Sichuan Embodied Humanoid Robotics Technology Co. (EIR) has completed a Pre-A funding round of more than 100 million yuan. The company says it will use the funds to develop its “Ai Qiu” humanoid robot, build a production base planned for capacity of up to 10,000 units, and establish a sales system. Ai Qiu starts at 98,000 yuan, and EIR says its new funding round has also begun.
UBTECH introduces Thinker-WM, a multimodal world model that jointly models RGB video, depth, and robot actions through a shared Unified Dynamics Transformer. In material supplied by UBTECH and republished by QbitAI, the company reports leading results on WorldOlympiad, EWMBench, and WorldArena1.0 Track-1, including scores of 0.740 on WorldOlympiad and 4.66 on EWMBench. The model supports six capability modes through shared weights, and adding depth improved RoboTwin single-task success by 15 percentage points over a baseline without depth.
The article describes how VLA models and world models are being developed and deployed in Shanghai: VLA enables robots to perform tasks, while world models predict what may happen before an action. Ant Lingbo’s “Lingbo General Brain” has been adapted to 17 robot brands and 20 configurations, and robots using it are working in multiple Shanghai pharmacy locations. The article says the two approaches are beginning to converge, while planning, standards, and evaluation are advancing.
We are open-sourcing V1.0 of our agentic robotics framework, ASPIRE, with full real robot skill discovery and self-improvement capabilities! On the day Astra arrived, our lab switched the backend model and saturated all the benchmarks to ~99% overnight. And the frontier is https://t.co/OGwborKIse
Amulya Vishwanath, a former NVIDIA robotics product marketing leader and founder of Techable VC, says robotics is in its “Lego era,” with basic building blocks still being rebuilt. On TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, she discusses investing in physical AI across robotics, materials science, and life sciences, and defines it broadly to include “a molecule, a material, a medicine,” or a factory machine.
Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is still rebuilding basic components such as actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards. On TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, she discussed where she is investing through Techable VC, the early-stage firm she founded to back physical AI across robotics, materials science, and life sciences.
DamoDa is developing a second product line for autonomous drone swarms in enclosed, GPS-limited environments and plans to apply for an IPO in 2027, Leiphone reports. According to the company, equipment sales contribute about 70% of revenue, while overseas equipment sales have grown 45-fold over five years. The new system targets navigation, obstacle avoidance and coordinated operations using multisensor positioning, with a demo expected between year-end and early next year.
Tang Duyu, former head of multimodal model development for Huawei’s Xiaoyi assistant, founded Guanxing Shuzhi to develop physical AI that identifies needs and decides when to intervene without explicit commands. Its ProAgent architecture pairs StreamingJev, a lightweight event monitor, with a Response Model that plans interventions and selects devices. The team reports testing guidance, warnings, and interaction on Reachy Mini across 60 cases, and introduced ProactiveXBench to evaluate intervention timing, progress, and outcomes.
Google is positioning Gemini 4 Argon as a single model for robotics simulation, control, and training data evaluation. Google reports that simulation-generated training episodes raised one robot’s success rate from 56 to 75 percent, but Argon ranked third in Artificial Analysis’s real robot control benchmark. The published demo prompts include extensive guidance, and Google does not report individual demo failure rates or the number of attempts behind the 75 percent result.
WanNa Robotics unveiled its NOVA21 dexterous hand at the 2026 Hong Kong Electronics Fair on October 15, presenting it as a tool for robotics research and development. The hand has 21 active degrees of freedom, with a maximum fingertip force of at least 20 N per finger and a tactile resolution of 0.1 N. WanNa says it supports research into multi-finger coordination, object pose adjustment, and complex manipulation strategies.
Welcome to the era of embodied AI. We are launching AA-Robotics v0.1, our research preview that measures frontier language model performance on understanding, planning, and acting in the physical world. In v0.1, each model is given control of a 6-axis robot arm (5 joints and a https://t.co/fCwpnDlvB2
You can't solve real-world physical tasks through autoregressive sampling alone. The physical world is entirely unforgiving to hallucination or approximate pattern matching. If we want actual autonomous robotics we have to engineer causality and discrete reasoning back into the https://t.co/UJtL2t0tQ2
😂 faceplant at 0.5 https://twitter.com/antoinepirrone/status/2109667437503193163
Ant Group’s embodied AI company Ant Lingbo has signed strategic cooperation agreements with Longsheng Weirui, Dema Technology and De’er Xiangwang to develop robotics solutions for industrial and logistics settings. The work includes industrial loading and unloading, automotive factory digitalization, and flexible parcel sorting. At the China International Industry Fair, robots from Tihoo and Stardust Intelligence equipped with LingBot-VLA 2.0 demonstrated industrial loading and unloading and flexible sorting.
The 2026 Global Developer Pioneer Summit and International Embodied AI Skills Competition will run October 23–25 in Shanghai’s Pudong district, featuring 10 highlights focused on real-world robot training and applications. The program includes 9 competition tracks with 23 events, more than 1,000 competing teams, and over 100 open source communities. Organizers say the event will showcase robot systems, components, industry models, and application scenarios.
PHANES AI and Tianlong Mobile launched SeePhys Hub on October 14 to supplement first-person human demonstration data with whole-body motion and optional tactile pressure recordings. The system combines a four-camera headband, two wristbands and three waist and leg trackers, with software for processing data and mapping human movements to robots. PHANES AI plans to release a whole-body, all-modality world model in 2027 and prioritize application validation in industrial, restaurant and retail settings.
Reporting on Jiayuan Mao’s IROS 2026 presentation, Leiphone describes research from UPenn, MIT, and Stanford on robot learning and compositional generalization. RAPID combines a coding agent with physics validation to learn complex non-grasping tasks from one human demonstration. In separate video-action research, the team introduced Temporal Ratio to measure attention to future versus current frames; adaptive guidance based on this metric raised average success on unseen compositional tasks with a real dual-arm robot from 71.8% to 83% without retraining.
Industrial Next presented AI-driven robotic stations at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 that it says let manufacturers retool production lines in minutes rather than weeks without traditional programming. Its proprietary foundation models connect vision, task context, and motion, with new tasks taught through simulation and demonstration. The startup announced a partnership with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate dexterous manipulation for manufacturing, and co-founder Lukas Pankau said some stations already perform delicate assembly tasks for an undisclosed smartphone customer.
Dyna Robotics co-founder and Chief Scientist Jason Ma explains how Dyna-2 combines future video prediction with robot actions and how agentic harnesses support hour-long workflows. He says the model was trained on over one million hours of human video, with some tasks requiring as little as 45 minutes of demonstrations. The interview covers napkin-folding deployments at Din Tai Fung, on-device inference, and hardware durability and missing sensory data as constraints on broader robot capabilities.
Gemini 4 Argon taught a robot to play cornhole just by watching a video. It mapped the physics, coded its own simulation, and taught @Apptronik's Apollo humanoid to sink 7 throws in a row.
Why it matters: The demonstration connects video observation, physics modeling, and a model-written simulation in a concrete example of teaching a humanoid robot a physical task.
Google DeepMind introduces Gemini 4 Argon, a general-purpose physical reasoning model for robot control, simulation reconstruction, physical understanding, and self-improvement. Google DeepMind reports an 87% ERQA score using pure reasoning and a simulation-generated training example that raises real-world robot success from 56% to 75% while reducing completion time from 35s to 24s. Argon is available today to Google AI Ultra subscribers through Google AI Studio and Google Antigravity, and through the paid Gemini API tier using gemini-4-argon in the Interactions API.
Why it matters: The simulation-to-hardware example provides a concrete basis for assessing how generated training episodes can improve robot task success and completion speed within a reported setup.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 opened its first day at Moscone West in San Francisco, bringing together more than 10,000 startup founders, investors, and tech leaders. The event features 250+ speakers, 300+ exhibiting startups, six industry stages, and Startup Battlefield pitches, including a $100,000 equity-free prize.
QbitAI reports that MagicLab Studio’s EchoPolicy-0 ranked first on MolmoSpaces Combined as of October 13, 2026, achieving 75.4% average success across all four v1 manipulation tasks in 3915 evaluation episodes. Its 3.4B-parameter MagicBrain ranked fourth with 72.4% average success and 94.4% grasping success. EchoPolicy-0 combines VLM-guided candidate trajectory selection with execution checks, while MagicBrain uses visual markers and post-training to connect target locations with actions without changing the VLA architecture.
DeepSeek plans to lead a seed round worth tens of millions of dollars for robotics AI startup Winverse AI, according to Bloomberg, at a post-money valuation of about $400 million. Founded in 2026 by Swin Transformer coauthor and former Tencent scientist Han Hu, Winverse AI remains in early research and development without publicly disclosed products or a specific technical roadmap. The proposed deal follows DeepSeek’s approximately RMB 141 million investment in Unitree in August.
UBTECH ranked 11th globally with a score of 115 on the 2026 Fortune Future 120, making it the highest-ranked Chinese company on the list. Fortune and Boston Consulting Group selected 120 companies from more than 3,500 based on growth ambition, talent density, and growth culture. UBTECH reported first-half 2026 revenue of 1.27 billion yuan, up 104.2% year over year.
Shanghai’s International Embodied Intelligence Skills Competition will run October 23–25, with 23 events across nine tracks and plans to attract more than 1,000 teams. The competition will test robots on real workplace tasks using operational data, with awards in each event and investment-intent funding and financing guidance for teams that place. Registration is still open.
Agile Robots brought 12 exhibits to the 26th China International Industry Fair, held in Shanghai from October 12 to 16, presenting work across five areas: embodied intelligence, embodied models, research, consumer applications and industrial deployment. Featured exhibits included the Mobile FR3 Duo research platform, an AI therapy and wellness robot, and a photography robot. The article was provided by Agile Robots and reprinted with authorization by QbitAI.
Robotics and physical AI companies raised nearly USD 48 billion through October 8, 2026, about 1.7 times the total for 2025, according to PitchBook data cited by the Financial Times. Funding increasingly concentrates in leading companies while supporting robot hardware, general-purpose models, training data, and deployment. The report examines paid video collection, robot training facilities, and commercial deployments as ways to gather data, while acknowledging that data quality, task coverage, and transfer across robots also affect learning.
The 2026 IEIC International Embodied Intelligence Skills Competition will test robots on real workplace tasks in Shanghai from October 23 to 25. It will feature nine tracks and 23 events, using a shared four-part, 100-point evaluation framework covering task execution, embodied data collection and feedback, autonomy, and innovation. Registration is ongoing, and winning teams may receive investment interest worth tens of millions of yuan and professional fundraising guidance.
@antoinepirrone posted 3 minutes of uncut Microduck testing on carpet. Clément Delangue reacts: 😂 faceplant at 0:50 https://twitter.com/antoinepirrone/status/2109667437503193163
Amazon operates more than 1 million warehouse robots and plans to expand its fleet, while employing more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers according to its 2025 annual report. Executives say robots reduce physically demanding tasks and injury risks, but labor advocates and researchers raise concerns about AI-driven automation. George Mason University professor Brad Greenwood says collaborative robots change workplace dynamics by working near people and potentially dictating their pace.
Orbbec decided in mid-September to end its robotic lawn mower ODM business after cumulative shipments reached only a few thousand units, far below expectations. Its vision module business remains unaffected, and perception modules for outdoor robots are still in development. The report cites tighter FCC rules, a crowded market and customer shipments too small to sustain the ODM product line.
Femo One founder Liu Nianqiu says experience moving DeepRoute AI from high-definition maps to mapless driving can inform the company’s approach to robots, which he calls “Physical Agents.” Femo One is focused on open, dynamic environments and plans to begin deployments at multiple sites next year, building a cycle of deployment, data collection, training and redeployment.
Odyssey has launched a free public research preview of Odyssey-3, a world model that generates interactive environments from text prompts and runs in real time on an autoregressive diffusion transformer. The base model has 14 billion parameters and outputs 832 × 480 video, while Odyssey-3 Pro supports 1280 × 720. Its reported 66.1-point Physics-IQ Verified score came from a single run using a selection method, below the benchmark's four-run requirement.
Siemens will showcase its industrial full-stack capabilities at the 26th China International Industry Fair, including a first full end-to-end humanoid robot solution spanning design, manufacturing, assembly and factory-floor use. It plans to release more than 20 new products and open 6 embodied intelligence "factory entry" scenarios, alongside an upgraded "钻耀之心3.0" and applications for data centers, electronics and semiconductors, and zero-carbon factories.
Standard Bots, which calls itself "America's largest AI-native industrial robot manufacturer," described its AI stack for industrial robot arms used in machine tending, welding, and assembly. Its largest model is in the low billions of parameters, trained on over a billion images for zero-shot perception, with training in the cloud and inference run on-premises via edge GPUs. The company recently raised $200 million at a $1 billion valuation in a Series C led by General Catalyst and RoboStrategy.
IM opened preorders for the new-generation LS6 on September 10 at a starting price of 209,900 yuan, with 8,000 small preorders in the first 45 minutes, and set the official launch for September 23. The fourth-generation LS6 is the first 200,000-yuan-class pure electric SUV under IM's "Next·2028" strategy, featuring a full steer-by-wire chassis, the NEO powertrain architecture, and IM Claw, an in-car AI agent.
Leiphone's New Smart Driving reports that Xie Baojun, vice president of Chery Automobile and head of its Intelligent Center, has apparently left the company, with his internal Feishu status showing as suspended. Chery had not responded to a request for comment at publication time. Xie joined Chery in October 2024 via its subsidiary Dazhuo Intelligent, and became the Intelligent Center's operational lead after Chery merged several units in May 2025.
WorldArena 2.0 Challenge, run by a Tsinghua-led team, released its final leaderboard on September 16 with three tracks covering video quality, world models as reinforcement learning environments, and real-robot manipulation. Visincept's WorldIncept won Track 1, Zhongguancun Academy's MW2 won Track 2, and Xiaomi Robotics' ViTacX topped Track 3, with total prize money of 7,000 USD. Organizers said contact-rich real-robot operation remains a bottleneck.
Columbia University's Li Yunzhu team presented progress on FlexiTac, an open-source flexible piezoresistive tactile sensor platform, at an IROS 2026 workshop. The sensor assembles in 3 minutes, ships with a full BOM and readout software, and integrates with the LeRobot robot-learning framework. Analog Devices is developing a commercial version with tactile resolution five times that of a human finger, produced via semiconductor manufacturing.
