New robots, new capabilities. Tracking what's coming for the workforce.
Robotics Figure has raised a little under $2B in equity across its history. On September 3 it signed a compute deal worth $3.5B, expandable past $6B, from a cloud provider that is also becoming its shareholder. The bill for training a robot now exceeds the bill for building the company.
Robotics Lumos Robotics launched the MOS 2 on September 1. The load-bearing number is not the payload. It is the 1,000 failure-free hours the previous model logged on a live PLC line at Mitsubishi Electric's Changshu plant, after which Mitsubishi led the funding round.
Robotics A Reuters investigation published August 31 puts Chinese government purchases of humanoids and related gear at $230M in the first half, against $62M a year earlier and $6M in 2024. In the training center those purchases funded, an experienced operator produces one usable movement per 50 attempts, and the robots work at roughly 20% of human speed.
Robotics The number worth reading in the August 27 report is not $6B. It is where SoftBank's robot money has moved in eight weeks: out of the most famous robot company on earth, into driverless excavators, and now into a house robot whose chores are staffed.
Robotics Figure moved the training-data step off the payroll and onto a bounty sheet. Index took four months to collect 16 million uploads from 44,000 weekly contributors, has paid out $15M, and has $1B committed for the next 12 months.
Robotics XPeng named a valuation for its humanoid business on August 24, alongside Q2 earnings. The number to read isn't $6.3B. It's where the money sends IRON to work: the showroom floor, not the plant floor.
Robotics Two robots beat the human world record over 100 meters in Beijing on August 23. One veered into a padded barrier past the line, the other fell and was carried off on a stretcher. The rule worth reading: the record events are the only two excused from running autonomously.
Robotics The games opened August 22 and moved the scenario events into a working hotel and a real apartment. The household contest is scored out of 300: living room 75, folded clothes 100, laundry 125. One human intervention and the entire run settles as remote control, weighted 0.5 against 1.
Robotics The 2026 Humanoid Robot Industry Development Report landed on the World Robot Conference main stage on August 20 with a headline figure: more than 40,000 units shipped in China in the first half, 97% of the global total. Elsewhere that same 40,000 is called production, not shipments.
Robotics The 2026 World Robot Conference opened August 19 in Beijing's Yizhuang district. The figure disclosed alongside it: Chinese robotics firms above scale booked more than 90B yuan in revenue from January through May, up 26.9%. On the floor, one welding system is already running near-unmanned inside a Korean shipyard.
Robotics Unitree filed its listing notice on August 18 and rings the bell on August 19 at a post-offer valuation of 61B yuan. The number worth reading is not the multiple. It is the 18,000 robots already built, and where they currently go to work.
Robotics Xiaomi's Q2 results on August 18 listed three named workstations in its own EV plant and the humanoid's success rate at each. On the same call, president Lu Weibing said the robot will not be sold as a standalone product.