Research | Embodied Wire

Korea · Oct 2, 2026

Korea to start robot foundation model R&D in 2027 with two consortia

The ministry has a structure, a first customer and a deadline it set for itself. It does not yet have a budget.

Patents · Oct 2, 2026

Korea’s humanoid patent share falls to 4.6% as China reaches 60.8%

The shares are clear. The raw counts published alongside them do not reconcile, and the newest data are still filling in.

Events · Oct 2, 2026

Korea’s autumn robot calendar: five events and one IPO, Oct–Nov 2026

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.

Korea · Sep 28, 2026

KAIST’s RAIBO2 ran a 42.195 km marathon on one charge; Nature paper explains how

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.

United States · Sep 28, 2026

Skild AI’s S1 learned soccer in 140 simulated years of self-play, with goals as its only reward

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.

Global · Sep 28, 2026

5 million industrial robots now at work as China takes 59% of 2025 installations, IFR says

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%.

Singapore · Sep 28, 2026

Asimov open-sources the Isaac Lab training stack behind its $15,000 DIY humanoid’s walk

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.

Global · Sep 28, 2026

Robot foundation models compared: GR00T, Gemini Robotics, π, Helix and the rest

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.

Global · Sep 28, 2026

Humanoid robot safety standards explained: ISO 25785-1, China’s system and what is missing

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.

Global · Sep 28, 2026

What is physical AI? Physical AI vs embodied AI vs robotics, explained

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.

Open Source · Sep 22, 2026

Intrinsic open-sources its robot runtime under Apache 2.0 as NVIDIA ships Isaac ROS 5.0

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.

Safety · Sep 19, 2026

RoboHarm: frontier models driving robot arms rarely refuse dangerous commands

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.

Models · Sep 17, 2026

Figure's Helix 2.5 does chores in 30 homes it had never seen, with 56% success

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%.

Japan · Sep 17, 2026

At Yaskawa’s newest plant, AI robots build robots and cook the canteen udon

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.

Industrial · Sep 15, 2026

Universal Robots launches Gen 7, rebuilding its cobot platform around the tool flange

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.

Models · Sep 14, 2026

Reward AI's OM-1 learns robot skills from human glove data alone, with no teleoperation or robot data

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.

Models · Sep 10, 2026

Unitree details UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, a 6B-parameter humanoid model, before releasing the full weights

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."

Security · Sep 7, 2026

Root on a Unitree G1 over Bluetooth is a safety bug, not a data bug

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.

Analysis · Sep 5, 2026

Everyone wants to be the layer above the robot

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.

Japan · Sep 3, 2026

ABEJA and Murata ran a dual-arm VLA on real hardware

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.

Japan · Aug 31, 2026

Japan’s humanoid consortium opened a data factory that records failures too

J-HRTI’s Kanto Data Factory, in operation since August 26, runs collection, annotation and industrial-replica test zones on AgiBot hardware. Glove motion capture for finger-level data is planned; the consortium was founded in March 2026.

Policy · Aug 21, 2026

Nevada authorises 8,000 robotaxis in one afternoon — and Tesla immediately talks the number down

Three permits approved unanimously on August 20: Tesla up to 5,000, Waymo 1,000, Uber 1,000 via Motional and Zoox. Tesla’s Cybercab chief engineer put the realistic one-year figure at 2,500.

Perception · Aug 20, 2026

Seeing Machines points eight million cars’ worth of human monitoring at robots

An automotive supplier repackages qualified driver-monitoring vision as a robot perception platform that maps people, objects and environment as one scene. No customers, pricing or timeline disclosed.

Deployment · Aug 17, 2026

Diligent ships Moxi 2.0 — a world model with a hospital invoice behind it

Ten times the onboard compute, 18-hour days, and an Isaac Sim plus Cosmos learning loop trained on five years of paid hospital operation across 25 hospitals.

Logistics · Aug 13, 2026

Amazon signs a global supply framework with AutoStore — and commits to buying nothing

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.

Energy · Aug 13, 2026

Robots could draw 363 TWh a year by 2035 — and almost none of it is humanoids

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.

Markets · Aug 12, 2026

North American robot orders rose 4.3% in units and 21.3% in value. The gap is the story.

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.

Policy · Aug 12, 2026

Korea is writing a Mobile Robot Special Act — and the target is buildings, not roads

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.

Safety · Aug 10, 2026

Hackers broke robots at DEF CON 34. Now those attacks ship as an Isaac Sim extension

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.

Manipulation · Aug 9, 2026

The missing organ in physical AI is the hand — Tacta Systems is selling one

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.

Platforms · Aug 4, 2026

NAVER wants to be the conductor, not the robot

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.

Components · Aug 3, 2026

HEBI wins a NASA grant to shrink the actuator — and the price with it

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.

Patents · Jul 31, 2026

China takes the top five humanoid patent portfolios — with US patents still scoring higher one by one

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.

Models · Jul 30, 2026

Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole-body control — and publishes the misses

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.

Infrastructure · Jul 28, 2026

Shipping software to robots that live on 3G, satellite and sonar

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.

Conferences · Jul 25, 2026

IEEE Humanoids 2026 makes the future of work its special topic as submissions close

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.

Industrial autonomy · Jul 23, 2026

Korea wants its ports to behave like one giant robot

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.

World Models · Jul 20, 2026

At WAIC 2026, China's embodied-AI race moves to models and benchmarks

Past the robots on the WAIC floor, the more consequential contest was in software: a new 'world model,' a shared benchmark for physical intelligence, and edge models small enough to run on a robot — China building the layer that makes hardware useful.

Analysis · Jul 20, 2026

Who controls the humanoid supply chain? TrendForce maps the US-China divide

A new TrendForce analysis argues the humanoid contest is turning from spec sheets to supply chains — and maps who controls the parts. China is broadest, the US owns the AI brains, and Japan and Germany hold the mechanics.

Interfaces · Jul 19, 2026

BrainCo closes the loop from EEG to robot arm in under 200 milliseconds

The demo is a headset and a robot arm picking up a cap. The more consequential product is the rig that records what the operator's brain was doing while they demonstrated the task.

Training Data · Jul 15, 2026

China's answer to the robot data problem: 64 data factories

Bloomberg reports China has built 64 warehouse-scale centers — with about 20 more coming — where workers perform everyday tasks on repeat so robots can learn from them. The wager is that the humanoid race is won on demonstration data, and that China can manufacture it.

Manipulation · Jul 13, 2026