Another Baidu veteran bolts for physical AI

From platform to physical world Yu joined Zhongguancun Kejin as president in September 2024 and is credited with productising its large-model platform and capturing the enterprise opportunity of ‘platform plus application plus service’, improving the company’s product capability, business scale and visibility. His departure marks another senior operator stepping from internet platforms and scaled AI … Read more

PaXini crosses 3.5 billion yuan as tactile sensing becomes Physical AI’s data layer

PaXini says cumulative funding has crossed 3.5 billion yuan, refreshing the global ceiling for tactile-sensing financing, as the company repositions itself from sensor maker to the data infrastructure of the Physical AI era. The round assembles a ‘four-in-one’ capital matrix spanning national financial capital, three regional AI-industry funds, leading market institutions and global industry giants. … Read more

RoboSense ships 719,200 LiDAR units in H1 2026, robot sales up 510%, Q2 up 170%

On 9 July, RoboSense reported first-half 2026 LiDAR shipments of 719,200 units, up 170% year on year. The robot segment contributed 282,600 units, a 510% surge, while ADAS delivered 436,600 units, up 98%, further cementing a ‘robot plus vehicle’ dual-engine structure. In the second quarter alone, total shipments reached 388,900 units, with robot LiDAR at … Read more

XtalPi launches an ‘operating system’ for AI-driven science

XtalPi Science is billed as the world’s first AI-for-Science platform integrating LLMs, agents and automated experiment robots, packaged as on-demand ‘Science Tokens.’ Genius Agents orchestrate cross-disciplinary long-horizon tasks, cutting hallucination and closing a loop from digital hypothesis to physical verification. The failure-data edge XtalPi’s chief scientist Zhang Peiyu notes the platform’s rarest asset is failure … Read more

BeingBeyond’s 500,000-hour bet: a Peking professor’s pure-model path to embodied AI

Lu’s company, BeingBeyond, just released Being-H0.8, an implicit tactile world-action model trained on 500,000 hours of first-person human video, the largest such corpus among embodied models globally. Its progression tells the story: H0 at 3,000 hours in July 2025, H0.5 at 35,000 hours supporting 30 robot types in January, H0.7 at 200,000 hours in April, … Read more

Embodied data enters the ‘out-of-box’ era: why robot training needs model-ready data

What ‘model-ready’ means Jianzhi Robotics calls the data it sells ‘Model-Ready Data’, data you can feed straight to a model without rework. It needs three traits at once: high precision, multimodality and diversity. Hand-tracking error of 2-3cm, the industry norm, means the model sees a finger a full digit off, so it grabs through cup … Read more

Shenzhen’s Opticalix Unveils an AI Stereo-Vision Stack for Physical AI

Shenzhen-based Opticalix has launched a vision-perception suite built specifically for embodied AI, betting that the bottleneck for robots leaving the lab is no longer brains but eyes. The package centres on AI-driven binocular stereo vision and two modules, Libra 1000 and Libra 3000, that the company says stabilise depth recovery in exactly the scenes where … Read more

NVIDIA’s GR00T Reference Humanoid Runs on a Chinese Dexterous Hand

When NVIDIA unveiled its Isaac GR00T reference humanoid at GTC Taipei during ICRA 2026, the industry noted the obvious choices: a Unitree H2 Plus body, Jetson Thor onboard compute, and the open-source Isaac GR00T model as the brain. But the component that drew the sharpest questions was the one few had heard of: the hands. … Read more