Author: Robots Daily

Unitree has published new details about UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, its latest general-purpose humanoid robot foundation model. According to the company, the model brings fine-grained tabletop manipulation and whole-body mobile manipulation into one system, using a unified action space to handle different end effectors. Unitree’s aim is to use one model for the full chain from perception and interaction decisions to action generation. The model has 6 billion parameters. Unitree says it was trained on about 2,500 hours of high-quality real-robot data. The company’s real-robot tests cover 64 tasks: 10 whole-body manipulation tasks and 54 tabletop tasks. It supports parallel grippers and two…

On September 8, an XPENG IRON humanoid robot walked off the production line at XPENG Robotics. No crane, no workers carrying it—it stepped in front of the cameras on its own. XPENG says this is the world’s first advanced general-purpose humanoid robot to complete automated assembly and walk off the line by itself. Over the past year, XPENG’s public demonstrations of IRON have mostly centered on human-like design, motion control, and physical world large models. This time was different. The production line itself became the story. With automation above 80% for core processes, XPENG describes the facility as the world’s…

BEIJING — At the China National Convention Center on the morning of September 4, Yuanshan Zhixing Technology did not send a robot out to dance or perform backflips. The company had one product to show: a robot built to help people with visual impairments move through cities on their own. The robot is called Xiaoyuan. Its developer, Hangzhou Yuanshan Zhixing Technology, is a technology brand under Hangzhou Zhiyuan Research Institute, which is affiliated with China South Industries Group Corporation. The institute describes Xiaoyuan as the world’s first wheel-legged guide robot. The scale of the problem is clear. More than 17…

01. What Large Models Are Doing to Robot Architecture Take a humanoid robot apart and it was never one technical problem. It’s a stack of systems, each layer constraining the ones above and below it. The body. This is the robot’s physical hardware — motors, reducers, sensors, batteries. The cerebellum. Motion control. Standing, walking, grasping. This layer doesn’t care about why an action happens, only how to execute it. In China’s robotics industry — Unitree, Black Sesame Technologies, Horizon Robotics — people routinely call this layer the “cerebellum.” The brain. This is where the biggest changes have happened over the…

Hard to believe, but in 2026, the quadruped robots you see at a tech expo outnumber the golden retrievers, corgis, and poodles you’d run into walking around your neighborhood. Combined. This isn’t a joke. Quadruped robot form factors are diversifying faster than most dog breeds evolved. On the same technical foundation, manufacturers have bolted on wheels, saddles, humanoid torsos, dinosaur skeletons, drone landing pads. Every new configuration seems to open up a new scenario, a new audience, and a new revenue stream. After seeing these wild machine dog variants, you might conclude that pet dogs never stood a chance. A…

On August 29, inside a Dairy Queen on Wujiang Road in Shanghai, a silver-white dual-arm robot stood behind the counter. After a customer placed an order, it opened cabinet doors, fitted a cup ring, dispensed soft serve, added Oreo crumbs, ran the spindle mixer, and handed over a completed Blizzard. From order to handoff, the robot went through 55 consecutive steps — separating a paper cup from a sanitized tray, aligning a cup ring with sub-millimeter precision, dispensing the ice cream, adding toppings, running the high-speed mixing spindle, and finally inverting the cup for the signature Blizzard flip. That “flip…

At the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games (WHRG 2026), Tiangong Omni crossed the finish line of the 400-meter small-group final in 45.66 seconds, leaning forward with both hands held near its face and barely swinging its arms. The unusual gait quickly became a talking point online. Chinese viewers dubbed it the “coy” run, or the “face-palm” sprint. But the running style points to a change in how humanoid robots are being trained. Han Gang, a motion-control algorithm expert at the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, told reporters after the race that the team had initially designed a more conventional running…

BEIJING — The music was still loud at Unitree Robotics’ booth, where the G1 and H2 humanoids went through their combat and group dance routines. A small crowd gathered, snapped a few photos, and moved on. A short walk away, robots sorting packages on conveyor belts, tightening screws at workstations, and pulling espresso shots had drawn a much bigger audience. Some visitors scribbled parameters into notebooks. Others chased sales reps for pricing. A few squatted down to inspect joint structures. Reuters put it bluntly in a dispatch from the event: “Robots that can do kung fu are already obsolete.” That…

BEIJING — On the evening of August 22, a 100-meter preliminary heat at the National Speed Skating Oval, the “Ice Ribbon,” pushed the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games into new territory. Team Tianzhuo’s robot opened with a 9.39-second run, already faster than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second men’s 100m world record. The mark did not last long. Tiangong-Jingfeng Technology Joint Team clocked 9.34 seconds. Honor’s Lightning had already posted a 9.32-second time in pre-event testing. By the end of the evening, multiple robots had posted times faster than the human world-record mark. The results showed how quickly the performance bar is rising…

The second World Humanoid Robot Games open today, August 22, at the National Speed Skating Oval, known as the “Ice Ribbon,” in Beijing. Over the next five days, 666 teams from 16 countries across six continents will field 2,056 robots across 51 events and 1,301 competition sessions. Compared with the inaugural Games, the number of events has nearly doubled, from 26 to 51. Scenario-based events have expanded from six to 21, covering real-world settings including industrial production, hotels, homes, emergency response, catering and office work. Athletic events have also added long jump, weightlifting, tug-of-war and table tennis. The focus of…