The companies. The capital. The research.
Reporting on what comes after the demo.
The 200,000 figure counts every kind of robot, bought by industry and the state together. The narrower numbers — and the cluster in Gumi and Pohang — show where the money is meant to go.
The 200,000 figure counts every kind of robot, bought by industry and the state together. The narrower numbers — and the cluster in Gumi and Pohang — show where the money is meant to go.
Boston Dynamics did not copy the human hand. It counted actuators, removed a finger, and built the rest to be simulated and manufactured.
Samsung’s robotics lab brought a cost sheet, not a demo. The same day, its subsidiary Rainbow Robotics signed a factory-automation partner to test the numbers on a real line.
Retail money priced Korea’s first two autumn robot listings at three times their offer price in the opening minutes. Both closed about half below those highs.
Count what is actually on a Korean line and the list is short: two robots in a demonstration centre, one bound for a food plant and a government project that runs to 2030. The rest is agreements and targets.
The stunt is the headline. The reason Figure gave is the story: keeping an older fleet running would have cost engineering time it needs for F.04.
Korea’s delivery-robot maker is not building a walker. It is putting two arms on the navigation stack it already runs across a fleet of 400-plus robots.
The ministry has a structure, a first customer and a deadline it set for itself. It does not yet have a budget.
The shares are clear. The raw counts published alongside them do not reconcile, and the newest data are still filling in.
Two city-run public shows, one academic conference, two trade fairs and a sensor maker’s KOSDAQ subscription. Every date below was checked against an organiser page or Korean press as of October 2, 2026.
Tesla built several hundred Optimus V3 units a week in August and targets 1,000+ by year-end, per The Information. Our tracker sets release date, price and output promises against what happened.
AGIBOT has built 20,000 robots, doubling its March total. The half-size X-series is 43.8% of output, and the count is production, not sales.
Qualcomm will buy PickNik, the Boulder company behind the open-source MoveIt manipulation framework. Terms are undisclosed; MoveIt stays open and gets ported to Dragonwing chips and Arduino VENTUNO Q boards.
KAIST’s RAIBO2 quadruped finished a full marathon in 4:19:52 without recharging. The Nature paper, published September 23, reports a cost of transport of 0.25, below a human runner’s 0.37.
Galaxy’s CEO says 28,000 paid visitors and 1,000 a day. Another report says 20,000. We line up every figure by metric, source and date.
UBTech began delivering its UWorld U1 companion humanoid on September 16, priced from RMB 119,800 to RMB 990,000. It reports 13,361 orders; early owners call the motion stiff.
Unitree’s G1+ adds a two-joint neck, 110% more shoulder and waist torque and a 3 kg arm payload, at $15,000 against the G1’s $13,500.
Feather’s wheeled, dual-arm humanoid costs $29,990 and runs whatever AI model the buyer brings. The Bay Area startup builds 30 a month and has raised $7.6 million.
AGIBOT and Chimelong launched more than 300 robots at Zhuhai’s Chimelong Spaceship Park on September 24, covering shows, guiding, retail, companionship and hotel service.
Amazon will spend more than $100 million on a 585,000 sq ft plant in Greenwood, Indiana to build equipment for its robotics network, opening by 2028. It follows a multibillion-dollar Austin site announced in August.
Japan’s defence procurement agency is set to study AI humanoids for base patrols and logistics, with a competition for companies and universities. Combat use is ruled out for now.
Skild AI says its S1 model taught itself soccer over 140+ simulated years of self-play in Isaac Sim, then played on real humanoids. Goals were the only reward in the self-play stage.
Google made Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar generally available in Gemini Enterprise: real-time, lip-synced video agents in 97 languages that call tools in the background. Custom avatars are allowlist-only.
A Halloween robot, a January 2027 robot idol and a New York arena: Galaxy’s stated calendar, with earlier targets and sources side by side.
Munich’s Vesoma came out of stealth with more than 60 staff, 3,500 m² of labs and a former Google DeepMind research director as chief AI officer. First Vesoma 1 units are being built; funding is undisclosed.
Robros’s 154 cm IGRIS-C humanoid can now walk and work under real-time full-body teleoperation. The company has built 36 units and sold 18, with paid trials in a chip cleanroom, a car plant and a cold-chain warehouse.
The IFR’s World Robotics 2026 report counts 5 million industrial robots in operation and 600,000+ installed in 2025. China took 59%; the US passed Japan; Korea slipped 1%.
Barclays now expects general-purpose humanoids to reach mass commercialisation around 2035, not 2030. It names AI as the bottleneck and doubts that robot inference will fill data centres.
Apptronik’s CEO says the US is short of humanoid gears, and actuators can be 60% of the parts bill. XPeng just signed its actuator suppliers. Who builds joints in-house, and who buys them.
Beijing E-Town’s Robot Warrior Challenge returns October 17–18 with 14 simulated disaster tasks, 24 teams registered so far and six categories split by robot type and control mode.
Menlo Research released isaac_asimov, the BSD-3 Isaac Lab code that trains its $15,000 Asimov 1 humanoid to walk with PPO and adversarial motion priors. A trained checkpoint was not yet downloadable.
O-ID, founded in Tokyo in 2025, raised $1.2 million to build a 172 cm, 30-DoF wheeled humanoid whose joints, limbs and compute can be swapped on site. Pilots are targeted for early 2027.
Galaxy planned a Taemin-IP robot show alongside his world tour. Fans feared bundling. The episode raises a wider question: who owns an idol’s likeness in a robot?
Galaxy Corporation plans to flip into a US parent, list in New York and return via KDRs. How flips and KDRs work, what they cost and who has done it.
Chimelong puts 300+ AGIBOT robots to work inside a resort; Galaxy sells tickets to robot K-pop shows. Two robot theme-park models, compared on the facts.
Every humanoid price we could trace to a maker, filing or named report, as of September 28, 2026: from $4,900 for a Unitree R1 to $129,900, and the four big names with no price at all.
AgiBot and Unitree ship about three quarters of the world’s humanoids. Every 2025 and H1 2026 count compared, with the definitions that explain why they disagree.
GR00T N1.7, Gemini Robotics 2, π0.7, Helix 2.5, GEN-1.5, Skild S1, GO-2 and UnifoLM-WLA side by side: weights, licences, parameters, robots and access, as of September 28, 2026.
Every disclosed humanoid factory and warehouse deployment, sorted into production, pilot, internal and announced. Only Figure at BMW and Agility at GXO have published enough to judge.
Twelve dexterous robot hands compared by active degrees of freedom, tactile sensing, payload and price, from the $3,500 ORCA to the 22-DoF Unitree Dex5-S and SharpaWave.
No finished safety standard covers humanoids yet. ISO 25785-1 is a committee draft, China has mapped 52 standards, and makers certify against rules written for arms and wheeled carts.
Goldman sees 75,000 humanoid shipments in 2026, Bank of America 90,000. The first half delivered 19,100. Every major forecast from 2026 to 2050, set against what actually shipped.
What a humanoid robot costs to rent as of September 2026: $299 a day self-run in the US, $2,800 a day with an operator in Dallas, ¥50,000 for two days in Japan, and Chinese rates down about 80% in a year.
Physical AI is AI that perceives, reasons and acts in the real world. A plain guide to how it differs from embodied AI and robotics, the five layers of the stack, and why Korea put a ₩3.1 trillion budget line behind the term.
The first Seoul edition of the summit put a Korean actuator maker’s humanoid next to NVIDIA’s model roadmap. The production numbers are small today and the target is for next year.
Two more joints than the Dex5-1 and all of them motor-driven. Weight, grip force and tactile sensing are not yet published.
At ROSCon 2026 in Toronto on September 22, Google's Intrinsic released Intrinsic Core with a CNC machine-tending reference design, and NVIDIA released Isaac ROS 5.0 with agent-ready skills.
The Robotics Metaplant Application Center replaces time-boxed Atlas trials with a standing facility for data collection and task testing. Parts sequencing comes first; component assembly is a 2030 goal.
The International Federation of Robotics has put a first number on the humanoid market. It is small next to conventional robots, and many of the units sold were bought to generate data rather than to work.
Peng Zhihui unveiled the 88 cm Q1 and the transformable T1 on September 20, both running Tencent Cloud's WorkBuddy. The brand sits inside Shangwei New Materials, the listed company AGIBOT controls.
The target is five times the Hayward factory’s ramped capacity and depends on a second plant that mostly comes online late in 2027. Børnich frames reliability, not output, as the constraint.
Robocurve ran 300 hazardous-instruction trials on real robot arms. GPT-6 Astra completed 60 of its 100, Claude Fable 5.1 refused only the doll-stabbing task, and the VLA MolmoAct2 never refused.
Hyundai keeps the company that ships robots and lets go of the research lab spun up alongside it. SoftBank, which sold Boston Dynamics to Hyundai in 2021, would bring Raibert’s work back under its roof.
A nine-figure cheque for China’s robot-compute layer goes to a chip supplier whose customer list reads like a roster of the country’s humanoid makers.
The AI build-out has a labour problem as well as a chip problem. Watney’s robots have been swapping network cables inside Meta data centres since mid-2025.
Figure pretrained Helix 2.5 from scratch on its human-behavior dataset, Index, and reports zero-shot tidying, towel folding and bed making in 30 Bay Area homes. Without that pretraining, success fell to 9%.
The number worth keeping is not the udon. It is the move from 99% to 99.9% on a screw, which on a production line is the difference between a stop every few units and one every thousand.
The plant is designed for roughly five times the full-size humanoids UBTech has sold since the start of 2025. Capacity is the easy number; utilisation is the one to watch.
New legs, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio and a safety system meant for shared floors. The order book is large; 2025 sales were not.
Unitree's debut was meant to open the mainland listing window for humanoid makers. A month later, the slide in its shares is being cited as the reason that window may narrow.
A Rome-based embedded-security company becomes a unicorn on the argument that robots and drones need to defend themselves at the device level. Europe’s Cyber Resilience Act is the deadline behind the pitch.
The pitch is physical AI. The engineering is plumbing: Ethernet and power at the wrist, a faster controller, and fewer external PCs between a camera and the robot.
The startup from Mobile ALOHA and DexCap researchers Zipeng Fu and Chen Wang says one policy runs on arms, humanoids and mobile manipulators and learns a new task from under 30 minutes of human demonstrations.
A bank that put the 2035 humanoid market at $38 billion in 2024 now puts it at $138 billion. The forecast is a scenario, not an order book.
Three months after a $60 million raise, a company that pays people to film themselves doing chores is being priced near half a billion dollars. Human-motion data is becoming an asset class.
A sensor maker adds two strategic investors. One of them, from a shipbuilding group, is co-developing a heavy-duty hand for shipyard work, and the money also buys a bigger sensor line.
Selling a humanoid is a transaction. Keeping one working at a customer site is a service business, and in Japan it now has a vehicle.
A two-armed wheeled robot, one large unnamed customer and an explicit refusal to join the model race. Maven is selling deployment hours, not a foundation model.
Unitree says one checkpoint trained on about 2,500 hours of real-robot data runs 64 manipulation tasks. It was billed as open source; at launch the code, weights and data were all marked "coming soon."
An autonomy software company is buying the supplier behind roughly 37% of Ukraine’s early-2026 ground-robot procurement spend. Most of the headline price depends on earnouts.
Hyundai Motor Group is keeping the costliest part of its humanoid inside the group. The parts maker that builds its car modules now builds Atlas’s joints.
The semiconductor foundry model, applied to robots: one plant builds for companies that cannot justify their own line. Most of the money is in a second phase that is not yet committed.
Galaxy Corporation outlined US IPO plans after its September 21 New York robot show. Read the bank-selection timeline and what remains unconfirmed.
Robotics is the growth story a 1.5%-margin carmaker can tell using assets it already owns. The parts of a humanoid business that assembly lines cannot supply are the parts nobody has yet.
How does Galaxy Robot Park monetize physical AI? Explore its shows, visitor experiences, reported paid attendance and the limits of the financial evidence.
Surgical robotics has been an arm on a cart for twenty years. Choosing a humanoid form is a claim about the operating room being un-redesignable — not a claim about autonomy.
Two new acts inside six weeks, and the majors are all building their own. The unresolved question is not whether audiences accept a synthetic performer — it is who owns the character, the voice and the labour behind them.
IL supplied its ILBOT H2 humanoid to Galaxy Robot Park, extending its deployment strategy into entertainment and visitor-interaction data collection.
The sector has spent two years being judged on video. XPeng has just moved the argument to the one place humanoid companies have consistently lost it: the factory floor.
The show date will get the headlines. The org chart is the part worth reading: Samsung has handed a software executive authority over the mechanical design too.
Humanoid startups begin with a body and hunt for a task. Doosan is starting from tasks it already sells and adding legs last — a slower route with one obvious problem: the date.
XYZ’s Barisbrew robot barista has reached Galaxy Robot Park and Musinsa Beauty Hongdae. Compare the deployments and the announced year-end supply plan.
The price is not the story for anyone building robots. The story is that the place open robot models are distributed and the company selling the models and the silicon underneath them become the same company.
Humanoid companies have been priced on hardware and policies. This deal prices the training bill, and it is larger than the funding history of the company signing it.
Two published exploit chains give an unauthenticated attacker root on Unitree’s G1 humanoid, one of them from Bluetooth range with no pairing. The interesting part is not the intrusion. It is that the compromised endpoint has actuators.
Ten projects, 15 member organisations, 12 government sites — and a two-year clock. Defence is the one corner of robotics where the cheque does not depend on a consumer thesis.
The name says embodied AI. The product is a physics simulation and discovery platform. The distinction matters, because the term “physical AI” is now being used for two unrelated businesses.
Two terminated deals, at $3.3bn and $1.2bn. The third is a SPAC at roughly $800 million — and the direction of that sequence is the story, not the merger.
NAVER's ARC Brain, Isaac GR00T N1.7 and Generalist's cross-embodiment model all claim the software layer that runs somebody else's robots. They disagree on what that layer is.
A state budget, a customer taking equity, and an industrial invoice — Korea's ₩3.1 trillion physical AI line, Charm Care's ¥300 million stake in Donut Robotics, and UBTech's 921 humanoids sold in H1 are three answers to who funds a humanoid.
Correction: the source previously cited for Galaxy’s H1 2026 earnings was a 2025 article. The unsupported financial figures and contract claim were removed.
8VC led a $200m Series B extension at a $3bn valuation, three months after a $400m round at $2bn. Gen 1.5 is reported to learn new tasks from three to twelve seconds of video.
No prototype, no timeline, no manufacturing partner — a podcast statement and roughly 11 open San Francisco robotics roles covering actuator design and hardware engineering.
A labour ministry guideline issued September 3 splits the automation decision from its employment consequences — and lands in the middle of Hyundai Motor’s dispute over Atlas.
Grip with the left arm, hand off to the right, reorient, insert into a rack — built on Isaac GR00T N1.7 and trained by imitation learning from teleoperation. No success rate published.
A 178cm robot nicknamed Hinata, run with KDDI and AVITA, answers transfer and sightseeing questions in about 60 languages — Umeda through September 6, Tanimachi 9-chome September 9 to 15.
Up from 21 in the 2022 original. Xiaomi says task success on a nut-fastening line at its EV factory went from 90% to 98% over about four months — company-reported, internal deployment.
Medtronic put roughly $700m into Cornerstone Robotics for ex-US rights to Sentire; Enovis made a binding offer for eCential Robotics at a €155m enterprise value. Both on September 1.
Maverick Silicon led, with Fidelity, Atreides, Key1 Capital and Ora Global participating. Total raised $272m. A bet that perception stays a separate product rather than getting absorbed by whoever ships the robot.
Cabinet-approved September 1, inside a ₩21.3tn package up 97.2%. Public-sector robots are itemised by ministry — 650 research and education, 214 defence, 369 police and fire, 200 elder care, 210 agriculture.
Korea's ₩2.3tn humanoid plan targets ten industries. Homes, elder care and venues are absent, and so far only logistics has a commercial humanoid deployment.
Revenue up 104.2% to RMB 1.27bn, humanoids up 1,445% to RMB 590.3m and 46.5% of the total, gross margin 44.7%. Net loss still RMB 338.8m, and the 2026 target is 10,000 units.
1,400 sq m in Narashino, Chiba, 35 teleoperated AgiBot humanoids expanding to a maximum of 40. Failed attempts are tagged and kept, with operator error separated from equipment fault.
₩2.3tn for the humanoid ecosystem through 2030 and ₩2.8tn for physical AI field trials in eight sectors. The line suppliers will price off is the procurement one: 1,080 domestic humanoids bought by 2030.
₩350bn for Wonik Robotics, ₩150bn of it direct state equity in convertible preferred stock. Hands and actuators are about 70% of humanoid hardware cost, and Korea builds roughly 1% of the world’s humanoids.
Atlas onto HMGMA lines from 2028, a US robot factory the same year, and a dealer network and captive lender already sized for volume. The initial 25,000-unit order is internal.
China’s largest single-round private financing in embodied AI, led by IDG Capital with Tencent and Alibaba strategic. About a third of it came from XPeng and its own executives.
591.53 yuan on August 26, the first close under 600. About 205.6 billion yuan off the debut peak — the day-one premium erased, the offer price still intact.
Galaxy’s August 2026 roadmap covered Soulware, character robots and robot idols. This archive separates announced plans from completed deployments.
$47.4 billion across 521 deals in H1 2026, against $12 billion across 470 deals the previous half. Waymo’s $16B Series D alone took close to a third of it.
Three permits, one unanimous vote: Tesla 5,000, Waymo 1,000, Uber 1,000. Tesla’s Cybercab chief engineer put his own realistic figure at 2,500.
Galaxy Robot Park fully opened in Seoul on August 21, 2026. Opening coverage reported 20,000 preview visitors and 17 additional robot types.
Driver-monitoring vision, already qualified and shipping at automotive volume, repackaged as a robot perception platform. No customers, pricing or timeline disclosed.
Oh Jun-ho says Samsung Electronics plans a humanoid presentation at ICRA 2027. It is an interview remark rather than a corporate announcement — and still the most specific signal Samsung has given.
Filed August 14, disclosed August 18. A/A technology grades, 88.2 billion won raised, 3,300 hours of driver-out testing and a paid 116 km truck route with Hanjin. Offering size undisclosed.
Thirty-six listed companies, 1.2905 trillion won of revenue, and a wider operating loss than last year. The profitable names sell gearboxes and inspection systems, not robots.
Two disclosed partners, both Korean: HD Hyundai and POSCO. Welding tops out near 1 cm per second, which removes the speed comparison humanoids usually lose.
Gravis Robotics does not build machines. It builds a rack that retrofits autonomy onto nine brands of heavy equipment already on site, across four continents.
Ten times the onboard compute, 18-hour days, and a Cosmos-based learning loop trained on five years of paid hospital operation. The customer is quoting utilisation numbers.
Co-led by Sequoia and the American Strategic Technology Fund, eight months after a $75M Series B. The number worth tracking is not the valuation — it is one million drones a year by 2028.
Actuators are around half the cost of building a humanoid, and the gearbox inside them is machined one part at a time. Schaeffler is forming it instead — seconds instead of minutes, 25% less cost, production in 2027.
An August 2026 announcement outlined support for 50 artists and permanent art displays at Galaxy Robot Park, including a ₩500 million contribution.
The MOU is the usual kind. The date is not — Q1 2027, on Isaac GR00T and Jetson Thor — and neither is the Tennessee washing-machine line that gets a wheeled CLOiD before this year ends.
A framework for global procurement of AutoStore systems, filed as inside information — and containing, in the company’s own words, no purchasing commitments at this time.
Wood Mackenzie models robotics as a grid load distinct from data centres. Industrial arms account for 357 TWh of the 2035 figure; humanoids account for about 6.
A3 counted 8,940 robots worth $622M in Q2. Units rose 4.3% and order value 21.3% — and the entire North American quarter is smaller than several single humanoid funding rounds this year.
MOLIT is drafting a bill to rewrite space and facility rules for delivery, parking and EV-charging robots — and 43 companies, including Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor and NAVER, were in the room on August 13.
Which South Korean companies actually build physical AI? Hyundai and Boston Dynamics lead on hardware, ROBOTIS owns the actuator layer, NAVER runs the largest service fleet, and Rainbow Robotics has the clearest near-term revenue event in its Army quadruped.
VicOne turned a capture-the-flag contest into a free simulation test suite. Import your robot, run the adversarial scenarios, find out whether your vision-language model does what a manipulated camera frame tells it to.
TactaBot is three products in one: a 15-degree-of-freedom hand with no motors in it, a tactile sensor smaller than a grain of sand, and a glove that harvests skilled human hands on the factory floor. First units ship in early 2027.
Path Robotics and GrayMatter Robotics get seven-year, performance-based production agreements. Not a funding round, not a pilot — a defense prime handing over hull work on the condition that the robots meet Navy quality standards.
The STAR Market offering priced on August 6 at 150.80 yuan a share, raising about 6.1 billion yuan and implying a valuation near 61 billion yuan. Nine strategic investors took a fifth of the deal, among them DeepSeek’s parent, Tencent and PetroChina.
Not a moonshot number — a procurement number. And the accompanying R&D line names exactly the three parts Korea still has to buy from someone else.
China's humanoid rentals, BYD's showroom robot and Tau Robotics' $30-an-hour teleop cleaning: the three ways a humanoid meets the public and gets paid in 2026.
BYD confirmed a first humanoid for early August at its Di Space experience venues. Reported specs put it at 1.61 metres and 58.5 kilograms with 31 degrees of freedom — and the job description is greeting buyers, not moving parts.
Ten smart robots do not make a service. NAVER's argument is that the value sits in the layer above them — and it is now inviting other manufacturers' machines onto that layer.
Between a $30 hobby servo and a bespoke space-qualified joint there is nothing. That empty middle is a bigger constraint on robotics than most model releases.
Article 50 of the AI Act applies from August 2, 2026. A chatbot has to say it is a chatbot at the moment of contact, and synthetic content that resembles a real person has to be marked whether or not anyone meant to deceive.
Tau Robotics opened an invite-only cleaning service in San Francisco on July 28. The price is the least interesting number: every visit is recorded as depth, telemetry and operator input, which is the product the company is actually building.
A LexisNexis Patent Asset Index published July 29 ranks Fourier, AgiBot, LimX Dynamics, Pudu Robotics and Unitree ahead of every Western humanoid maker. The per-patent numbers tell a different story from the totals.
Google DeepMind shipped three models on July 30. The demo is a humanoid walking to a shelf. The more useful disclosure is a table showing fine manipulation succeeding 32% of the time.
Humanoids and quadrupeds went on the Covered List on July 28. The immediate commercial damage is small, because most Chinese humanoid makers were barely selling in the US anyway. The durable effect is on what American labs can buy.
Every humanoid company claims deployment. This one is putting an hours number in a securities filing, which is a different kind of claim.
The demos get the attention; the update pipeline decides whether a fleet is a business. Agency Tool Co. is betting the boring layer is the one nobody has built.
Not more web video, not more simulation, not more sensor gloves. Study how people actually try to command a robot, and derive the architecture from that.
Humanoid, Atoms and a reported Genesis AI round pushed physical-AI funding near $1.9B in four days. The revenue is in surgical robots, warehouse grids and robotaxis.
The field's flagship academic conference has stopped asking whether humanoids can work and started asking what happens to the people already doing the job — and it is putting commercial platforms on a scored task circuit alongside research robots.
Intelligent devices, then intelligent spaces, then city-level intelligence. The framing is tidy; what makes it credible is a robotics cluster that will also do contract manufacturing for companies that cannot build their own.
The robot was built to fly aircraft by reading manuals and moving human controls. The Navy pointed the same idea at a ship's wheel, because the sailors to turn it are running out.
The round is the largest Series A closed by a humanoid-first company in Europe — and the investor list matters more than the number: Bosch is signing on as contract manufacturer, Schaeffler as a deployment customer.
Cranes, AGVs and cargo handlers that assess their surroundings and act without an operator. The interesting claim is not the automation — it is treating the whole terminal as a single embodied system.
AgiBot told Chinese media it is putting domestically made chips into cerebellum control, joint microcontrollers and communications. The high-level brain in its flagship humanoid still runs on NVIDIA silicon — which is exactly where the substitution story currently stops.
A single org-chart change moved a sector 20% in a session — against a market still 28% below its June high. That asymmetry is the story, not the percentages.