Author: Robots Daily
Across a day in the nursing home, robots in elderly care have quietly become part of seniors’ routines: in the morning, a nursing home robot leads slow finger exercises and light fitness routines in the activity room; by noon, a delivery robot moves through the hallway with meals and supplies; in the afternoon, a companion robot for seniors chats with residents and recognizes who it is talking to; at night, an inspection robot takes over the corridors, sending an alert to the nurses’ station if it detects a fall or anything unusual.This set of scenes is still at an early…
The first time you see such a robot, you cannot help yourself – you stare at it for a few moments. What is it about it that makes it so human?Not only is the face realistic but also the interaction it shows through changes in facial expressions and lip movements while talking. For a moment, you have to make sure that it really is.In 2026, Chinese humanoid robots are getting a lot more attention. Some people are watching them walk and dance. Others are following their factory trials. But there is another reason they keep showing up online: some of…
Whether a humanoid robot dexterous hand can hold a cup, pick up a coin, or twist open a bottle depends on one basic question: how does the motor’s force reach the fingertip? The motor is only the starting point. What really shapes the finger’s movement is the transmission system in between. That system may use a tendon, a set of gears, a linkage, a lead screw, a chain, or a compact actuator placed close to the joint. A 2021 paper published in Nature Communications grouped the main drive mechanisms for multi-fingered dexterous hands into three categories: motor-direct-driven, tendon-driven, and linkage-driven.…
Galbot recently released AstraBrain-WBC 0.5, a model that gives a humanoid robot body something close to a robot cerebellum: a Transformer controller that can learn new movements in zero-shot mode.In the demo video, a Unitree G1 humanoid robot follows human movements from a video and dances with smooth, continuous motion. There is no pre-programmed routine and no fine-tuning for that specific movement. The paper’s numbers are also solid: a 92.58% success rate in zero-shot motion tracking, with inference latency pushed down to 0.39 milliseconds. What Is a Robot Cerebellum, and How Is It Different From a Robot Brain? Galbot breaks…
Vision is the first gateway through which we interact with the real world. Humanoid robots need that same gateway. A simple way to understand humanoid robot 3D vision is to compare it with a regular 2D robot vision camera. A 2D camera can show color, texture, and surface details. The image may look sharp, but it is still flat. The robot can see that something is there. It just cannot reliably tell how far away it is, or how much space it takes up. That is where a 3D vision system comes in. It gives the robot depth, so robot…
Humanoid robots are starting to move out of the lab. They are moving goods in factories, patrolling campuses and showing up in eldercare settings. But then they go out into the real world, and the battery is soon the teammate that’s holding everything back. There is only so much space inside the body, and the battery pack usually has to stay within five or six kilos. Too heavy and the robot loses useful working capacity. If it is too light, it cannot run long. It does more than power the battery. It determines if the robot is able to stand…
Recent humanoid robot demos have been hard to miss. From Figure 03’s long-duration livestream of package sorting, to earlier demonstrations where two Figure robots worked together to tidy a room and fold laundry, to Atlas performing high-difficulty gymnastics movements. Putting aside whether these actions are fully “autonomous,” one thing is clear: humanoid robots are shedding their mechanical feel and starting to move with smoother, more human-like motion. Behind these fluid movements sits a critical component: the robot reducer. Often described as the “heart” of a robot joint, it accounts for about 15% of the total cost in mainstream humanoid robots.…
On the evening of June 24, Unitree Robotics announced that the starting price of its bipedal humanoid robot, the Unitree R1, had been cut from RMB 39,900 to RMB 29,900, about $4,400. Unitree also said sales began the same day, with inventory ready to ship.In 2023, the average price of Unitree’s humanoid robots was RMB 593,400, or about $87,000. By 2025, that figure had fallen to RMB 166,400, or about $24,500. The R1 launched last July at RMB 39,900. Less than a year later, another RMB 10,000 has been taken off. When consumers see a price cut, the first reaction…
There’s been a noticeable shift in robotics lately: capital is flowing into dexterous hands. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, funding for companies working on dexterous hands reached nearly 50 billion RMB. Investment activity around firms such as Yinshi Robotics and LinkerBot has pushed what used to be lab-style hardware into a key component of the humanoid robot supply chain. The reason behind the attention is straightforward. A robot walking up to a table only gets itself to the right place. The actual task begins when it needs to pick up a cup or twist open a bottle. That…
The most costly component of the humanoid robot is not the casing itself or the computer program. The most costly component of a humanoid robot is its joints that reside inside the body. Sum up the cost of shoulders, elbows, and wrists together, and one will see how one-third of the cost ends up being in joint modules. A joint is basically thought of as a rotating component, but there is a robot motor, reducer, encoder, and driver inside it. Joints must produce force, monitor the position, and operate efficiently in a small space. Whether a robot is able to…