2026-10-16 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-10-16corrected
21st Century Business Herald reported on 16 October 2026, after a site visit on 15 October, that 15 Leju humanoid robots were in routine operation on Zhaofeng Mechanical & Electronic's automotive-parts production line in Hangzhou, autonomously completing 10+ consecutive actions per cycle to fetch, transfer and load small parts onto loading stations in under 40 seconds with no human teleoperation, with the solution adaptable to 15 stations and covering 10+ part types, and a company-stated loading success rate above 98%, about 1,000 cumulative running hours over more than two months without failure and 60,000+ parts produced (company-provided data; the project is billed as an embodied-AI 'real-scene practical-training demonstration project').
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2026-10-16: 21st Century Business Herald reported on 16 October 2026, after a site visit on 15…
2026-10-07 · analysis · ●●○ · published 2026-10-07corrected
Forbes reported in October 2026 (Forbes Australia syndication, 7 October) that BMW said only one Figure robot worked at any given time during the 2025 Spartanburg pilot (a second was onsite to rotate in while it recharged), that the project Figure began at the plant in June 2026 with updated robots was a non-production test of two or three robots that has ended with no Figure robots currently operating at the plant, and that Figure sent five to ten people to ensure its promotional video shoot went smoothly.
2026-10-07 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-10-07verified
BMW told Forbes, in a report syndicated by Forbes Australia on 7 October 2026, that Figure's 2026 project at Plant Spartanburg (begun in June with updated robots, after Figure 02's 2025 body-shop pilot ended with its November 2025 retirement) was a non-production test of two or three robots that has ended, and that no Figure robots currently operate at the plant.
2026-09 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-09-30corrected
Xinhua Daily's news site, republishing Hebei Youth Daily, reported on 30 September 2026 that in September Galbot's instant-retail smart-pharmacy solution entered routine commercial operation at Laobaixing Pharmacy's Hongcao Road store in Shanghai's Xuhui district, where Galbot G1 humanoid robots fulfil online orders around the clock, autonomously identifying shelves, picking medicines, checking them visually, packing them and placing them into pickup lockers 'without human intervention' (a pilot store; the report also says night-time operation is still being optimized toward uninterrupted 24-hour running; company-reported 400–500 orders a day, no robot count or intervention log given).
2026-09-21 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-09-21corrected
Boston Dynamics opened its Robotics Metaplant Application Center (RMAC) at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America near Savannah, Georgia on 21 September 2026 as a testbed and training center where Atlas humanoids are 'now in training' on preparing the logistics and sequencing of automotive parts, with component assembly targeted by 2030; Hyundai Motor Group plans to begin Atlas deployment with 25,000 units at Hyundai and Kia plants over the next few years.
2026-09-15 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-09-15verified
Unveiling Digit 5 on 15 September 2026, Agility Robotics said Digit 4 had logged more than 65,000 operating hours across customer sites including GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada over nearly three years and kept approximately 98% accuracy while on-task through its 100,000-tote GXO milestone, and claimed Digit 5's 90-minute battery with 9-minute charging gives a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio (vs 2:1 for Digit 4) enabling 20+ productive hours per day, with early access in H1 2027.
2026-07-30 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-07-30verified
FedEx and Dexterity announced on 30 July 2026 that, after multiple years of joint development, testing and operational validation at a pilot site, they were scaling Dexterity's Mech trailer-loading robots (a dual-arm 'superhumanoid' on a wheeled rover base) and its Foresight world model for autonomous trailer loading at the FedEx Hagerstown Hub in Maryland, enabling production at a significantly larger operational scale (no robot count, throughput or intervention figures given).
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2026-07-30: FedEx and Dexterity announced on 30 July 2026 that, after multiple years of joint…
2026-06-13 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-06-13corrected
UBTech's industrial-solutions web page (undated; captured by the Internet Archive on 13 June 2026) states that its Walker S2 humanoid has taken up work at Sany Renewable Energy's wind-power smart factory, which it calls China's first 5G fully connected flexible smart manufacturing factory for wind power, autonomously performing industrial material loading and tray handling alongside humans (no robot count, hours or intervention figures given).
2026-05-15 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-05-15verified
IT Home reported on 15 May 2026, citing a Robotera announcement and CCTV footage, that Robotera's self-developed Star Motion M7 humanoids had formally started work as parcel sorters at China Post's Guangzhou Postal District Center, autonomously locating parcels, grasping and flipping them label-up and dropping them for automated equipment to route to chutes; Robotera said its feeding efficiency had reached over 85% of a human's, with up to 1,200 parcels fed per hour (company claims; no robot count or intervention figures given).
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2026-05-15: IT Home reported on 15 May 2026, citing a Robotera announcement and CCTV footage, that…
2026-04-14 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-04-14verified
AgiBot announced on 14 April 2026 that multiple AgiBot G2 robots had been officially integrated into Longcheer Technology's tablet mass-production lines in Nanchang, where at MMIT test stations they autonomously pick up tablets, navigate the factory, place devices into test fixtures and sort finished or defective units, claiming up to 310 units per hour, over 99% success in continuous operation, about 3,000 units per shift, and 24/7 autonomous operation with minimal human intervention over 140+ hours of cumulative continuous operation (company claims; robot count and intervention count not disclosed).
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2026-04-14: AgiBot announced on 14 April 2026 that multiple AgiBot G2 robots had been officially…
2026-03-27 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-03-27corrected
SAIC Motor said on 27 March 2026 that 'Nengzai No. 1', a humanoid robot jointly developed by SAIC-GM and SAIC-backed AgiBot, had formally started work on the Buick Zhijing (至境) E7 battery mass-production line, handling the core steps of grabbing and loading battery cells, autonomously identifying incoming cells and planning grasp paths at about 2 seconds per piece (company claims; hours and intervention figures not disclosed).
2026-03-13 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-03-13corrected
People's Daily Online reported on 13 March 2026 that, after Galbot's instant-retail smart-pharmacy solution received a drug-retail licence in Beijing's Haidian district (the first for a humanoid drug-retail scenario), a Galbot G1 robot was autonomously staffing the Danling Street store of Beijing Nepstar (海王星辰) pharmacy chain, picking medicines from shelves for online orders, checking them visually, packing them and placing them in pickup lockers in 1–2 minutes per order, and quoted the chain's general manager as saying the robot autonomously handles order taking, picking, packing, restocking and stocktaking around the clock, with a peak of 370 orders in a day, 99.95% order success and accuracy and over 50% less staff input per store (customer/company claims; no robot count or intervention figures).
2026-03-11 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-03-12verified
FamilyMart said in a release published by Jiemian on 12 March 2026 that its Beijing Zhongguancun Dinghao store, opened on 11 March (FamilyMart calling itself the first convenience-store chain in mainland China to bring in routine robot service), had put Galbot's embodied-AI robot into the store's daily service, moving autonomously around the store and independently fetching and handing customers steamed sweet potatoes besides greeting and product guidance (with a stated 24-hour service capability); Beijing Daily reported on 17 April 2026 that the Galbot G1 had formally started routine duty there, autonomously picking and handing over sausages, cold drinks and hot food (customer/company statements; no robot count, throughput, hours or intervention figures).
2026-01-16 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-16corrected
36Kr reported on 16 January 2026 that Galbot's S1 heavy-duty embodied robot (dual-arm payload up to 50 kg), launched on 5 January, had been deployed at CATL's factory and was serving real production workflows with zero teleoperation and autonomously, taking on heavy-load carrying in a key manufacturing step (no site, robot count, hours or intervention figures given).
2026-01-15 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-01-15corrected
Humanoid's 15 January 2026 release says the proof of concept with Siemens — whose second phase was a two-week on-site deployment of an HMND 01 wheeled Alpha robot doing tote-to-conveyor destacking at the Siemens Electronics Factory in Erlangen — has been successfully completed, calling it a first step after which the partners 'may progress toward a broader rollout' across Siemens facilities, so the robot's work at Erlangen ended with the two-week trial.
2026-01-15 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-15verified
UK robotics company Humanoid said on 15 January 2026 that it and Siemens had completed a proof of concept in which its HMND 01 wheeled Alpha robot, deployed for two weeks in real operations at the Siemens Electronics Factory in Erlangen, autonomously picked totes from a storage stack, transported them to a conveyor and placed them at a pickup point for human operators, meeting targets of 60 tote moves per hour, more than 30 minutes of continuous autonomous task execution, uptime above 8 hours and above 90% autonomous pick-and-place success (company-reported two-week trial; robot count and intervention counts not disclosed).
2025 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04corrected
Tracxn reported humanoid robot companies raised $2.64B in equity funding in 2025, up 152.37% from 2024.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Tracxn data put total humanoid robot sector VC funding in 2025 at about $1.71 billion,…
2025 · setback · ●●● · published 2026-01-04verified
Tesla abandoned its target of producing 5,000 Optimus humanoid robots in 2025 and temporarily halted Optimus mass production, keeping Optimus in internal pilot testing at its factories.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Tesla abandoned its target of producing 5,000 Optimus humanoid robots in 2025 and…
2025 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
As of 2025, Agility Robotics' Digit humanoid is commercially deployed at GXO Logistics' Flowery Branch, Georgia warehouse under a robots-as-a-service agreement, with the exact single-site fleet size undisclosed (estimated at 2–5 units).
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: As of 2025, Agility Robotics' Digit humanoid is commercially deployed at GXO Logistics'…
2025 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Mercedes-Benz is testing Apptronik's Apollo humanoid robot for intralogistics tasks at its Berlin plant.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Mercedes-Benz is testing Apptronik's Apollo humanoid robot for intralogistics tasks at…
2025 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Agility Robotics and Mercado Libre announced a commercial agreement to deploy Digit humanoids for commerce fulfillment at Mercado Libre's San Antonio, Texas site.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Agility Robotics and Mercado Libre announced a commercial agreement to deploy Digit…
2025 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-10-13verified
UBTech has contracted more than 500 Walker S2 humanoid robots for deployment in Chinese factories including those of BYD, Volkswagen and Audi.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: UBTech has contracted more than 500 Walker S2 humanoid robots for deployment in Chinese…
2025-12-17 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-12-17corrected
IT Home reported on 17 December 2025, citing a CATL announcement that day, that the first new-energy battery PACK production line with humanoid embodied-AI robots deployed at scale had formally entered operation at CATL's Zhongzhou base, where Spirit AI's VLA-driven 'Xiaomo' humanoid plugs high-voltage test connectors into battery packs at the EOL and DCR end-of-line test steps, autonomously checks harness connection status and reports anomalies, with a claimed tripling of daily workload (company claims; robot count and intervention figures not disclosed).
2025-11-20 · achievement · ●●● · published 2025-11-20corrected
Agility Robotics reported on 20 November 2025 that its Digit humanoids had moved over 100,000 totes in commercial deployment at GXO's Flowery Branch facility, picking items on and off an AMR to a conveyor and also stacking totes onto a different floor location (no runtime, fleet-size or intervention figures given).
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-11: Agility Robotics reported that its Digit humanoids at GXO Logistics had moved more than…
2025-11-19 · achievement · ●●● · published 2025-11-19verified
Figure AI reported on 19 November 2025, retiring Figure 02, that its 11-month deployment at BMW Plant Spartanburg (about six months of daily runtime on an active line, 10-hour shifts Monday–Friday) loaded 90,000+ sheet-metal parts over 1,250+ runtime hours and contributed to 30,000+ BMW X3s, against targets of an 84 s cycle (37 s load), >99% placement accuracy per shift and zero interventions per shift, but it did not disclose achieved accuracy or intervention counts; Assembly Magazine described the pilot as two robots.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Figure AI completed an 11-month production deployment of Figure 02 humanoids at BMW's…
2025-11-19 · data · ●○○ · published 2025-11-19corrected
Figure AI said on 19 November 2025, starting the fleet-wide retirement of Figure 02 after the release of Figure 03, that its Figure 02 robots had returned to Figure's headquarters from BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, ending the 11-month deployment in which they loaded sheet-metal parts onto welding fixtures.
2025-07-09 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-07-09corrected
Securities Times reported on 9 July 2025 that AgiBot and integrator Anu Intelligence livestreamed for three hours from Fulin Precision's Mianyang factory the real work of AgiBot's A2-W general-purpose embodied robot, 'on the job' there for a month, which carried totes under two-shift operation at 800+ totes per shift, made zero errors during the three-hour stream and autonomously planned its path and adjusted or paused work around people and obstacles (company-presented livestream; robot count, uptime and intervention figures not disclosed).
2025-07-03 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2025-07-03corrected
Hyundai’s Georgia plant was reported to plan Atlas deployment from October 2025; Atlas was speculated to cost around $150,000 or more.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-07-03: Hyundai's Georgia plant was reported (July 3, 2025) to plan manufacturing use of Boston…
2025-06-02 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-06-02corrected
Rocking Robots reported on 2 June 2025, interviewing Agility Robotics CTO Pras Velagapudi at the Humanoids Summit in London, that since Agility's three-year commercial agreement with GXO Logistics about a year earlier its Digit humanoid had worked daily shifts at a logistics facility, autonomously transferring totes from autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to conveyors, which Velagapudi called 'a full-shift, operational deployment' rather than a research engagement or proof of concept (no robot count, hours or intervention figures given).
2025-04-30 · projection · ●●○ · published 2025-04-30verified
Bank of America projected in an April 2025 report that mass adoption of humanoid robots will start in 2028.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-04-30: Bank of America projected in an April 2025 report that mass adoption of humanoid robots…
2025-04 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-04-24corrected
Schaeffler's 'tomorrow' magazine reported, in an undated article archived by 24 April 2025, that since the beginning of 2025 Agility Robotics' Digit humanoid has been loading and unloading a washing machine at Schaeffler's plant in Cheraw, South Carolina, as a pilot project in what it called a permanent, commercially-based setting, describing Digit as able to autonomously navigate complex environments and automatically recognize obstacles (no robot count, hours or intervention figures given).
2025-04-06 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-04-06corrected
A Figure AI humanoid was doing live-production work at BMW's South Carolina plant by early April 2025: Fortune reported on 6 April 2025 that, per a BMW spokesperson, a single Figure robot had recently moved from non-production-hours practice into live production hours, picking parts with two hands from a logistics container and placing them onto a welding fixture in the body shop, work that Figure CEO Brett Adcock had shown in a 31 March 2025 post captioned 'This isn't a test—this is what autonomous robots in production operations look like' (company autonomy claim; one robot at a time, no hours or intervention figures).
2026-09-24 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-09-24corrected
Waymo reported on 24 September 2026 that across over 270 million fully autonomous miles through June 2026 in five metros (Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco), its vehicles were involved in 82% fewer injury-causing crashes (841 fewer) and 95% fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes than human-driver benchmarks, regardless of fault (company analysis).
2026-09-24 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-09-24verified
TechCrunch reported on 24 September 2026 that Waymo had roughly 4,000 robotaxis serving 15 U.S. cities at an average of 500,000 paid rides a week, about 80% of them in California and Texas (1,102 autonomous vehicles registered in Texas as of 24 September, up 49% in three weeks as Ojai minivans arrived) and about 800 in other states, and that MoffettNathanson expected Waymo to import 5,100 Ojai vehicles by the end of 2026.
2026-08-18 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-08-18verified
Pony.ai reported on 18 August 2026 that its robotaxi fleet had reached 1,975 vehicles, against a year-end 2026 target of more than 3,500 (raised from 3,000 in May), and that in Guangzhou its robotaxi service now reached the city centre across Haizhu, Tianhe, Huangpu and Panyu districts, its operating area having grown by over 300 km² since January to cover a population of over 7 million.
2026-08-18 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-08-18corrected
Baidu said on its 18 August 2026 Q2 earnings call that Apollo Go delivered around 1 million fully driverless operational rides in Q2 2026, as ride volume was 'temporarily affected by operational adjustments in certain domestic cities due to regulatory considerations' (operations in the affected cities had begun to resume as of August), with cumulative public rides exceeding 23 million as of June 2026; its Q2 results put Apollo Go's global footprint at 28 cities.
2026-08-05 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-08-05verified
Zoox, which said on 30 July 2026 that NHTSA had granted it the first commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi, announced on 5 August that it would start charging fares in Las Vegas from 10 August 2026, its first commercial launch, after carrying nearly 1 million riders free since 2025 across Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin and Miami; paid trips elsewhere still need state and local approvals.
2026-08-03 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-08-03verified
Bianews (读佳) reported on 3 August 2026 that Baidu's Apollo Go had resumed operating in Wuhan about four months after the 1 April city-wide suspension, with service available in its tests only in the Wuhan Economic-Technological Development Zone and the Caidian and Hanyang districts.
2026-07-30 · policy · ●●○ · published 2026-07-30corrected
NHTSA announced on 30 July 2026 that it would allow Zoox to commercially deploy its robotaxis through a temporary exemption permitting up to 2,500 vehicles a year for two years under an enhanced, adaptable oversight structure, alongside a three-year, $5 million 'A2SCEND' consortium with SAE Industry Technologies Consortia to develop the first AV performance standards, an interim final rule letting vehicles built before an exemption qualify for commercial-deployment exemptions, and updated guidance to streamline Part 555 exemptions.
2026-07-22 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-07-22verified
Tesla said in its Q2 2026 update of 22 July 2026 that Cybercab production had begun at Gigafactory Texas and that its Robotaxi service was live in seven metros, ramping unsupervised rides in Austin, Dallas and Houston and, from July, Miami, Orlando and Tampa, while the SF Bay Area still used safety drivers and Phoenix and Las Vegas, both listed for 1H 2026 in January, were still at 'preparations underway'; it disclosed no Robotaxi fleet count.
2026-06 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-08-16verified
Business Insider reported on 16 August 2026 that YipitData, using email receipts from about 1.5 million US consumer accounts and counting only trips that start and end inside Waymo's operating zones, estimated Waymo's share of Waymo, Uber and Lyft gross bookings (dollars spent, not trips or vehicles) at 15% in San Francisco and Los Angeles and 16% in Phoenix in June 2026, down from 16%, 17% and 19% in January.
2026-06-02 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-06-02verified
Electrive reported on 2 June 2026 that Tesla had registered 42 autonomous robotaxis with the Texas DMV under new reporting rules, mostly in Austin with the rest believed to be in Dallas and Houston, far below Elon Musk's 2025 talk of about 1,000 vehicles within months, and, citing third-party Robotaxi Tracker data via InsideEVs, that unsupervised operation in Austin began with a single vehicle on 22 January 2026 and had reached about 30 vehicles.
2026-05-28 · projection · ●●○ · published 2026-05-28verified
Waymo said on 28 May 2026, as select riders in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles began riding in its Zeekr-based Ojai, the first vehicle with its 6th-generation Driver, that it was scaling its Mesa, Arizona factory toward a capacity of tens of thousands of Waymo-enabled vehicles per year (a capacity target, not output).
2026-05-18 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-05-18verified
Baidu reported on 18 May 2026 that Apollo Go delivered 3.2 million fully driverless operational rides in Q1 2026, with weekly rides peaking at over 350,000 in March and total rides up over 120% year over year, cumulative public rides exceeding 22 million as of April 2026 and a footprint of 27 cities as of May.
2026-04-30 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-05-13verified
WeRide reported on 13 May 2026, with its Q1 results, that its global robotaxi fleet had reached approximately 1,300 vehicles as of 30 April 2026, about 1,000 of them in China, and that it planned to deploy 1,200 robotaxis across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Riyadh by 2027.
2026-04-30 · projection · ●●○ · published 2026-04-30corrected
Goldman Sachs Research forecast on 30 April 2026 that the worldwide commercial robotaxi fleet will grow from roughly 7,000 vehicles in 2025 to about 1 million in 2030 and approximately 6 million in 2035.
2026-04 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-04-22verified
Tesla said in its Q1 2026 update of 22 April 2026 that it had further expanded its unsupervised (no safety monitor) Robotaxi operating area in Austin and launched unsupervised Robotaxi rides in Dallas and Houston in April 2026; it gave no fleet count.
2026-04-29 · policy · ●●○ · published 2026-04-29verified
Bloomberg reported on 29 April 2026, citing people familiar with the matter (as relayed by Lianhe Zaobao), that China had suspended issuing new autonomous-vehicle licences after the 31 March Apollo Go stall in Wuhan — stopping operators from adding driverless robotaxis to their fleets, starting new test programmes or entering new cities, for an unknown period — and that Baidu's Wuhan robotaxi business remained suspended while the local government investigated.
2026-03-31 · setback · ●●● · published 2026-04-01verified
On the evening of 31 March 2026 what Wuhan traffic police preliminarily called a 'system failure' left many Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis stalled in the middle of roads in Wuhan, Apollo Go's largest operating city, trapping passengers (one for nearly two hours on an elevated road) and leading to at least one rear-end collision but no injuries, and on 1 April Apollo Go's customer service said service was suspended across all of Wuhan.
2026-03-31 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-03-31verified
WeRide and Uber began fully driverless, fare-charging robotaxi operations with no vehicle operator on board along routes in Dubai's Jumeirah and Umm Suqeim districts on 31 March 2026, when WeRide had over 200 robotaxis in the Middle East and the partners had committed (February 2026) to deploy at least 1,200 across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.
2026-03-26 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-03-26verified
Pony.ai reported on 26 March 2026, with its Q4/FY2025 results, that its robotaxi fleet had surpassed 1,400 vehicles, that its Guangzhou and Shenzhen operations had reached unit-economics breakeven within four months of the Gen-7 robotaxi launch, and that it targeted a fleet of over 3,000 vehicles in more than 20 cities by end-2026.
2026-03-24 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-03-24corrected
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said in a podcast released on 24 March 2026 that Waymo had 'about 3,000 cars on the roads' completing roughly half a million rides and over four million fully autonomous miles a week, with riders in 10 U.S. cities, and Waymo said on X that week that it was providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides per week across 10 U.S. cities, TechCrunch reported.
2026-02-26 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-02-26verified
Baidu reported on 26 February 2026 that Apollo Go delivered 3.4 million fully driverless operational rides in Q4 2025, with weekly rides peaking at over 300,000 during the quarter and total rides up over 200% year over year, and that by February 2026 its cumulative public rides exceeded 20 million across a footprint of 26 cities.
2026-02-24 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-02-24verified
Waymo opened its driverless ride-hailing service to its first public riders in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando on 24 February 2026, bringing it to 10 commercial metro areas, and co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said Waymo was on track to serve over one million rides per week by the end of 2026 (a projection).
2026-02-02 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-02-02verified
Waymo said on 2 February 2026 that it had raised a $16 billion investment round at a $126 billion post-money valuation, that it was providing more than 400,000 rides a week across six U.S. metropolitan areas after more than tripling its annual volume to 15 million rides in 2025 (over 20 million lifetime), and that it was preparing ride-hailing in over 20 additional cities in 2026, including Tokyo and London.
2026-01 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-28verified
Tesla said in its Q4 2025 update of 28 January 2026 that, after testing driverless Robotaxis in Austin from December 2025, it began removing the safety monitor from Austin Robotaxi customer rides in January 2026 'on a limited basis', while its SF Bay Area service still ran with safety drivers and Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Las Vegas were listed for 1H 2026; it gave no count of vehicles running without a monitor.
2026-01-29 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-29verified
Waymo began fully autonomous rides to and from San Francisco International Airport on 29 January 2026 for a select number of riders, with pickups and drop-offs initially only at the SFO Rental Car Center (an AirTrain ride from the terminals), all riders to be admitted over the following months and terminal stops planned later.
2026-01-23 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-01-29verified
On 23 January 2026 an unoccupied Waymo robotaxi (5th-generation driver, travelling at 17 mph after a drop-off) braked but struck a 9-year-old pupil who stepped out midblock between queued cars in a Santa Monica school zone, causing minor injuries with no medical transport needed; NHTSA opened a preliminary evaluation (PE26001) on 28 January and the NTSB, which published preliminary details on 3 March 2026, is also investigating.
2026-01-12 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-03-03verified
The NTSB reported preliminarily on 3 March 2026 that on 12 January 2026 an unoccupied Waymo robotaxi in Austin stopped for a school bus loading pupils, asked remote assistance whether it was 'a school bus with active signals', was told 'No' by an agent in Novi, Michigan, and then passed the bus with its stop arms extended (no crash) — one of multiple such incidents reported by Austin ISD in the 2025/26 school year that the NTSB is investigating, after Waymo's December 2025 software recall of 3,067 vehicles.
2025-12 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04corrected
By the end of 2025, Tesla's Austin Robotaxi service still had safety riders.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: Tesla missed all its 2025 robotaxi targets: Tesla had promised driverless service in…
2025-12 · data · ●●● · published 2025-12-10legacy
By December 2025 Waymo was providing more than 450,000 paid robotaxi rides per week with a fleet of about 2,500 vehicles across 6 US cities.
2025-12 · setback · ●●○ · published 2025-12-06verified
A Baidu Apollo Go robotaxi caused an accident in Zhengzhou, China in December 2025 that left two people in intensive care.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: A Baidu Apollo Go robotaxi caused an accident in Zhengzhou, China in December 2025 that…
2025-12 · setback · ●●○ · published 2025-12-05corrected
In December 2025, Waymo recalled its 5th Generation ADS software after 12 citations were identified as related to vehicles proceeding before school buses deactivated their warning signals.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: Waymo issued a recall of its self-driving vehicles in December 2025 after 19+ incidents…
2025 · data · ●○○ · published 2025-11-18verified
Tesla's robotaxi service remained a pilot in Austin, Texas with roughly 30–50 vehicles in 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Tesla's robotaxi service remained a pilot in Austin, Texas with roughly 30–50 vehicles…
2025 · data · ●○○ · published 2025-11-06corrected
Pony.ai reported a combined fleet exceeding 720 fully driverless commercial robotaxis across China's four tier-1 cities; it launched Gen-7 robotaxis in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Pony.ai operates a fleet of 720+ robotaxis, running fully driverless commercial…
2025-11 · setback · ●○○ · published 2025-12-10verified
A Waymo robotaxi killed a dog in November 2025, the company's second animal fatality in two months.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-11: A Waymo robotaxi killed a dog in November 2025, the company's second animal fatality in…
2025-11 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-11-30verified
Waymo launched robotaxi freeway operations for riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix in November 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-11: Waymo launched robotaxi freeway operations for riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles and…
2025-11 · projection · ●●○ · published 2025-11-13corrected
Baidu said Apollo Go's Wuhan operations were nearing break-even and projected to achieve profitability by 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-11: Baidu said Apollo Go's Wuhan operations were nearing break-even and projected to…
2025-11 · data · ●●○ · published 2025-11-13verified
Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxi service was providing more than 250,000 rides per week as of November 2025, operating in 22 cities globally with 1,000+ vehicles in Wuhan.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-11: Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxi service was providing more than 250,000 rides per week as of…
2025-10 · setback · ●○○ · published 2025-12-10verified
A Waymo robotaxi killed a cat in October 2025, raising questions about its sensor detection.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-10: A Waymo robotaxi killed a cat in October 2025, raising questions about its sensor…
2025-10 · policy · ●●○ · published 2025-11-20verified
Pony.ai received its first city-wide robotaxi permit, covering all of Shenzhen, in October 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-10: Pony.ai received its first city-wide robotaxi permit, covering all of Shenzhen, in…
2025-09 · data · ●○○ · published 2025-12-22corrected
In September 2025, Zoox had deployed a fleet of 50 robotaxis between San Francisco and Las Vegas.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: Zoox operated a robotaxi fleet of about 50 vehicles in San Francisco and Las Vegas as…
2025-07 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-12-31verified
Waymo's robotaxi fleet reached 100 million fully autonomous miles in July 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-07: Waymo's robotaxi fleet reached 100 million fully autonomous miles in July 2025.
2025-04 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-12-10legacy
Waymo reached 250,000 paid robotaxi rides per week (about 1 million per month) in April 2025.
2025-03 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-03-04verified
Waymo and Uber launched robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas in March 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-03: Waymo and Uber launched robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas in March 2025.
2024-12 · setback · ●●● · published 2024-12-11corrected
In December 2024, General Motors stopped funding Cruise, shifting autonomous-vehicle work toward driver-assistance systems and ending funding for autonomous taxis.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2024-12: General Motors shut down its Cruise robotaxi business in December 2024, ending robotaxi…
2023-10 · setback · ●●○ · published 2023-11-08verified
In October 2023 a GM Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian, leading to a recall of Cruise's self-driving cars.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2023-10: In October 2023 a GM Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian, leading to a recall of…
2026-10-16 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-10-16corrected
MarketWatch reported on 16 October 2026, after reporter Christine Ji hosted two Tau Robotics humanoids (modified Unitree G1s costing about $55,000 each before Tau's modifications) in her San Francisco apartment, that the robots climbed the stairs to her third-floor apartment with teleoperator assistance, vacuumed, mopped, wiped counters, loaded a dishwasher (struggling to grip a smooth glass and to retrieve a small knife) and slowly folded a towel (about four minutes) and denim pants while remote human operators at Tau's headquarters guided them, with Tau operating eight robots and having logged roughly 160 paid robot hours across nearly 100 cleanings ($30 per robot-hour); Tau's website states its robots are not fully autonomous, a supervising human deciding when to let them do tasks autonomously and when to take over and steer them — i.e. Tau's commercial in-home humanoid cleaning still depends on human help.
2026-09-27 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-09-27verified
Stanford and Caltech researchers' HomeBody system (reported 27 September 2026) let a Unitree G1 humanoid driven by GPT-6 Astra explore an unfamiliar kitchen, build a digital twin and spatial memory, then tidy it and fetch items from drawers by calling a skill library, with limitations including model latency, overheating finger servos and high compute costs; no success rates were reported.
2026-09-17 · achievement · ●●● · published 2026-09-17verified
Figure AI reported on 17 September 2026 that its Helix 2.5 model, pretrained on Figure's Index dataset of human behavior, ran three long-horizon whole-body tasks (living-room tidying, towel folding, bed making) zero-shot in 30 unseen Bay Area homes with unseen objects, reaching 56% full-task success (no partial credit) versus 9% for the same model without Index pretraining, and matched a Helix 02 policy trained in its evaluation environment using half as much task data.
2026-07-30 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-07-30corrected
Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2 on 30 July 2026, reporting whole-body control of Apptronik's Apollo humanoid with success of 68.4% picking up objects from a table, 45.7% from the floor and 76.3% from a shelf, and 32–92% on multi-finger dexterity tasks such as tying a trash bag (44%), in its own evaluations whose environment novelty was not specified.
2026-07-16 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-07-16corrected
Sunday Robotics reported on 16 July 2026 that its ACT-2 model achieved 99.1% (±0.3% SE) success on laundry folding across 785 autonomous attempts on 9 garment types in unseen homes with zero per-home adaptation, and that out-of-domain folding success rose from 14% to 100% as pretraining data scaled; it said other household skills its model is learning, including coffee preparation, were not yet reliable enough and had not yet been tested against this standard.
2026-04-30 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-04-30corrected
1X said on 30 April 2026 that NEO home-humanoid pre-orders booked out its entire production capacity for the next year (10,000 units) within 5 days of the 28 October 2025 launch, that its NEO Factory in Hayward, California had commenced full-scale production, giving 1X (together with a San Carlos facility coming online later in 2026) capacity to produce up to 10,000 NEOs a year, and that the first NEOs would ship to customers in 2026 with some buyers receiving units later.
2026-04-20 · projection · ●●○ · published 2026-04-20verified
The Forecasting Research Institute's LEAP expert panel (Wave 7, surveyed 9–31 March 2026, published 20 April 2026) gave a median expert forecast of 2034 for a robot first passing the Coffee Test (making coffee in three unfamiliar home-like environments without mistakes), with superforecasters at 2032, the general public at 2039 and an expert interquartile range of 2030–2040.
2026-04-16 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-04-16verified
Physical Intelligence's π0.7 model (arXiv, 16 April 2026) followed 3–6-step open-ended instruction sequences in 4 unseen kitchens and 2 unseen bedrooms with significantly higher success than π0.5 and π0.6, and operated an espresso machine out of the box at a level matching RL-specialized models; its authors report that seen tasks often exceed 90% success while unseen tasks or task-robot combinations reach 60–80%.
2026-04-02 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-04-02corrected
Generalist AI reported on 2 April 2026 that its GEN-1 model, pretrained on over 500,000 hours of physical interaction data and fine-tuned with about 1 hour of robot data per task, averaged 99% success on a set of dexterous tasks where its GEN-0 model (November 2025) averaged 64%, running tasks such as folding t-shirts 86 times in a row without intervention.
2026-01-27 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-27corrected
Figure AI's Helix 02 model (27 January 2026) had a Figure humanoid unload and reload a dishwasher across a full-sized kitchen in a 4-minute fully autonomous run of 61 sequenced loco-manipulation actions with no resets or human intervention, which Figure called the longest-horizon autonomous humanoid task to date; the policy was trained on data from the environment where it was evaluated and no success rate was given.
2025 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Agility Robotics stated that its humanoids will not go into homes until it can prove the robot is not going to fall on a baby.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Agility Robotics stated that its humanoids will not go into homes until it can prove…
2025-12-01 · data · ●●○ · published 2025-12-01verified
In Stanford's 2025 BEHAVIOR Challenge (leaderboard published 1 December 2025, NeurIPS 2025), whose 50 long-horizon household tasks are run in photo-realistic simulation, the best of 18 teams achieved only 12.4% full-task success on the held-out test (Q-score 0.26 including partial credit), using a π0.5-based policy.
2025-11-19 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-11-19corrected
Sunday Robotics said on 19 November 2025 that its ACT-1 model, trained on glove-captured human data with zero robot data, cleared dining tables and loaded dishwashers in Airbnb homes it had never seen, given a 3D map of each home, and performed a Table-to-Dishwasher task of 33 unique and 68 total dexterous interactions with 21 objects over more than 130 ft of navigation, and pulled an espresso shot on a consumer machine; no task success rates were disclosed.
2025-11-18 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-11-18verified
Physical Intelligence reported on 18 November 2025 that its π*0.6 VLA, improved with the RECAP reinforcement-learning method, made espresso drinks with a commercial espresso machine for 13 hours straight and folded novel laundry in a new home for over two hours without interruptions; on the hardest tasks (diverse laundry, espresso) RECAP more than doubled successful completions per hour and roughly halved failure rates versus the base model.
2025-10 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
In October 2025 Figure AI showed Figure 03 with its Helix VLA picking up novel objects from language commands; Helix controls the full upper body (35 DoF at 200 Hz) and Figure says it can grasp 'virtually any' novel household object.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-10: In October 2025 Figure AI showed Figure 03 with its Helix VLA picking up novel objects…
2025-10 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
1X Technologies opened pre-orders for its NEO home humanoid robot in October 2025 at $20,000 or a $499 monthly subscription.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-10: 1X Technologies opened pre-orders for its NEO home humanoid robot in October 2025 at…
2025-04-22 · achievement · ●●● · published 2025-04-22verified
Physical Intelligence's π0.5 VLA model (arXiv, 22 April 2025), trained with about 400 hours of mobile-manipulator data from about 100 homes plus other robot and web data (97.6% of first-phase examples), performed multi-stage kitchen and bedroom cleaning tasks in 3 real homes not seen in training; in unseen mock homes its success rose with the number of training locations (3 to 104), and the 104-location model performed about as well as a control trained on the test homes.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-04: Physical Intelligence released its π₀.5 vision-language-action model in April 2025,…
2025-03 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics in March 2025, a multi-embodiment vision-language-action model with reasoning that more than doubles generalization performance versus prior models.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-03: Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics in March 2025, a multi-embodiment…
2025-03-19 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2025-03-19corrected
University of Edinburgh researchers reported in Nature Machine Intelligence on 19 March 2025 that ELLMER, a GPT-4-based system controlling a seven-degrees-of-freedom Kinova robot arm, made a cup of coffee in a purpose-designed realistic kitchen setting — finding a mug by opening drawers with opening mechanisms it had not encountered before and mixing a set ratio of coffee with kettle water — while adapting to disturbances such as the mug being moved; the demonstration used a single designed setting.
2024 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2024-04-30verified
Stanford's Mobile ALOHA robot performed cooking tasks in 2024 demos, but required about 50 demonstrations in the target environment.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2024: Stanford's Mobile ALOHA robot performed cooking tasks in 2024 demos, but required about…
2024-10-31 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2024-10-31corrected
Physical Intelligence's π0 robot foundation model (arXiv, 31 October 2024) was pretrained on about 10,000 hours of dexterous manipulation data from 7 robot configurations and 68 tasks and, after fine-tuning, performed multi-stage tasks such as laundry folding and table bussing that take 5–20 minutes to complete.
2024-01-07 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2024-01-07corrected
Figure AI showed on 7 January 2024 its Figure 01 humanoid making a cup of coffee with a Keurig machine using an end-to-end neural network (video in, trajectories out) that, per press coverage, learned from about 10 hours of videos of humans and could self-correct its mistakes.
2026-10-18 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-10-18verified
At Beijing E-Town's 2026 Robot Warrior Challenge fall competition on 18 October 2026 — a ~6,500 m² outdoor staged emergency course of 14 tasks, run on surfaces left wet by the previous day's heavy rain, whose humanoid-only tasks were pulling open a door, explosive-hazard removal, emergency valve closure and fire extinguishing — 24 of the 29 teams competed by remote control and 5 by autonomous navigation, and the published results named placings in the remote-controlled humanoid, quadruped and wheeled-quadruped groups but only one autonomous winner (Zhishen 'Milk long B' in the autonomous wheeled-quadruped group), reporting no autonomous humanoid placing, whereas X-Humanoid's Tien Kung 3.0 had won the autonomous humanoid run of the spring edition in April.
2026-10-02 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-10-02verified
On 2 October 2026 TEPCO began inserting a remote-controlled multi-joint robotic arm — under development since 2017, about ¥7.8 billion in government funds, and repeatedly delayed — into Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2's containment vessel, planning 3–4 months of obstacle clearing and 3D surveying before a third trial fuel-debris retrieval next year, after two earlier trials (2024, 2025) recovered about 0.9 g combined.
2026-10-01 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-10-01corrected
Launching its Shift fleet-management platform on 1 October 2026, ANYbotics said Shift is already used across more than 200 robot deployments and runs hundreds of thousands of autonomous inspections per month (company-reported; autonomous navigation and sensing, not manipulation or repair).
2026-06-15 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-06-15verified
ANYbotics reported in a June 2026 case study that its ANYmal quadruped at Vigier Ciment's 24/7 cement plant in Péry, Switzerland has run fully autonomous nightly inspection missions across 3 mills and 6 floors since January 2025, completing more than 33,000 inspections at 450 inspection points in 16 months with zero robot breakdowns (company-reported; sensing-only inspection, no manipulation or repair).
2026-04-18 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-04-19corrected
At Beijing E-Town's first Robot Warrior Challenge on 18 April 2026 — a 3,500 m² staged earthquake/flood/fire course of 17 obstacles including emergency valve closure, with a 12-minute limit for humanoids and 36 teams running 30 remote-controlled versus 8 autonomous-navigation rounds — X-Humanoid's full-size Tien Kung 3.0 completed the course fully autonomously with no remote control and, per X-Humanoid, achieved the highest overall score to become the first winner of the fully autonomous run (Warrior Intelligent Mobility Award), clearing pendulum traversal, forward progression and barrier-breaching/obstacle-clearance tasks, though neither the organiser nor the company reports it completing the valve-closure task.
2025 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Boston Dynamics' Spot robot is in ongoing inspection deployments at the Fukushima Daiichi, Chernobyl and Sellafield nuclear sites.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Boston Dynamics' Spot robot is in ongoing inspection deployments at the Fukushima…
2025 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04legacy
TEPCO retrieved only about 0.9 g of fuel debris in total from Fukushima Daiichi in 2024–2025, against roughly 880 tonnes remaining, with the retrieval robots teleoperated.
↳ follows up on 2025-04: TEPCO carried out a second Fukushima Daiichi fuel debris retrieval in April 2025,… (since withdrawn)
2025 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2025-06-23verified
Equinor deployed ANYbotics' ANYmal quadruped at the Northern Lights carbon capture and storage facility in 2025 for CO₂ monitoring.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Equinor deployed ANYbotics' ANYmal quadruped at the Northern Lights carbon capture and…
2025-10-12 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-10-12verified
At the World Robot Summit 2025 Harsh Environment F-REI Challenge at the Fukushima Robot Test Field (10–12 October 2025; 34 teams from eight countries and regions across four competitions), the real-robot Plant Disaster Challenge — gauge reading and valve opening/closing on digital-twin command, abnormality response under smoke, and debris removal plus gas-valve closure after a simulated boiler explosion with communication delays or blackouts — was won by team NuTech-R, ahead of Quix and MISORA+UoA.
2025-10-04 · data · ●●○ · published 2025-11-14verified
DARPA Triage Challenge Event 2 (Systems competition, Perry, Georgia, 26 Sep–3 Oct 2025, concluded 4 Oct) required fully autonomous UAV/UGV systems to geolocate and triage simulated casualties on C-130-crash and night-ambush courses with smoke, darkness and obstructions; among 9 teams, DARPA-funded DART scored highest (728 points: 536 on the C-130 course plus 192 at night) and self-funded Coordinated Robotics (546) won the $300,000 top prize, with scores not comparable to Event 1's different scoring scheme.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-10: DARPA held Event 2 of its Triage Challenge in October 2025, in which robots navigated…
2025-08 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-08-20verified
Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute demonstrated the Atlas humanoid controlled by Large Behavior Models in August 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-08: Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute demonstrated the Atlas humanoid…
2025-07-29 · setback · ●●○ · published 2025-07-29corrected
In July 2025 the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corp. (NDF), which supervises Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning, said full-scale removal of the estimated 880 tonnes of fuel debris in Units 1–3, previously planned for the early 2030s, is likely to start only in (fiscal) 2037 or later, as TEPCO reportedly concluded that preparations alone would take about 12–15 years; only small trial samples had been retrieved from Unit 2, in November 2024 and April 2025.
2025-06 · policy · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority launched the £9.5 million Auto-SAS robotics partnership in June 2025 to develop autonomous sorting of nuclear waste.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-06: The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority launched the £9.5 million Auto-SAS robotics…
2024-11 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04corrected
TEPCO retrieved its first fuel-debris sample from Fukushima Daiichi in November 2024; the sample weighed approximately 0.7 grams.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2024-11: TEPCO retrieved the first fuel debris sample (about 0.19 g) from the Fukushima Daiichi…
2024-10-04 · data · ●●○ · published 2024-10-05verified
In DARPA Triage Challenge Event 1 (Perry, Georgia, 28 Sep–4 Oct 2024), 11 teams fielded autonomous UAV/UGV systems to find and triage simulated casualties on three staged courses (airplane crash, convoy ambush, open battlefield); the top Systems score was DART's 92.5 points (mean of its best two of three runs, at up to 15 points per casualty), while 6 of the 11 teams scored zero on at least two of their three runs.
2026-10-18 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-10-18corrected
Cailian Press reported on 18 October 2026, after a visit to Zhaofeng's Hangzhou auto-parts plant, where 15 wheeled Leju Kuavo humanoids load parts at 15 stations on workers' instructions, that each robot load took 35–40 s versus about 15 s for a skilled worker; Leju's CEO said accuracy and MTBF were already up to standard and the next step was to cut load time to the 15 s that matches the production cycle, which Zhaofeng's chairman expected in six months to a year; Zhaofeng is also exploring having robots do the pre-shift recalibration of a 26–28-station line at model changeovers (now 2–3 hours of work by three engineers) and is testing robot camera inspection toward 'lights-out factory' closed-loop operation (company statements; humans still work on the line, and Jiemian quoted Zhaofeng's general manager on 16 October as saying the robots fill the manual gaps between automated processes rather than replacing the whole automated line).
- 2026-10-16 · 21st Century Business Herald reported on 16 October 2026, after a site visit on 15 October, that 15 Leju humanoid robots were in routine ope…
2026-10-14 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2026-10-14verified
A Beijing News (新京报) survey of Chinese humanoid factory deployments published on 14 October 2026 (SAIC-GM/AgiBot's 'Nengzai No. 1', AgiBot G2 at Longcheer, Galbot S1 at CATL) concluded that the applications disclosed so far show some robots can take on specific tasks but that whether this holds over longer periods and more complex conditions still needs sustained-operation testing, warning that a rated runtime such as Galbot S1's official 8 hours with hot-swappable batteries is not the same as continuously completing production tasks, so line suitability must be judged from effective work, fault downtime and human takeovers during operation rather than battery life, and noting that factory training, line trials and routine production still coexist (e.g. Dongfeng's 'Xiaodong' humanoid was planned to enter its plant for practical training at end-October 2026 and join trial production by year-end).
2026-10-09 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-10-10corrected
Dyna Robotics co-founder and chief scientist Jason Ma said at a Savant VC event in San Francisco on 9 October 2026 that a Dyna robot folds between 1,000 and 1,100 napkins per day at each Din Tai Fung restaurant, running the same unified model at every location with no site-specific engineering, and that Dyna robots also handle about 1,000 towels per day at Best Western (company statements reported by humanoid.guide; no intervention or uptime figures given).
- 2026-10-07 · Forbes reported in October 2026 (Forbes Australia syndication, 7 October) that BMW said only one Figure robot worked at any given time durin…
- 2026-09-21 · Boston Dynamics opened its Robotics Metaplant Application Center (RMAC) at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America near Savannah, Georgia on 2…
- 2026-09-15 · Unveiling Digit 5 on 15 September 2026, Agility Robotics said Digit 4 had logged more than 65,000 operating hours across customer sites incl…
2026-08-27 · data · ●●● · published 2026-08-27verified
Dyna Robotics reported on 27 August 2026 that at Din Tai Fung restaurants, where each robot must produce 1,500 table-ready napkins per 18-hour shift, its Dyna-1 model at launch (June 2025) folded about 35 napkins/hour with 75% meeting the quality bar (about 480 per shift, roughly 32% of the requirement), while Dyna-2 (August 2026) folds 95/hour with 93% passing, about 1,590 per day (106% of the requirement), and that Din Tai Fung is rolling the robots out across its network, with Dyna projecting a deployed fleet of hundreds by H1 2027.
2026-06-29 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-06-29corrected
AgiBot said on 29 June 2026 that during a six-consecutive-day livestream from a tablet mass-production quality-inspection section at Longcheer's Nanchang factory, multiple AgiBot humanoids logged more than 64 hours of operation, performed 64,828 production-line tasks across more than 4 production workflows alongside human operators with a 99.99% task success rate, and contributed to cumulative line output of 17,625 (company figures; interventions and teleoperation not quantified).
2026-05 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-06-02verified
The Economic Observer reported on 2 June 2026 that Robotera's humanoids (column-based lower body) at a China Post logistics centre in Longgang, Shenzhen fell from about 600 parcels/hour in the lab to about 100/hour on arrival (November 2025), reached about 900/hour by March 2026 and a stable 1,200/hour by end-May 2026 versus a human average above 1,000/hour (skilled maximum 1,200), after six months of on-site engineering support including night-shift supervision, with some of its 10+ logistics centres running robots on two to three shifts for 24-hour coverage and new sites now deployed in about 3 days with 2 hours of data.
2026-05-22 · achievement · ●●● · published 2026-05-22corrected
Figure AI ended on 22 May 2026 an unedited livestream that began as a response to a challenge to prove humanoids could work an 8-hour shift at human speed without intervention, in which a rotating fleet of Figure 03 humanoids running Helix-02 sorted 249,560 packages over 200 continuous hours at its Sunnyvale headquarters, autonomously rotating units to charge on roughly 4-hour batteries; CEO Brett Adcock said it 'ran for 200 hours without a failure', which Humanoids Daily and Interesting Engineering describe as no catastrophic mechanical breakdown or system-halting crash, though viewers saw occasional dropped or mis-oriented packages (company facility, not a customer workplace; intervention counts not published).
2026-05-18 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-05-18corrected
In a 10-hour 'Man vs. Machine' parcel-sorting contest at Figure AI's own facility, held during its May 2026 livestream marathon and reported on 18 May 2026, a rotating fleet of autonomous Figure 03 humanoids running Helix-02 sorted 12,732 packages (2.83 s/package) versus 12,924 (2.79 s/package) for a human intern who took California-mandated meal and rest breaks, i.e. about 98.5% of the human's shift output on this single task (company-run contest, not a customer site).
2026-04-14 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-04-15corrected
Four AgiBot G2 humanoids completed an eight-hour live-streamed shift on 14 April 2026 loading and unloading tablets at MMIT test stations on Longcheer's mass-production line in Nanchang, China, where Xinhua reported 18–20 s per operation and 310 units per hour, and AgiBot/Longcheer reported up to 310 units per hour (about 3,000 per shift), over 99.9% success in continuous operation, over 140 hours of cumulative continuous operation with downtime loss below 4% and 'minimal human intervention' (intervention count not disclosed).
- 2026-04-14 · AgiBot announced on 14 April 2026 that multiple AgiBot G2 robots had been officially integrated into Longcheer Technology's tablet mass-prod…
2026-03-25 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-03-25corrected
Humanoids Daily reported on 25 March 2026, citing a recent Wall Street Journal report, that at Schaeffler's 750-employee auto-parts plant in Cheraw, South Carolina, an Agility Digit humanoid moves 25-pound baskets of bearing components from a stamping press to an industrial washing machine for eight hours a day, split into two four-hour shifts with a recharge break in between, working alone inside a Plexiglas safety cage, at an estimated operating cost of $10–25 per hour (depending on service model) versus a $20/hour entry-level wage (no throughput or intervention data reported).
2026-01-28 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-01-28corrected
On Tesla's Q4 2025 earnings call on 28 January 2026, Elon Musk said Optimus was 'still in the R&D phase' and 'not in usage in our factories in a material way' (having done 'some basic tasks in the factory'), which Electrek characterized as an admission that no Optimus robots were doing useful work in Tesla's factories, after Tesla had claimed in June 2024 that two Optimus bots performed factory tasks autonomously and Musk had said in January 2025 he was confident several thousand Optimus robots would be doing useful things by end-2025.
2026-01-26 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-01-26corrected
TechSpot reported on 26 January 2026, drawing on the Financial Times, that UBTech acknowledges its Walker S2 humanoids achieve only 30–50% of a human worker's productivity, that the robot is optimized for controlled, repetitive tasks such as moving parts between stations, stacking boxes and visual defect inspection, that it still needs a human operator to swap its hands or tools for different tasks, and that UBTech aims to reach 80% of human efficiency by 2027.
2025 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04legacy
The Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla Optimus demos are often remotely controlled by human engineers.
2025 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Kepler's K2 humanoid (about $34,600) ran an 8-hour livestream on a single charge in a trade-show demo, not in production work.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Kepler's K2 humanoid (about $34,600) ran an 8-hour livestream on a single charge in a…
2025 · setback · ●●○ · published 2025-12-31corrected
Tesla’s Optimus robot fell over and went viral in 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: A Tesla Optimus humanoid fell over during a Miami demo in 2025, a viral moment…
2025-12-17 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-12-18verified
CATL said on 17 December 2025 that it had begun deploying Spirit AI's VLA-driven Xiaomo humanoid robots at scale at its Zhongzhou (Luoyang) battery base to plug in high-voltage battery connectors, claiming a 99% task success rate and a daily workload triple a human worker's because the robots work without breaks (company claims; robot count, throughput per hour and interventions not disclosed).
- 2025-11-20 · Agility Robotics reported on 20 November 2025 that its Digit humanoids had moved over 100,000 totes in commercial deployment at GXO's Flower…
- 2025-11-19 · Figure AI reported on 19 November 2025, retiring Figure 02, that its 11-month deployment at BMW Plant Spartanburg (about six months of daily…
- 2025-07-09 · Securities Times reported on 9 July 2025 that AgiBot and integrator Anu Intelligence livestreamed for three hours from Fulin Precision's Mia…
2025-06-07 · data · ●●○ · published 2025-06-07corrected
Figure AI reported on 7 June 2025 that its Helix policy on Figure 02, rotating mixed packages (including poly bags and flat envelopes) on a conveyor so the barcode faces the scanner, cut average handling time to 4.05 s per package (from ~5.0 s at its initial logistics deployment about three months earlier) and raised correct barcode orientation to ~95% (from ~70%); scaling demonstration data from 10 to 60 hours took handling time from ~6.84 s to 4.31 s and barcode success from 88.2% to 94.4%; it also released a 60-minute uninterrupted video of Figure 02 doing the task (company evaluation, not a customer shift).
- 2025-06-02 · Rocking Robots reported on 2 June 2025, interviewing Agility Robotics CTO Pras Velagapudi at the Humanoids Summit in London, that since Agil…
2025-04-29 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-04-29corrected
Dyna Robotics said on 29 April 2025 that its DYNA-1 foundation model, running a pair of stationary robot arms, autonomously folded 800+ napkins in a continuous 24-hour demonstration, and claimed a 99.4% success rate without human intervention while operating at 60% of human throughput (company claim; demonstration site and per-run intervention log not disclosed).
2025-04-06 · analysis · ●●○ · published 2025-04-06corrected
Fortune reported on 6 April 2025 that, per BMW spokesperson Steve Wilson, only a single Figure robot worked at BMW's South Carolina plant at any given time and, until sometime in March 2025, only during non-production hours, after which the same robot performed one limited chore in live production hours (picking parts from a logistics container and placing them onto a welding fixture in the body shop), contrasting with CEO Brett Adcock's February claim of a 'fleet of robots performing end-to-end operations'.
- 2025-04-06 · A Figure AI humanoid was doing live-production work at BMW's South Carolina plant by early April 2025: Fortune reported on 6 April 2025 that…
2024-11-19 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2024-11-19corrected
Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock claimed on 19 November 2024 that Figure 02 in the BMW project was 'now an autonomous fleet, 400% faster with 7x higher success rate'; the accompanying video, per Interesting Engineering, showed Figure 02 at BMW's Spartanburg plant doing a sheet-metal insertion task at up to 1,000 placements per day (company claim; baselines, robot count and interventions not disclosed; BMW told IE there were then no Figure robots at Plant Spartanburg).
2024-02-28 · data · ●●○ · published 2024-02-28corrected
In a 28 February 2024 'Deployment Update: Putwall Automation' post, Agility Robotics said Digit continues to complete real tasks in real facilities, with workflows run on a continuous basis and 100% autonomously, at 75% of a human's speed and a 97% success rate, without gantry or tether (company claim; site, run length and intervention counts not disclosed).
2026-10-01 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-10-01verified
Boston Dynamics unveiled on 1 October 2026 a new-generation hand for Atlas with four fingers and 13 directly actuated, backdrivable degrees of freedom (up from 7 in the previous hand, including a 4-DoF opposable thumb), dense pressure tactile sensors over the fingertips and palm and the previous hand's strength (carrying a 100 lb+ loaded minifridge), deliberately omitting a pinky to save cost and failure points; it said the hand is designed for high-fidelity simulation and sim-to-real reinforcement learning, with only initial sim-to-real results so far.
2026-09-28 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-09-28corrected
Sharpa launched at IROS 2026 on 28 September 2026 its W02 dexterous hand — 21 active degrees of freedom in a body about 30% smaller than its W01, with a Dynamic Tactile Array at the fingertips (5 mN–30 N force range, 1 mm spatial resolution) plus electronic skin over most of the hand (0.1–20 N, 5 mm resolution) and IP54 protection — alongside a D01 manipulation robot with whole-body e-skin and an AE01 haptic exoskeleton data glove (product specifications, no task results).
2026-09-25 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-09-25verified
The Information reported on 25 September 2026 that hands, along with factory equipment and suppliers, are holding back Tesla's Optimus V3 ramp (from a few dozen robots a week in Q2 to several hundred, against a goal of 1,000+ a week by end-2026): each hand and forearm has more than 100 screws and small parts that workers assemble by hand, assembly equipment does not always align parts precisely so robots need rework, and some touch sensors have been unreliable, so Tesla developed a replaceable 'sensing glove' to add in next year's model (per The Next Web's summary of the paywalled report).
2026-09-22 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-09-22verified
GGII's humanoid-robot media arm counted about 35 financing rounds in China's dexterous-hand sector in 2026 through 19 September totalling over ¥6.73 billion, up 821% from ¥730 million in the same period of 2025, and 61 new dexterous-hand products launched in the year, adding that hybrid tendon-plus-direct-drive designs had become a hotspot and that tactile sensors are becoming standard equipment, with piezoresistive, capacitive and Hall-effect sensors dominating mass production.
2026-09-21 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-09-21verified
Unitree launched the Dex5-S dexterous hand on 21 September 2026 at a starting price of ¥39,900: human-hand 1:1 size, 22 degrees of freedom with all 22 motors direct-drive and backdrivable, 620 g, 1 kg rated (2 kg maximum) payload and up to 1,000 Hz control — which trade press framed as a price cut for high-DoF hands, at a time when, per OFweek, 6-DoF humanoid hands sell for ¥6,000–8,000 and Inspire's hand fell from ¥50,000 in 2023 to ¥18,000 in 2026.
2026-08-26 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-08-31verified
The second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (closed 26 August 2026) added a first dedicated dexterous-hand competition of eight events (an average of 51 teams registered per event) with separate teleoperated and fully autonomous groups, autonomous scores weighted double to encourage autonomy; AgiBot's AgiLink OmniHand won seven of the eight golds, but its firsts in cable connection, unboxing, nail fixing, bottle opening and lid prying were teleoperated in real time with MANUS data gloves, while LinkerBot won the power-tool assembly gold fully autonomously with 18 screw installations in five minutes (in a tweezers bean-picking preliminary, a teleoperated-group team picked 33 beans in five minutes).
2026-07-09 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-07-09verified
1X unveiled on 9 July 2026 the hands that will ship on every NEO humanoid: 25 degrees of freedom (22 in fingers and palm plus 3 at the wrist), tendon-driven at ~5:1–15:1 gear ratios so every joint is force-controlled and backdrivable, with tactile skin sensing normal force, contact location and shear for slip detection, ±0.2 mm positioning accuracy, IP68 sealing, and joints tested to millions of cycles; 1X said hundreds had come off its production line with capacity for 10,000 hands in 2026, but told WIRED that some of its demonstration videos were teleoperated to show the hardware's upper limit.
2026-06-17 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-06-17verified
Sanctuary AI announced on 17 June 2026 that its Physical AI, running on existing industrial robot arms rather than its humanoid, achieved a 99.5%+ task success rate at a 2.54 s cycle time on a wire-plugging task — inserting a flexible wire into a moving target on a conveyor — matching the throughput of an unnamed global Tier 1 automotive supplier's live production line in a proof of concept validated against that customer's benchmarks, as Sanctuary shifted strategy to deploying its AI on existing robots, with its hydraulic hands listed on its website as 'In Development'.
2026-05-15 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-05-15verified
DoNews reported on 15 May 2026 that, per Tashan Technology's VP Fu Yihui, the share of dexterous hands fitted with tactile sensors rose from about 10% to over 50% from Q4 2025 to year-end and now exceeds 60% of the market, while Inspire Robots' CMO Fang Hainan said mainstream hands' average life of over 300,000 cycles still falls short of real-deployment needs, that Inspire's main product reaches one million loaded grasp cycles and that its price fell from ¥50,000 per hand in 2023 to about ¥20,000 in 2026, with Inspire delivering over 10,000 hands in 2025 and targeting 30,000–50,000 in 2026 (company statements).
2026-05-15 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-05-15verified
Research firm GGII estimates that about 19,200 robotic dexterous hands were sold in China in 2025 (up 236.84% year on year) and projects about 70,200 in 2026 (+265.63%) and more than 430,000 by 2030 (2026–2030 CAGR ~57.8%), noting that linkage-driven hands lead shipments while tendon-driven hands remain hard to mass-produce, and that the industry still faces an 'impossible triangle' of low cost, high performance and high stability (figures first reported by DoNews on 15 May 2026; restated in GGII's 2026 H1 dexterous-hand report).
2026-05-06 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-05-06verified
Genesis AI announced on 6 May 2026 its GENE-26.5 robot foundation model and a proprietary human-scale dexterous hand paired with a tactile-skin data-collection glove (claimed 100× cheaper than typical options and up to 5× more data-efficient than teleoperation in internal tests), releasing videos of the system cooking a 20-step meal with one-handed egg cracking, pipetting, wire harnessing, solving a Rubik's Cube in-air and playing the piano — company-curated videos with no success rates or autonomy breakdown disclosed.
2026-04-01 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-04-01verified
Sanctuary AI said on 1 April 2026 that a policy trained entirely in simulation and transferred zero-shot to its proprietary hydraulic robotic hand autonomously reoriented a lettered cube to specified goal orientations ten consecutive times without dropping it, manipulating at the fingertips without palm support (company video; no overall success rate given).
2026-03-19 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-03-19verified
Physical Intelligence reported on 19 March 2026 that its RL Token (RLT) method — a compact VLA output token feeding a small actor-critic trained online on the robot — sped up the most precise stages of four contact-rich tasks (driving an M3 screw with an electric screwdriver, zip-tie fastening, Ethernet-cable and power-cord insertion) by up to 3× over the base VLA, with the Ethernet insertion improved using 15 minutes of robot data (about two hours of training) until half of the final policy's trials were faster than any human-teleoperated demonstration in the dataset (company lab evaluation).
2026-03-10 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-03-10verified
University of Texas at Austin researchers reported on 10 March 2026 (IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters) that FORTE, 3D-printed fin-ray gripper fingers whose internal air channels act as tactile sensors, achieved a 91.9% single-trial grasp success rate on 31 objects including raspberries, potato chips, jam jars and billiard balls, outperforming vision-only grippers, and detected 93% of slips with 100% precision (two-finger gripper in lab tests; designs open-sourced).
2026-02-13 · analysis · ●●○ · published 2026-02-13verified
The BBC reported on 13 February 2026 that Bristol University robotics professor Nathan Lepora called Elon Musk's promise of human-level manual dexterity for the 2026 Optimus 'rubbish', estimating human-level robot dexterity is about 10 years away, while industry figures described the cost and durability gap: Kinisi's prototype three-fingered hand cost about £4,000 to make versus £400 for its pincer gripper, Wuji's tactile five-finger hand sells for $12,000, about 200 Shadow Robot hands are in use (mostly in research), and Kinisi's founder said lab and start-up tactile sensors typically last about six months, whereas industry wants robots that work for 10 years.
2026-01-06 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-06verified
Sharpa unveiled its North full-body robot at CES 2026 on 6 January 2026, saying it gave four fully autonomous live demonstrations with its mass-produced SharpaWave hand (22 active degrees of freedom, more than 1,000 tactile pixels per fingertip at sub-millimetre resolution) — ping-pong rallies with a 0.02 s reaction time, ~2 mm-precision photo capture, card dealing, and building a paper windmill through a 30+ step handicraft sequence that Sharpa called one of the longest continuous autonomous manipulation sequences publicly demonstrated — a trade-show demo with no success rates or trial counts disclosed.
2025 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Shadow Robot received an £11 million ARIA grant for systematic robot hand design (OGRES/UPWARD projects).
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Shadow Robot received an £11 million ARIA grant for systematic robot hand design…
2025 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Sanctuary AI's Gen 7 Phoenix humanoid has 20-degree-of-freedom hands with haptic feedback, versus 27 DoF in a human hand.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Sanctuary AI's Gen 7 Phoenix humanoid has 20-degree-of-freedom hands with haptic…
2025 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
ICRA 2025 held its 5th workshop on deformable object manipulation (cloth, cables, food), a problem with no unified solution framework.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: ICRA 2025 held its 5th workshop on deformable object manipulation (cloth, cables,…
2025 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
NVIDIA and UT Austin's DexMimicGen, presented at ICRA 2025, generated 20,000+ bimanual dexterous manipulation demonstrations from 60 human demonstrations.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: NVIDIA and UT Austin's DexMimicGen, presented at ICRA 2025, generated 20,000+ bimanual…
2025-12 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2025-12-10verified
MIT researchers unveiled a vine-inspired robotic gripper in December 2025 that gently lifts heavy and fragile objects.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: MIT researchers unveiled a vine-inspired robotic gripper in December 2025 that gently…
2025-09 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Figure AI introduced the Figure 03 humanoid in September 2025, with new hands carrying custom tactile sensors that detect forces as small as 3 grams.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-09: Figure AI introduced the Figure 03 humanoid in September 2025, with new hands carrying…
2026-10-13 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-10-13verified
Vals AI's Robo-bench, introduced on 13 October 2026, has frontier models' coding agents control a simulated 7-DoF Franka arm and 29-DoF Unitree G1 humanoid in real time from only datasheets, cameras and sensors (no motion planner, grasping or walking controller; 24 mostly held-out tasks of 3 minutes each) and found the best agent, OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol, averaging 28.33% of milestone points overall, with the best arm-suite average about 50.8 points and every model below 2 points on the humanoid tasks.
- 2026-09-27 · Stanford and Caltech researchers' HomeBody system (reported 27 September 2026) let a Unitree G1 humanoid driven by GPT-6 Astra explore an un…
2026-09-25 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-09-25verified
Electrek reported on 25 September 2026, citing The Information, that three people familiar with Tesla's Optimus said its AI cannot yet reliably handle a wide range of tasks and behaves unpredictably in situations it was not trained on, that Optimus reportedly still takes several days to learn even basic tasks despite over 500,000 hours of training data, and that the units working in Tesla's factories are confined to controlled, supervised areas and programmed for specific tasks, even as Tesla builds several hundred V3 robots a week at Fremont, mostly for internal testing, training and data collection.
- 2026-09-17 · Figure AI reported on 17 September 2026 that its Helix 2.5 model, pretrained on Figure's Index dataset of human behavior, ran three long-hor…
2026-09-09 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-09-09verified
AgiBot reported on 9–10 September 2026 that its GE-Act 2.0 world-action model, evaluated zero-shot (no task fine-tuning or demonstrations) on 100 atomic tasks in 20 skill groups with scenes, backgrounds, lighting and object instances unseen in training, raised average success from 17.1% to 44.1% on its G1-OP robot (tasks with non-zero success from 39 to 76) and from 13.4% to 31.1% on its G2-90D robot as co-training data grew from 300 to 30,000 hours, without clear saturation, the G2-90D gain despite that robot making up under 2% of the data indicating cross-embodiment transfer (company evaluation).
2026-08 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-10-18corrected
Generalist AI reported in August 2026 that its GEN-1.5 robot foundation model learns new short-horizon dexterous tasks in context from a single 3–12-second demonstration with no gradient updates, averaging 59% (±10% s.d.) success across 10 tasks such as unzipping a pouch and opening jars, rising to 83% (±9%) after 10 gradient steps on about 5 minutes (~50 demonstrations) of data per task and reaching 66.5% on a held-out task after one gradient step on one minute of data, while noting the tasks are simple and short-horizon and in-context skills are more brittle than fine-tuned ones (company evaluation).
- 2026-08-27 · Dyna Robotics reported on 27 August 2026 that at Din Tai Fung restaurants, where each robot must produce 1,500 table-ready napkins per 18-ho…
2026-08-20 · setback · ●○○ · published 2026-08-21verified
Beijing News reporters at the preliminaries of the second World Humanoid Robot Games' scenario events in Beijing (18–20 August 2026) found that in the 'packing and warehousing' event (pills into boxes, boxes into cartons) and the 'cable connection' event (inserting a USB cable) nearly all teams that fully completed the tasks were teleoperated while fully autonomous robots fared worse, with reporters seeing one autonomous robot knock a carton askew so that every later box went in crooked, a referee saying autonomous robots often cannot adjust once a first small error occurs, and a team reporting that the organiser's cables were much softer than the ones it had bought for training, making the task harder.
2026-08-20 · projection · ●●○ · published 2026-08-21verified
Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said at the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing on 20 August 2026 that insufficient generalization is embodied AI's biggest bottleneck worldwide — models trained with ample data in a fixed scene approach 100% task success, but success drops sharply once the objects or environment change slightly, so each new task needs retraining — and projected that robots able to complete about 80% of tasks in any unfamiliar environment or home from voice or language instructions alone, which he called embodied AI's 'ChatGPT moment', could arrive in 2–3 years at the fastest and 5–10 years at the slowest.
2026-08-18 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-08-18verified
Skild AI reported on 18 August 2026 that its S1 foundation model, prompted with a single video demonstration and no fine-tuning, reached 66% average cumulative per-step success on internal long-horizon tasks (4–8 minutes) unseen in pretraining, versus 9% for a language-prompted VLA at the same 100,000 hours of pretraining, and 96% on seen tasks, estimating one in-context demonstration to be worth about 380 post-training demonstrations (50–100 hours of teleoperation), with a post-trained VLA reaching 86% only at 2,000 demonstrations (company benchmark; per-step scoring with humans recovering failures during grading).
2026-07-30 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-07-30verified
Alongside Gemini Robotics 2 on 30 July 2026, Google DeepMind said its Gemini Robotics ER 2 planning model tracks task progress from continuous video so a robot can self-correct or retry a failed step without restarting, scoring 57.4% accuracy on five-level progress classification and 91.3% on moment finding, and that Gemini Robotics 2 adapts to new bi-arm robot embodiments in a few hours of adaptation, typically with fewer than 200 examples (company evaluations).
- 2026-07-30 · Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2 on 30 July 2026, reporting whole-body control of Apptronik's Apollo humanoid with success of 68…
- 2026-07-16 · Sunday Robotics reported on 16 July 2026 that its ACT-2 model achieved 99.1% (±0.3% SE) success on laundry folding across 785 autonomous att…
2026-06-29 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-06-29verified
Swiss startup Flexion said on 29 June 2026 that its Reflect v1.0 system let a humanoid complete, from a single instruction and without a human operator, a multi-floor mission in its own building (fetch a parcel via the stairs, return by elevator, open the box with tools and stow the contents in a drawer), with a VLM mission controller that replans when it detects failures from the camera feed, and that reinforcement-learning fine-tuning raised the controller's end-to-end completion on a 16-step evaluation mission from 38% (supervised fine-tuning alone) to 90%, while acknowledging a bounded task distribution and recovery behaviours that cover some failure modes but not all (company evaluation).
2026-06-20 · setback · ●○○ · published 2026-06-20corrected
After Spirit AI announced on 3 June 2026 that its Spirit v1.6 model had topped RoboArena, the crowd-sourced real-world leaderboard for generalist robot policies (Elo-style score 1,924 vs 1,881 for NVIDIA's Cosmos3-Nano-Policy), Chinese media reported from 20 June that RoboArena had removed suspect evaluations and dropped Spirit v1.6 from the leaderboard, after 72% of its 310 evaluations were found to come from two evaluator accounts registered on 26 May (179 evaluations at a 97% win rate and 45 at 86.7%) while NVIDIA's 21 evaluations of the same model gave it a 0% win rate.
- 2026-04-16 · Physical Intelligence's π0.7 model (arXiv, 16 April 2026) followed 3–6-step open-ended instruction sequences in 4 unseen kitchens and 2 unse…
- 2026-04-02 · Generalist AI reported on 2 April 2026 that its GEN-1 model, pretrained on over 500,000 hours of physical interaction data and fine-tuned wi…
2026-03-16 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-03-16verified
At its GTC conference on 16 March 2026 NVIDIA previewed GR00T N2, a robot foundation model based on its DreamZero world-action-model research, saying it helps robots succeed at new tasks in new environments more than twice as often as leading vision-language-action models and then ranked No. 1 on the MolmoSpaces and RoboArena generalist-policy leaderboards, with availability slated for the end of 2026 (company claim; model not yet released).
2026-03-03 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-03-03verified
Physical Intelligence reported on 3 March 2026 that Multi-Scale Embodied Memory (MEM), which gives its π0.6 VLA short-term video memory plus long-term memories written in natural language, let the model carry out tasks needing up to 15 minutes of memory — cleaning up a whole kitchen, cooking a grilled cheese sandwich, fetching a recipe's ingredients while closing the doors and drawers it opened — and adapt in context after a failure (e.g. switching grasp after a failed chopstick pick, trying the other direction after failing to open a fridge door), improving task progress over memoryless and simpler-memory variants on six evaluated tasks (gains shown only in charts; its own test environments).
2026-02-17 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-02-17verified
NVIDIA researchers reported on 17 February 2026 (arXiv) that DreamZero, a 14B world action model built on a pretrained video-diffusion backbone and running closed-loop at 7 Hz, reached 62.2% average task progress on pretraining-distribution tasks in unseen environments with unseen objects versus 27.4% for the best pretrained VLA baseline, 39.5% task progress on tasks absent from training (e.g. untying shoelaces) and, trained on DROID, 49% on tasks with unseen verbs versus 25–32% for VLAs, and that it adapted to a new robot (YAM) with 30 minutes of play data (task-progress scores in the authors' own real-robot evaluations, not full-task success rates).
- 2026-01-27 · Figure AI's Helix 02 model (27 January 2026) had a Figure humanoid unload and reload a dishwasher across a full-sized kitchen in a 4-minute …
2026-01-12 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-12verified
1X said on 12 January 2026 that its 1X World Model (1XWM) — a 14B text-conditioned video-generation model mid-trained on 900 hours of egocentric human video and fine-tuned on 70 hours of NEO robot data (98.5% of the post-training data being pick-and-place), whose imagined video is turned into NEO's motions by an inverse-dynamics model — lets NEO generalize to unseen objects, motions and tasks, including two-handed and human-interaction tasks absent from its robot data, reporting in- and out-of-distribution task success (30 trials per task) only in charts and noting that dexterous tasks such as pouring and drawing remain challenging (company evaluation).
2025 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Google DeepMind's RT-2-X robotics model shows chain-of-thought reasoning and emergent skills, performing about 3× better than RT-1.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Google DeepMind's RT-2-X robotics model shows chain-of-thought reasoning and emergent…
2025 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04corrected
Berkeley/Stanford's OpenVLA-OFT fine-tuning recipe enables 25–50× faster inference, higher task success rates, multiple input images and high-frequency bimanual robot control.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Berkeley/Stanford's OpenVLA-OFT fine-tuning recipe delivers 25–50× faster inference and…
2025 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
NVIDIA released Isaac GR00T N1, described as the first open humanoid robot foundation model.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: NVIDIA released Isaac GR00T N1, described as the first open humanoid robot foundation…
- 2025 · NVIDIA and UT Austin's DexMimicGen, presented at ICRA 2025, generated 20,000+ bimanual dexterous manipulation demonstrations from 60 human d…
2025 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
A 2025 UC Berkeley AutoEval technical report found that SIMPLER simulation evaluation scores were uncorrelated with real-world performance for some robot policies.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: A 2025 UC Berkeley AutoEval technical report found that SIMPLER simulation evaluation…
2025-12 · analysis · ●●○ · published 2025-12-31verified
The REALM benchmark paper (arXiv, December 2025) found that VLA models π₀ and GR00T N1.5 struggle when tasks are perturbed, indicating fragile generalization.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: The REALM benchmark paper (arXiv, December 2025) found that VLA models π₀ and GR00T…
- 2025-12-01 · In Stanford's 2025 BEHAVIOR Challenge (leaderboard published 1 December 2025, NeurIPS 2025), whose 50 long-horizon household tasks are run i…
2025-11 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2025-11-30verified
A November 2025 arXiv survey of ten open challenges for VLA robot models found long-horizon multi-step tasks remain fragile due to compounding errors.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-11: A November 2025 arXiv survey of ten open challenges for VLA robot models found…
- 2025-11-19 · Sunday Robotics said on 19 November 2025 that its ACT-1 model, trained on glove-captured human data with zero robot data, cleared dining tab…
- 2025-11-18 · Physical Intelligence reported on 18 November 2025 that its π*0.6 VLA, improved with the RECAP reinforcement-learning method, made espresso …
- 2025-10 · In October 2025 Figure AI showed Figure 03 with its Helix VLA picking up novel objects from language commands; Helix controls the full upper…
2025-10 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-10-31verified
The FailSafe system (arXiv, October 2025) adds automatic failure detection and recovery to VLA models, which cannot reason about failures themselves, improving π₀ and OpenVLA by +22.6%.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-10: The FailSafe system (arXiv, October 2025) adds automatic failure detection and recovery…
- 2025-08 · Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute demonstrated the Atlas humanoid controlled by Large Behavior Models in August 2025.
- 2025-06-07 · Figure AI reported on 7 June 2025 that its Helix policy on Figure 02, rotating mixed packages (including poly bags and flat envelopes) on a …
- 2025-04-29 · Dyna Robotics said on 29 April 2025 that its DYNA-1 foundation model, running a pair of stationary robot arms, autonomously folded 800+ napk…
- 2025-04-22 · Physical Intelligence's π0.5 VLA model (arXiv, 22 April 2025), trained with about 400 hours of mobile-manipulator data from about 100 homes …
- 2025-03 · Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics in March 2025, a multi-embodiment vision-language-action model with reasoning that more than doub…
2025-03 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2025-03-31verified
The STAR framework (arXiv, March 2025) achieves a 78% failure recovery rate for robot manipulation.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-03: The STAR framework (arXiv, March 2025) achieves a 78% failure recovery rate for robot…
- 2024-10-31 · Physical Intelligence's π0 robot foundation model (arXiv, 31 October 2024) was pretrained on about 10,000 hours of dexterous manipulation da…
2026-10-14 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2026-10-14verified
36Kr reported on 14 October 2026 that low-priced consumer humanoids reach their price points by cutting hardware — Unitree's R1 AIR at ¥29,900 (versus ¥39,900 for the standard R1) drops from 26 to 20 joint degrees of freedom and loses force control, and Noetix's ¥9,998 Bumi lacks a five-finger hand and depth sensing — and, citing manufacturers' specifications and third-party reports, that entry-level models under ¥100,000 typically run 2–3 hours per charge (some about 1 hour) with none offering autonomous recharging, versus 6–8 hours for commercial or flagship models above ¥100,000.
2026-10-06 · projection · ●○○ · published 2026-10-09verified
At its 6 October 2026 analyst and investor day (transcript filed with the SEC on 9 October), Agility Robotics said Digit 5's bill of materials will be about $150,000 per unit at commercial launch with a target of about $30,000 per unit at volumes of 10,000 robots a year, that Digit 4's bill of materials is roughly $125,000, and that actuators make up roughly 25% of Digit's current cost (company targets).
- 2026-09-25 · The Information reported on 25 September 2026 that hands, along with factory equipment and suppliers, are holding back Tesla's Optimus V3 ra…
2026-09-23 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-09-23verified
KAIST researchers reported in Nature on 23 September 2026 that RAIBO2, a quadruped designed from a whole-robot energy-loss model (force-transparent lightweight hardware, a low-resistance motor-drive circuit and a low-dissipation locomotion policy), completed a full 42.195 km marathon (Sangju, November 2024) in 4 h 19 min 52 s on a single battery charge with a total cost of transport of 0.25, below the human benchmark of 0.37, giving more than three times the travel range per charge of existing quadrupeds.
- 2026-09-15 · Unveiling Digit 5 on 15 September 2026, Agility Robotics said Digit 4 had logged more than 65,000 operating hours across customer sites incl…
2026-09-03 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-09-03verified
CnEVPost reported on 3 September 2026, citing Jipian Lab, that XPeng has switched its IRON humanoid from the all-solid-state batteries it announced in November 2025 to high-energy solid-liquid hybrid (semi-solid) pouch cells from a second-tier Chinese supplier, after failing to secure all-solid-state products meeting its installation requirements from BYD, Gotion, CALB or Eve Energy, so as not to endanger its end-2026 mass-production plan (XPeng had not publicly disclosed the change).
2026-08-30 · projection · ●●○ · published 2026-08-31verified
Goldman Sachs' Global Physical AI report (30 August 2026) projects humanoid robot bill-of-materials cost falling about 7% a year from about $27,700 in 2025 to about $13,500 in 2035 and the global average selling price about 6% a year from about $41,800 (2025) to $30,800 (2030) and $21,300 (2035), puts a factory humanoid's cost at about 2.8 years of labour cost in 2026 and 1.9 years in 2027, and raised its 2035 humanoid shipment forecast to about 6.5 million units from 1.4 million.
2026-08-28 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-08-28verified
UBTech reported revenue from full-size embodied humanoid robot products and solutions of ¥820.6 million on 1,079 units sold in 2025 (annual report) and ¥590.3 million on 921 units in the first half of 2026 (interim results, 28 August 2026), implying average revenue of about ¥761,000 per unit in 2025 and about ¥641,000 in H1 2026, roughly 16% lower (revenue includes solutions, and the H1 2026 line-up added the wheeled Cruzr Y1, the Walker C1 and the U1 companion series).
2026-07-31 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-07-31verified
Unitree's final IPO prospectus of 31 July 2026 gives full-year figures: it sold 5,215 humanoid robots in 2025 at an average price of ¥166,400, down 36.10% from ¥260,400 (412 units) in 2024 and from ¥593,400 (5 units) in 2023, with humanoid gross margin of 63.18% in 2025 versus 69.26% in 2024 (implying an average unit cost of roughly ¥61,000, down from about ¥80,000), and attributes the price fall to the cheaper G1 mix, steadily falling unit costs, intensifying competition and 2025 price cuts.
2026-07-31 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2026-07-31verified
Securities Times reported on 31 July 2026 that mainstream mass-produced humanoids run 2–4 hours per charge, short of an 8-hour factory shift, partly because without joint self-locking their hip and knee joints must draw 200–300 W continuously just to stand; Joyson's robot-battery chief said most robots run only about 2 hours continuously, so deployments also need swap stations and spare batteries, UBTech had said full-size humanoids generally run 2–4 hours, and analyst Tian Feng projected the bottleneck easing around 2028 as solid-state or semi-solid batteries reach hundred-MWh-scale production in 2027–2028 and robot edge-AI chips cut inference power by an order of magnitude.
2026-07-17 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-07-17verified
Joyson Electronics launched at WAIC 2026 on 17 July 2026 its Juen solid-liquid hybrid (semi-solid) battery pack series for embodied-AI robots, claiming 380 Wh/kg energy density, about 60% longer combined runtime, 2,000+ charge cycles, operation from −20 °C to 60 °C and charging to 80% in 30 minutes with wired or wireless charging, alongside a bidirectional wireless charging solution for robots (company claims; the baseline for the runtime gain is not stated).
2026-06-24 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-06-24verified
Announcing its planned SPAC listing on 24 June 2026, Agility Robotics said it had cut the bill of materials of its Digit v4 humanoid to about $125,000 per unit and had a 'clear path' to about $30,000 per Digit v5 over time, illustrated robots-as-a-service pricing of about $100,000 a year per Digit (assuming $8,500 a month, about $500,000 over a 5-year life) against about $200,000 a year of fully burdened labour for two 10-hour shifts, and claimed Digit v5's 10:1 charge ratio (versus 2:1 for v4) raises maximum battery-powered output in 24 hours from about 16 to about 22 hours (company figures and illustrative projections).
- 2026-06-02 · Cheetah Mobile CEO Fu Sheng was reported on 2 June 2026 as saying that, by industry standards, harmonic reducers in humanoid joints last abo…
2026-05-19 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-05-21verified
Leju Robotics' ChiNext IPO prospectus (application accepted on 19 May 2026) shows that its full-size Kuavo humanoid sold 577 units in 2025 versus 32 in 2024 at an average price of ¥308,100, down 25.56% from about ¥414,000, which it attributes to proactive price cuts, while Kuavo's unit cost fell 27.35% so the product's own gross margin edged up; company-wide gross margin fell from 50.45% in 2023 to 40.78% in 2025 as lower-margin Kuavo grew to about 69% of revenue.
2026-03-20 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-03-20verified
Unitree's draft STAR Market IPO prospectus, published on 20 March 2026, shows the average selling price of its humanoid robots falling from ¥593,400 in 2023 (5 units) to ¥260,700 in 2024 (410 units) and ¥167,600 in January–September 2025 (3,551 units), a 72% drop it attributes to the shift to its cheaper mid-size G1, steadily falling unit costs and 2025 price cuts, while its humanoid gross margin was 87.67%, 68.44% and 62.91% respectively (implying an average unit cost of roughly ¥62,000 in January–September 2025); the filing also warns that general-purpose robots' runtime, compute speed and durability have not yet been validated at large scale.
2026-03-09 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-03-09verified
Samsung SDI said on 9 March 2026 that it would unveil at InterBattery 2026 (Seoul, 11–13 March) its first public sample of a pouch-type all-solid-state battery under development for physical-AI applications such as humanoid robots (adding a lightweight pouch format to its prismatic EV all-solid-state work, for compact cells with high energy density and peak power output), and that its all-solid-state battery technology targets mass production in the second half of 2027; no energy-density or robot-runtime figures were given.
- 2026-02-22 · Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock said on 21–22 February 2026 that a Figure 03 fleet (seven units shown) now runs autonomously 24/7 at its Sunnyval…
2026-02-13 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-02-13verified
AgiBot launched its full-size Yuanzheng A3 humanoid, aimed at guided tours, retail guidance and entertainment, on 13 February 2026 with a torso-embedded dual-battery system that it says gives up to 8 hours of combined runtime on a full charge, with fast battery swapping and charging to cover a day's work; the A3 user manual lists a 1,152 Wh battery giving a total of 10 hours, 'including 6 hours of standing operation and over 4 hours of continuous walking', and a charging time of 2 hours or less (company specifications, not a measured work shift).
2026-01-28 · analysis · ●●○ · published 2026-01-28verified
TrendForce reported on 28 January 2026 that most humanoid robots deliver only 2–4 hours of runtime on batteries generally under 2 kWh (e.g. Unitree H1's 0.864 kWh pack gives under 4 hours of static operation and Tesla Optimus Gen 2's 2.3 kWh pack about 2 hours of dynamic runtime), named battery swapping (Agility Digit, Apptronik Apollo) and higher-energy-density solid-state batteries (XPeng IRON, GAC GoMate and EngineAI T800, which it says run over 4 hours) as the two routes past a 5–8-hour runtime threshold, and projected humanoid demand for solid-state batteries to exceed 74 GWh by 2035, more than 1,000 times the 2026 level.
- 2026-01-05 · Boston Dynamics unveiled the production version of its electric Atlas humanoid at CES on 5 January 2026, stating that when its battery runs …
2025-12 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Samsung invested in Alva Industries in December 2025 to scale its FiberPrinting ultra-compact motor technology.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: Samsung invested in Alva Industries in December 2025 to scale its FiberPrinting…
2025 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04corrected
Unitree's R1 costs $5,900 and has onboard battery life listed at around one hour.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Unitree unveiled its R1 humanoid priced at $5,900, with about 1 hour of runtime and…
2025 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04corrected
Unitree lists the G1 humanoid at a starting price of $13.5K.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Unitree sells its G1 humanoid for $13,500, with 2–3 hours of runtime and limited payload.
2025 · projection · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04legacy
Tesla's Optimus Gen 3 targets 8–12 hours of runtime on light tasks, a 20 kg payload and a $20,000–30,000 unit cost.
- 2025 · Kepler's K2 humanoid (about $34,600) ran an 8-hour livestream on a single charge in a trade-show demo, not in production work.
2025 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04legacy
Figure 02 runs about 5–6 hours per charge with a 20 kg payload at an estimated cost of $50,000–150,000.
2025 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04corrected
Agility Robotics says Digit’s expanded battery capabilities last up to four hours and it can autonomously dock onto a charging station.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Agility Robotics' Digit runs about 4 hours per charge with autonomous docking and…
2025 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04legacy
Apptronik's Apollo humanoid runs 4–5 hours per battery (up to 22 hours per spec with hot-swappable batteries), carries 25 kg and targets a price under $50,000.
2025 · projection · ●○○ · published 2025-12-03corrected
E-magy says its first drone pouch-cell iteration is in production, with an improved design expected in H1 2026; its silicon-anode cells are claimed to deliver 40% higher energy density.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: E-magy's silicon-anode batteries, with 40% higher energy density, are slated to enter…
2025 · analysis · ●●○ · published 2025-09-24corrected
GlobalSpec reported that batteries in the latest humanoid models limit runtime to two to four hours per charge.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: GlobalSpec reported humanoid robot battery life stuck at 2–5 hours typical, with…
- 2025-07-17 · UBTech announced on 17 July 2025 that its Walker S2 industrial humanoid can autonomously swap its own hot-swappable battery in about 3 minut…
2026-09-30 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-09-30verified
The IFR's World Robotics 2026 Service Robots report (30 September 2026) said global sales of professional service robots rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025 (transport and logistics 117,500, a 47% share) and consumer service robots 37% to almost 34.2 million, and that about 7,000 full-size humanoids (above 140 cm) intended for commercial and professional uses beyond R&D and entertainment were sold worldwide in 2025, while most current humanoid applications remain specialized and often require human teleoperation.
2026-09-24 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-09-24verified
The IFR's World Robotics 2026 report (24 September 2026) said the global operational stock of industrial robots rose 9% to a record 5 million units in 2025 as annual installations rose 11% to more than 600,000, with China installing 354,000 (up 20%, 59% of the world total; Chinese suppliers 55% of their home market), the United States overtaking Japan as the second-largest market with almost 38,500 (up 12%) versus Japan's 36,219 (down 19%), and forecast installations of 655,000 in 2026 (up 9%) and 806,000 in 2029.
2026-09-18 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-09-18corrected
CNMO reported on 18 September 2026 that Lei Jun, sharing a CCTV News visit to Xiaomi's Changping phone factory, said its in-house iBrain industrial-AI system cut engineers' manual parameter tuning (e.g. battery-cover assembly to a 0.05 mm gap) from 4 hours to 2 minutes and on-site anomaly handling from 2 hours to 3 minutes; CNMO added, citing official information, that the factory's modular lines (key processes 100% automated, 96.8% self-developed hardware) can switch products within 10 hours and turn out one phone every 6 seconds per line (600 per hour per line) — iBrain recommends parameters and anomalies are still handled on site, and no staffing or actual output figure was given (purpose-built lines, no general-purpose robots).
2026-09-16 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-09-16corrected
China's National Bureau of Statistics reported on 16 September 2026 that industrial enterprises above designated size produced 729,352 sets of industrial robots in January–August 2026 (up 29.0% year on year; 96,174 in August alone, up 34.6%) and 13,931,863 sets of service robots (up 12.1%).
2026-08-27 · setback · ●○○ · published 2026-08-28verified
Security researcher Olivier Laflamme disclosed on 27 August 2026 two independent root remote-code-execution chains in Unitree's G1 EDU humanoid (CVE-2026-76639, network-adjacent, and CVE-2026-76640, starting over Bluetooth Low Energy without pairing), after Unitree had patched a related cloud robot-ownership check in July 2026, with no fixed firmware release for either flaw verified as of the disclosure, The Hacker News reported.
2026-08-19 · announcement · ●●● · published 2026-08-19corrected
Unitree Robotics listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on 19 August 2026 — the first humanoid-robot maker to list in mainland China — with shares offered at 150.80 yuan opening at a high of 1,100 yuan; at the end of the morning session the rise valued the company at about $50 billion per Reuters, and the shares closed the first day at 845 yuan (up more than 460%); the BBC reported that Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoids in 2025 and made a net profit of 278 million yuan.
2026-08-19 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-08-19verified
Counterpoint Research estimated on 19 August 2026 that global humanoid robot shipments topped 22,000 units in H1 2026 (up nearly 300% year on year), led by AgiBot (about 9,700, over 43%) and Unitree (over 7,000, 31%), with entertainment and performance plus data production and research still above 60% of shipments (intelligent manufacturing 13%, warehousing and logistics 5%), and projected over 50,000 shipments in 2026 — an application split at odds with Smart Analytics Global's estimate nine days earlier that industrial and commercial uses took over 70%.
2026-08-10 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-08-10verified
Smart Analytics Global estimated on 10 August 2026 that global humanoid robot shipments reached about 19,100 units in H1 2026 (up 272% from 5,100 in H1 2025), led by AgiBot (about 8,400, 44%) ahead of Unitree (about 5,900, 31%), Galbot (about 900), UBTech (about 700) and Leju (about 600), with Chinese vendors over 97% of shipments and industrial and commercial applications over 70% (up from about 50%), and forecast nearly 60,000 shipments in 2026 and 500,000 by 2030 (analyst estimates).
2026-07-28 · policy · ●●● · published 2026-07-28verified
The US FCC on 28 July 2026 added all foreign-produced 'advanced robotic devices' — networked mobile robots over 4.4 lb, including autonomous mobile robots, humanoids and quadrupeds, but excluding fixed industrial or medical robot arms, connected vehicles, drones and medical devices — to its Covered List after a 27 July national-security determination by an executive-branch interagency body, so new models from any foreign country cannot receive FCC equipment authorization and thus cannot be imported or sold in the US unless the Department of War exempts them, while previously authorized models and devices already owned remain legal.
2026-07-27 · policy · ●○○ · published 2026-07-27verified
The EU's Digital Omnibus on AI (Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 of 8 July 2026), in force from 27 July 2026, postponed the AI Act's high-risk rules for AI embedded in physical products listed in Annex I (machinery, toys, lifts, etc.) to 2 August 2028 and those for Annex III high-risk uses to 2 December 2027, and moved the Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 to Annex I Section B, so AI-enabled machinery such as robots is to be regulated through the Machinery Regulation's sectoral requirements, with only a few AI Act provisions applying directly.
2026-06-30 · policy · ●○○ · published 2026-06-30verified
Japan's METI and NEDO launched on 30 June 2026 the Multimodal Foundation Model Development Project for AI Robots and Physical AI (FY2026–FY2030), selecting Noetra Corp. to develop a domestic multimodal foundation model (language, audio, image, video and sensor data) and AIST to support future model development, as the basis for Japanese physical AI (no budget given in the release).
2026-06-24 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-06-24verified
Agility Robotics announced on 24 June 2026 a definitive agreement to go public through a merger with the SPAC Churchill Capital Corp XI (NASDAQ: CCXI) at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value, with more than $620 million of expected gross proceeds including about $200 million from a PIPE committed at $10 per share; closing is expected in 2026, subject to Churchill shareholder, SEC, regulatory and exchange approvals (announced, not completed).
2026-05-05 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2026-05-05verified
The International Federation of Robotics said on 5 May 2026, assessing China's 15th Five-Year Plan, that humanoids' actual capabilities in real-world production are currently limited to demonstrators or pilot projects despite staged showcases, that mass adoption as universal factory helpers or in private households will not happen in the near and medium term, and that the plan sees humanoid commercialization towards the end of its 2026–2030 period, while industrial robots are likely to remain the backbone of high-speed, precision manufacturing.
2026-04-23 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-04-23verified
IDC reported on 23 April 2026 that global humanoid robot shipments exceeded 18,000 units in 2025, with Chinese vendors expected to account for 95% and more than 85% of deployments concentrated in performances, education, data collection and guided-tour scenarios (only early pilots in manufacturing and logistics), and forecast shipments above 510,000 units by 2030 (a compound annual growth rate of nearly 95%).
2026-04-22 · setback · ●●○ · published 2026-04-22verified
On Tesla's Q1 2026 earnings call on 22 April 2026, Elon Musk again pushed back the Optimus V3 (Gen 3) unveiling, originally expected in Q1 2026, to 'probably middle of this year', said Optimus production would start on the converted Model S/X line at Fremont in late July or August with initial output 'quite slow' and no 2026 production target given, and said a second Optimus factory at Giga Texas would begin production around summer 2027, per Electrek.
2026-04-19 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2026-04-19verified
At the second Beijing E-Town humanoid robot half-marathon on 19 April 2026 (more than 100 teams, separate lanes from human runners), Honor's humanoid 'Flash' won the 21.0975 km race in 50 minutes 26 seconds using autonomous navigation — faster than the men's human world record of 57:20 and far ahead of the 2025 winner's 2 h 40 min 42 s — while a separate remote-controlled Honor robot crossed the line first in 48:19 but lost under the rule multiplying remote-controlled times by 1.2; about 40% of teams navigated autonomously.
2026-03-24 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-03-24verified
Amazon confirmed on 24 March 2026 that it had acquired Fauna Robotics, a New York startup founded in 2024 by former Meta and Google engineers that had launched Sprout, a $50,000 bipedal humanoid 3 feet 6 inches tall and weighing 50 pounds designed to be 'approachable' for consumers and businesses, with Fauna's roughly 50 employees joining Amazon (terms undisclosed), CNBC reported after Bloomberg first broke the news.
2026-03-12 · policy · ●●○ · published 2026-03-15verified
The outline of China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), adopted on 12 March 2026, designates robotics as one of the strategic emerging industries for priority development and embodied AI as one of the future industries to be nurtured (alongside quantum technology, biomanufacturing, hydrogen and nuclear fusion energy, brain-computer interfaces and 6G), Xinhua reported.
2026-03-02 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-03-03verified
Beijing Galbot said on 2 March 2026 that it had raised 2.5 billion yuan ($362 million) in a new financing round, which the company said made it the highest-valued unlisted humanoid-robotics firm, as it prepares a Hong Kong IPO, Caixin reported (no new valuation figure given; its December 2025 round had valued it at $3 billion post-money).
2026-02-28 · policy · ●●○ · published 2026-03-03verified
China's first national standard system for humanoid robots and embodied intelligence — a framework of six pillars (foundational and common standards, neuromorphic and intelligent computing, limbs and components, full-system integration, application, and safety and ethics) developed by over 120 institutions, enterprises and users under MIIT's Humanoid Robots and Embodied Intelligence Standardization (HEIS) technical committee — was unveiled at the committee's annual meeting in Beijing on 28 February 2026, Xinhua reported, citing MIIT figures that over 140 domestic manufacturers released more than 330 humanoid models in 2025 (a standards framework, not a set of binding standards).
2026-02-11 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-02-11verified
Apptronik announced on 11 February 2026 a $520 million Series A-X extension round, with existing investors including B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz and PEAK6, bringing its Series A to over $935 million to commercialise its Apollo humanoid, at a $5 billion valuation per CNBC.
2026-01-21 · data · ●●○ · published 2026-01-21verified
At a State Council Information Office briefing on 21 January 2026, MIIT vice-minister Zhang Yunming said China had cumulatively built more than 35,000 basic-level, 8,200 advanced-level and 500 excellence-level smart factories and cultivated 15 'leading-level' (领航级) smart factories under its four-tier smart-factory programme (up from 30,000+ basic, 1,200+ advanced and 230+ excellence-level reported in February 2025), while MIIT spokesman Xie Cun mentioned 'dark (lights-out) factories' only as a new model that is 'gradually growing' — the official programme grades smart factories and publishes no count of dark or lights-out factories, although Xinhua (25 December 2025) had paired the smart-factory counts with a claim that dark factories were 'springing up'.
2026-01-20 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-01-20verified
China's National Bureau of Statistics reported on 20 January 2026 that industrial enterprises above designated size produced 773,074 sets of industrial robots in 2025 (up 28.0% year on year) and 18,581,081 sets of service robots (up 16.1%) — production counts, not installations.
2026-01-14 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-14verified
Skild AI, which builds a single robot foundation model ('Skild Brain') meant to control any robot body, announced on 14 January 2026 a $1.4 billion Series C led by SoftBank, with NVIDIA's NVentures, Macquarie Capital and Bezos Expeditions participating, valuing it at over $14 billion, and said its live revenue grew from zero to about $30 million in a few months of 2025.
2026-01-14 · data · ●○○ · published 2026-01-14verified
Counterpoint Research estimated on 14 January 2026 that worldwide humanoid robot installations grew by 16,000 units in 2025, with the top five vendors taking 73% of the year's installations, and projected cumulative humanoid installations to exceed 100,000 units by 2027, with logistics, manufacturing and automotive making up 72% of 2027's annual installations (analyst estimates).
2026-01-06 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-06verified
Mobileye, the automotive driver-assistance chip company, announced on 6 January 2026 a definitive agreement to acquire humanoid-robot developer Mentee Robotics for a total consideration of $900 million (about $612 million in cash plus up to about 26.2 million Mobileye Class A shares, subject to adjustment), a related-party deal from which Mentee's chairman and co-founder Prof. Amnon Shashua recused himself on the Mobileye board (agreement announced; closing not confirmed in the release).
2025-12 · announcement · ●●● · published 2026-01-04verified
ABB agreed to sell its Robotics division to SoftBank for $5.375 billion, a major industry consolidation.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: ABB agreed to sell its Robotics division to SoftBank for $5.375 billion, a major…
- 2025 · Tracxn reported humanoid robot companies raised $2.64B in equity funding in 2025, up 152.37% from 2024.
2025 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Pudu Robotics launched its D5 industrial quadruped robot series at iREX 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Pudu Robotics launched its D5 industrial quadruped robot series at iREX 2025.
2025 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Physical Intelligence raised $600 million in a Series B round, with investors including OpenAI and Tiger Global, to advance robot foundation models.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Physical Intelligence raised $600 million in a Series B round, with investors including…
2025 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
NEURA Robotics raised a €120 million Series B round from investors including Lingotto and the Volvo Cars Tech Fund.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: NEURA Robotics raised a €120 million Series B round from investors including Lingotto…
2025 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04corrected
Fourier’s Series E secured nearly ¥800 million (about $109.1 million), with joint participation from Guoxin Investment, Pudong Venture Capital and Prosperity7.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Fourier raised a $109 million Series E round from investors including Guoxin and…
2025 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Figure AI raised a Series C round of more than $1 billion from investors including Parkway VC, NVIDIA, Intel and LG.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Figure AI raised a Series C round of more than $1 billion from investors including…
2025 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Apptronik closed a $403 million Series A round with investors including Google, Mercedes-Benz and ARK.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Apptronik closed a $403 million Series A round with investors including Google,…
2025 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2026-01-04verified
1X Technologies is seeking up to $1 billion in new funding at a target valuation of $10 billion or more.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: 1X Technologies is seeking up to $1 billion in new funding at a target valuation of $10…
- 2025 · Tesla’s Optimus robot fell over and went viral in 2025.
2025 · policy · ●●○ · published 2025-12-30verified
China has more than 150 humanoid robot companies, and its National Development and Reform Commission warned of a bubble in the sector.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: China has more than 150 humanoid robot companies, and its National Development and…
2025 · announcement · ●○○ · published 2025-12-22verified
XPeng revealed its IRON humanoid robot in 2025, including a dramatic 'skin peel' demonstration proving its authenticity.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: XPeng revealed its IRON humanoid robot in 2025, including a dramatic 'skin peel'…
2025 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2025-12-22verified
UBTech's Walker S2 'marching army' demo drew more than 15 million TikTok views in 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: UBTech's Walker S2 'marching army' demo drew more than 15 million TikTok views in 2025.
2025 · achievement · ●○○ · published 2025-12-22verified
Tesla's Optimus Gen 3 humanoid served popcorn at the Tesla Diner in a viral 2025 moment.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025: Tesla's Optimus Gen 3 humanoid served popcorn at the Tesla Diner in a viral 2025 moment.
2025-12 · policy · ●●○ · published 2025-12-03verified
In December 2025 the US Commerce Secretary met with robotics CEOs as the Trump administration considered an executive order on robotics.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: In December 2025 the US Commerce Secretary met with robotics CEOs as the Trump…
2025-12-27 · policy · ●●○ · published 2025-12-27corrected
China's Cyberspace Administration released draft rules on human-like interactive AI for public comment on December 27, 2025, including a ban on emotional manipulation and protections for elderly users.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12: China issued draft rules in December 2025 regulating AI with human-like interaction,…
2025-12-17 · policy · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
CMR Surgical's Versius Plus surgical robot received US FDA clearance on December 17, 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12-17: CMR Surgical's Versius Plus surgical robot received US FDA clearance on December 17, 2025.
2025-12-15 · setback · ●●○ · published 2025-12-15corrected
On December 15, 2025, iRobot announced a restructuring agreement under which its Chinese creditor and contract manufacturer planned to acquire the company through a court-supervised Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12-15: iRobot, maker of the Roomba, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 15, 2025 and…
2025-12-04 · policy · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Medtronic's Hugo surgical robot received US FDA clearance on December 4, 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-12-04: Medtronic's Hugo surgical robot received US FDA clearance on December 4, 2025.
2025-10 · analysis · ●○○ · published 2025-10-10verified
Multiple venture capitalists told TechCrunch in October 2025 that the world is 'just not quite ready for humanoids yet', predicting scaled adoption is still years away.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-10: Multiple venture capitalists told TechCrunch in October 2025 that the world is 'just…
2025-10-01 · policy · ●○○ · published 2025-07-30verified
California rules restricting the use of AI in employment decision-making, approved in July 2025, took effect on October 1, 2025.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-10-01: California rules restricting the use of AI in employment decision-making, approved in…
2025-09 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2025-09-09verified
Unitree was reported in September 2025 to be planning an IPO at a valuation of about $7 billion.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-09: Unitree was reported in September 2025 to be planning an IPO at a valuation of about $7…
2025-08 · achievement · ●●○ · published 2025-10-19corrected
The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing featured more than 500 humanoid robots competing in sporting events and real-world tasks.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-08: The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August 2025 featured 500+ humanoid robots…
2025-06-17 · data · ●●○ · published 2025-06-17corrected
Xinhua reported on 17 June 2025 that Xiaomi's 700,000+ m² Beijing EV factory can turn out a car every 76 seconds (the full-ramp rate of 40 SU7s per hour given by Beijing Daily in March 2024), with more than 700 robots and 100% automation across 200-plus key processes, while picturing stamped parts still inspected by hand; Beijing Daily's March 2024 tour reported the body shop at 91% overall automation with 400+ robots and 'capable of lights-out production', die-cast parts checked manually and professional test drivers road-testing every car — so the only lights-out claim is Beijing Daily's for the body shop, with Xinhua claiming full automation only for key processes, not the whole factory, and no headcount was disclosed (purpose-built automation, no general-purpose robots).
2025-04 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2026-01-04verified
Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025 and put the open-source Reachy 2 robot on sale for $70,000.
↳ corrects (or adds sources to) an earlier record: 2025-04: Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025 and put the open-source Reachy 2…
2024-11-27 · data · ●●○ · published 2024-11-27verified
A China Unicom Guangdong ('U-Joy Cities') press release of 27 November 2024 called Gree's ¥15 billion Gaolan (Zhuhai) smart-manufacturing demonstration factory, built with Gree's own equipment, the world's largest 5.5G native 'lights-out' factory, saying it produces more than 12 million split air conditioners a year at 86% higher production efficiency than a traditional factory with 'only a few employees in charge of equipment maintenance, quality control and inspection', plus control-centre staff monitoring the plant, while Economic Daily (15 May 2024) contrasted this with the hundred-plus workers a traditional single air-conditioner line needs — 'lights-out' here means a small maintenance, QC and inspection crew (no headcount given), not zero staff, and no general-purpose robots are involved.
2024-10-08 · data · ●●○ · published 2024-10-08verified
FANUC's own factory page (undated; captured by the Internet Archive on 8 October 2024) says the ROBOT Factory at its Oshino-mura headquarters can produce 6,000 robots a month in automated assembly systems where many FANUC robots build robots, that its robot-cell machining factories allow 'unmanned operation … for long hours, including nights and weekends', and that heavy parts in some factories are assembled jointly by workers and collaborative robots — it makes no claim of a fully lights-out plant, whereas the widely repeated figures (e.g. AMT, 6 May 2021) that FANUC has run a lights-out factory since 2001 building about 50 robots per 24-hour shift and running unsupervised for up to 30 days trace to a 1 June 2003 Business 2.0/CNN Money article and are not restated by FANUC (purpose-built automation, no general-purpose robots).
2024-07-08 · announcement · ●●○ · published 2024-07-08verified
After Lei Jun announced on 8 July 2024 that Xiaomi's ¥2.4 billion, 81,000 m² Changping (Beijing) smartphone factory was in use, with 11 phone lines and mostly self-developed equipment, Beijing's official science-and-technology portal reported on 9 July that once in production 'the great majority of work' would be done autonomously by intelligent robots running 24 hours a day at an average of up to 30,000 phones per day, with all lines planned to start by end-2024 for a rated capacity of 10 million phones a year once fully ramped; Xiaomi's promotional video, as reported by CNMO, went further, calling it a 'lights-out' (黑灯) factory that runs 24 hours without people and makes one phone per second — a projection for purpose-built automated lines with no staffing figure given, not a demonstrated unmanned plant or general-purpose robots.
2022-10-11 · data · ●○○ · published 2022-10-11verified
CATL said on 11 October 2022, when its Yibin (Sichuan) plant joined the WEF Global Lighthouse Network as its second Lighthouse after Ningde (2021), that the plant's pack lines had reached 80% automation and that automatic gluing had cut the gluing line's manpower by 70% at a 99.8% qualified rate, with the WEF citing 17% higher line speed and 14% lower yield loss — a highly automated but staffed plant; the release makes no lights-out or unattended-operation claim and gives no headcount.
2021-10-20 · data · ●●○ · published 2021-10-20corrected
Xinhua reported on 20 October 2021 that SANY's Beijing rotary drilling rig plant in Changping — added in September 2021 to the WEF Global Lighthouse Network as its first heavy-industry site — has 12 automated production lines and 150 robots (with 5G AGVs and truss manipulators) in four hectares of workshops, that its human workforce fell from 2,000 to a fifth of that (about 400) while annual output rose from 1,000 to 3,000 units, and that labour productivity rose 85% and production lead time fell 77% (from almost a month to a week); Xinhua says 'few operators' are needed, with workers retrained as robot technicians, not that the plant runs unmanned, and SANY's own 15 November 2021 release, citing the WEF, gives the productivity gain as 185% (purpose-built automation, no general-purpose robots).
2016-05-21 · data · ●●○ · published 2016-05-21verified
The South China Morning Post reported on 21 May 2016, under the headline '60,000 workers culled from just one factory', that a Kunshan government official said one factory had 'reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots', which the BBC (25 May 2016) attributed to Foxconn while Foxconn told the BBC it was automating repetitive tasks but denied long-term job losses and expected to 'maintain our significant workforce in China' — a headcount cut at a plant still staffed by about 50,000 people, with no robot count given, not '60,000 robots' or a lights-out factory.
2012-08-18 · data · ●○○ · published 2012-08-18verified
The New York Times reported on 18 August 2012 that at Philips' electric-shaver factory in Drachten, Netherlands, 128 camera-guided robot arms do the assembly work that hundreds of workers do by hand at its sister plant in Zhuhai, China, and that the Drachten factory has 'several dozen workers per shift', about a tenth as many as the Zhuhai plant — a highly automated, purpose-built but staffed plant, not the 'only nine human quality-assurance workers' lights-out factory that Wikipedia's lights-out manufacturing article later repeats (citing a Techonomy 2012 panel transcript); no general-purpose robots are involved.