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 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, 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
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
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
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
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
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
This year’s WAIC and WRC showed a shift in embodied intelligence: less showboating, more pragmatism. Last year’s robots danced, fought and walked runways; this year they were dropped into real logistics, industrial and home tasks. That points to a bigger question: how far has embodied intelligence actually come, and how far to real scale? Embodied-intelligence … Read more
On 1 June 2026 Sam Altman posted on X: AI should help humans in the physical world; in the short term OpenAI is building robots that assist skilled workers constructing future infrastructure, and in the long term it imagines a personal robot for everyone. The post announced OpenAI Robotics, closing a six-year loop from disbanding … Read more