New robots, new capabilities. Tracking what's coming for the workforce.
Robotics NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T reference humanoid — Unitree H2 Plus body, Sharpa hands, Jetson Thor brain, 75 degrees of freedom — ships to Stanford, ETH Zurich, Ai2 and UC San Diego labs in late 2026.
Robotics UBTech's consumer brand UWORLD opened JD.com pre-sales for a full-size hyper-bionic companion humanoid: two SKUs, 88 degrees of freedom, 2-4 hour battery, 3,000 yuan deposit, shipping by September 15.
Robotics Computex Taipei opened Tuesday with a first-ever AI Robotics Zone. Hiwin made its Computex debut with a 17-DOF zero-shot hand and a heavy-load planetary roller screw built for humanoid joints; Solomon brought a vision arm; ASUS unveiled Kairo.
Robotics Qualcomm's June 1 Computex 2026 keynote unveiled the Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design — 700 TOPS, 18-core Oryon CPU, 12 camera streams, LiDAR/ToF/IMU native, EtherCAT and ROS2. Early access this month.
Robotics Vingroup subsidiary VinDynamics, founded September 2025, debuted its first humanoid robot Dyno at IEEE ICRA Vienna (June 1–5) and Computex Taipei (June 2–5) — alongside a Schaeffler partnership and a $12.75M US R&D investment.
Robotics On June 1, Nvidia announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot — Unitree H2 Plus chassis, Sharpa five-finger hands, Jetson Thor compute — the same morning Shanghai's STAR Market reviewed Unitree's 4.2B yuan IPO.
Robotics Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi published a May 31 evaluation of Foundation's Phantom MK-1 humanoid deployment that names $150K unit price, 20-motor reliability risk, AI-hallucination concerns and the Ukrainian MoD's silence.
Robotics On May 28, China's MIIT launched a national humanoid full-lifecycle platform issuing a 29-character ID to every robot. Over 100 firms have already enrolled 28,000+ units across 200 models.
Robotics Foundation Future Industries deployed two Phantom MK-1 humanoid robots to Ukraine for behind-the-line logistics runs, CNBC reported May 30 — the first known combat-theater humanoid deployment, with $24M in Pentagon research contracts already signed.
Robotics Honda's dexterous robotic hand threading a needle was the visual headline of Humanoids Summit Tokyo. The business headline was that Chinese platforms — Unitree, Booster, LimX, High Torque's $5,500 Mini Pi Plus — are dominating actual deployment.
Robotics Matrix Robotics unveiled MATRIX-3 at Macao's BEYOND Expo on May 28 — 27-DOF hand, 4-hour runtime, Shanghai factory commissioned, 100K-unit production target by 2027.
Robotics RBR50 named Amazon Vulcan its 2026 Robot of the Year at the Boston Robotics Summit on May 28. The touch-sensing stowing arm now handles 75% of warehouse items across two sites, 500K+ orders processed.