On 11 August in Shenzhen, China Changan Automobile Group and Huawei Technologies signed a strategic framework agreement, the centrepiece of a 12 August wave of OEM and supply-chain news. The two sides will explore cooperation in AI products and scenarios, general and automotive vertical large models, digital infrastructure, compute, software and hardware, and will deepen … Read more
On 23 July, Apollo Go received Hong Kong’s first driverless test licence, and on 27 July it began public-road testing on the airport island with no safety driver inside, the world’s first fully driverless project in a right-hand-traffic system. One day later its sixth-generation RT6 appeared on the streets of London, where on 28 July … Read more
On 21 April 2026, RoboSense held its Tech Day in Shenzhen and for the first time laid out a systematic chip roadmap. Two flagship SPAD-SoCs on its new “Genesis” digital architecture debuted: the Phoenix line for monolithic native ultra-high line count, and the Peacock line for all-solid-state high-resolution arrays. Both reach mass production in 2026. … Read more
No more showboating. At the ninth World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which opened in Shanghai on 17 July, humanoid robots stopped performing and started working. Past shows leaned on backflips and boxing; this year robots served as both product and staff, guiding visitors and minding unmanned retail points, the first time full-size humanoids were deployed at … Read more
On 28 July, BYD confirmed to media that its humanoid robot product will officially debut and “go on duty” in August, signalling a move from a pure carmaker toward an ecosystem technology group. The same day, the 2026 Fortune Global 500 listed 35 vehicle and parts firms; BYD replaced Tesla as the electric-vehicle sales champion … Read more
A year ago China’s dexterous-hand sector was a demo-dominated infancy. Capital interest was thin, most makers were still validating concepts, and industry shipments sat at the hundred-to-thousand-unit level, with products suited to trade-show displays rather than stable industrial use or full humanoid integration. In a single year the picture flipped. Hot money rushed in, new … Read more
Tactile sensing is becoming a foundational capability for the next generation of embodied intelligence. For two years the robotics industry poured resources into bodies, large models, dexterous hands and vision. As those capabilities advanced quickly, the bottleneck narrowed to the contact layer: a robot must not only locate an object, but feel force, friction, slip … Read more
Doubao, ByteDance’s AI assistant, has started charging a commission. The same hotel room on the same settlement system costs an 8 per cent platform fee from the Douyin feed but 12 per cent when the order jumps from the Doubao chat box. The four-percentage-point gap has a single variable: the traffic came from an AI … Read more
Shenzhen News reported on 12 August that Ruqi’s Robotaxi fleet capacity has been connected to Tencent’s Travel Service WeChat mini-program. In zones including Guangzhou’s Nansha and Science City, users can now hail a Ruqi Robotaxi through the Tencent entry point. Ruqi Robotaxi is now bookable inside Tencent’s Travel Service mini-program (Source: Shenzhen News) Inside a … Read more
The first half of 2026 reshuffled the humanoid rankings. AgiBot shipped more than Unitree for the first time, taking the global lead. According to a 9 August report from Smart Analytics Global, a California research firm, global humanoid shipments reached about 19,100 units in the first half, nearly triple the 5,100 a year earlier. Full-year … Read more