoboSense, Tashan, Wuwenzhike, the iFlytek robot-brain platform, Xinjingcheng, Quectel, Zhixing Embodied and Zongguanxian formed the China Embodied Intelligence Tier 1 Industry Alliance. LinkerBot’s dexterous-hand … Read more

A 2-billion-parameter model just beat 8-billion ones at robot-arm control by doing less, not more

For a while, Scaling Law ruled embodied intelligence. To make a robot arm handle complex pick, align and assemble tasks, most work pushed vision-language-action (VLA) models to 7 billion or even 8.5 billion parameters. Bigger helped semantics, but long-horizon instability did not disappear. A robot arm executing a long-horizon manipulation task. (Source: Leiphone) Many large … Read more