Hong Kong’s Expats Lost Their Translator
Hong Kong’s top jobs increasingly require Mandarin. The strange part is that it took nearly 30 years.
The Belt
Shenzhen’s D-Robotics Open-Sourced the Simulator That Scores Robot Policies
On 27 October the large-model team at D-Robotics published Uranus, a world-model simulation platform, and put the whole stack in public: technical report, inference code, SDK and two versions of the model weights. A hundred early-access slots were opened to teams outside the company. The Shenzhen company, which grew out of Horizon Robotics to build … Read more
Shenzhen Robotics: A Million Motor Orders Before the Humanoid Had a Market
China’s industrial control giants are having a better year. Inovance reported revenue of RMB 37.956 billion for the first nine months of 2026, up 19.88 per cent, with net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 4.398 billion, up 3.38 per cent. The headline profit number is unremarkable. The line underneath it is not. General automation, … Read more
Shenzhen Robotics: 16 Robot Apps Reached Real Hardware in 36 Hours
The final of the Astribot OS robot hackathon closed in Shenzhen on 25 October. Seventeen teams worked 36 hours at the final, and 16 apps made it from simulation to a working robot. The real-hardware rate was 94 per cent. Remote cat-litter scooping, plant watering, camera tracking, brush calligraphy: contestants used the AOS toolkit together … Read more
Shenzhen Robotics: Orbbec Walked Away From the Mower and Back to the Sensor
Orbbec, the Shenzhen-listed 3D vision company, decided internally in mid-September to shut down its lawn-mower robot ODM business, according to an exclusive Leiphone report. The vision module line is untouched, and perception modules aimed at outdoor robots continue as before. The ODM project had been treated as a serious bet. It was pushed by the … Read more
Shenzhen Undergraduates Pushed a 250g Drone to 500.01 km/h
A drone the size of a hand and about as heavy as a smartphone has now flown faster than a Formula One car, and the margin over the previous record is not close. Xu Yang, an undergraduate at the School of Science and Engineering and Morningside College at CUHK-Shenzhen, set a new Guinness World Record … Read more
Shenzhen Robotics: UBTech Buys a European Network Instead of Building One
After landing manufacturing and logistics reference customers in Europe, UBTech has started filling in the piece it did not have: a local network. On 22 October the Shenzhen-listed company, trading in Hong Kong as 09880, signed a memorandum of understanding with ChinaEU, an international association headquartered in Brussels, to deepen cooperation in the European robot … Read more
Shenzhen’s EngineAI T800 Punched a Streamer. China Has No Rule for That
The punch landed on the back of his head and the streamer went down. He got up, kept broadcasting, and a few minutes later the same machine kicked through a glass display case and collapsed, twitching, on the floor. EngineAI builds the T800 in Shenzhen for combat demonstrations. Illustrative image produced for The Robot Belt … Read more
Shenzhen’s D-Robotics Pulls $400 Million to Own the Robot Brain
The company that sells the chip inside somebody else’s robot raised $400 million on 17 September, and almost none of the money came from China alone. D-Robotics, the Shenzhen robot-computing spinout of Horizon Robotics, closed a Series C of $400 million, about RMB 2.68 billion, with close to 30 investors on the cap table. D-Robotics … Read more
Shenzhen Robotics: UBTech Hands the Gulf a Desert Proving Ground
UBTech has signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with the international relations office of the Ras Al Khaimah government in the United Arab Emirates. The framework covers humanoid research, real-world testing and system deployment, with an explicit focus on adapting the technology to Gulf conditions. UBTech will send engineering teams to Ras Al Khaimah to run … Read more