Robotics Timeline

Astek innovation events in the Robotics domain.

KUKA KR FORTEC (2024-02-08) — KUKA launches the KR FORTEC, a heavy-payload industrial robot with 240 kg payload and 3,683 mm reach, up to 700 kg lighter than its predecessor and designed to lower total cost of ownership.
Covariant RFM-1 (2024-03-11) — Covariant unveils RFM-1, a foundation model for warehouse robots trained on text, images, video, robot actions and sensor readings collected by its production fleet.
Intuitive da Vinci 5 (2024-03-14) — Intuitive receives FDA 510(k) clearance for da Vinci 5, the fifth generation of its surgical robot, which introduces force feedback. It is first offered to a small number of US customers.
Rainbow Robotics RB-Y1 (2024-04-07) — Korea's Rainbow Robotics unveils the RB-Y1, a mobile manipulator with two 7-DOF arms on a wheeled base. Designed for embodied AI, it becomes a research platform adopted by several US universities.
Mentee Robotics MenteeBot (2024-04-17) — Founded by Amnon Shashua (Mobileye), Mentee Robotics comes out of stealth with MenteeBot, a humanoid trained in simulation then transferred to the real world, aimed at warehouses and homes.
Boston Dynamics Atlas (electric) (2024-04-17) — A day after retiring the hydraulic Atlas, Boston Dynamics unveils a fully electric Atlas designed for the factory rather than the lab, with Hyundai as its first testing ground.
Sanctuary AI Phoenix (Generation 7) (2024-04-25) — Phoenix Generation 7 cuts the time needed to automate a new task from weeks to under 24 hours, with miniaturised hydraulics and better sensors.
BHRIC Tiangong (2024-04-27) — The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center unveils Tiangong, a 1.63 m, 43 kg humanoid presented as the first full-size humanoid able to run on fully electric drive, at 6 km/h.
FANUC CRX-10iA/L Paint (2024-05-06) — FANUC launches the CRX-10iA/L Paint, an explosion-proof painting cobot with 10 kg payload and 1,418 mm reach, certified for explosive atmospheres in many regions worldwide.
Doosan Robotics PRIME SERIES (2024-05-07) — Doosan Robotics launches the PRIME SERIES, its longest-reach cobots: the P3020 carries 30 kg at 2,030 mm and palletizes from the floor up to 2 m high without a lift.
Unitree G1 (2024-05-13) — Unitree launches the G1, a compact humanoid about 1.32 m tall sold from $16,000 (¥99,000). That price, several times lower than other humanoids at the time, makes it the most widely used research platform.
Octo Model Team Octo (2024-05-20) — An academic team led by Berkeley releases Octo, an open generalist robot policy trained on 800,000 Open X-Embodiment trajectories and fine-tunable in a few hours on a consumer GPU.
Stanford OpenVLA (2024-06-13) — OpenVLA, a 7-billion-parameter vision-language-action model trained on 970,000 real-world demonstrations, becomes the open reference VLA, released under the MIT license.
Galbot G1 (2024-06-21) — Beijing startup Galbot unveils the G1, a semi-humanoid robot with two arms on a wheeled base, driven by its own AI models. It goes on sale in 2025 in Beijing stores and pharmacies.
Enchanted Tools Mirokaï (first delivery) (2024-07-25) — French start-up Enchanted Tools delivers its first Mirokaï social robot to ISIR (Sorbonne University): a humanoid torso with an animated face, balanced on a ball.
Figure 02 (2024-08-06) — Figure AI unveils its second generation: 16-DoF hands, triple the onboard compute, a torso-integrated battery and voice conversation through models trained with OpenAI.
AgiBot Yuanzheng A2 (2024-08-18) — AgiBot (Zhiyuan) unveils five robots at once: the bipedal Yuanzheng A2 (1.75 m, 55 kg) with its A2-W and A2-Max variants, plus the Lingxi X1 and X1-W series. Deliveries are due to start in October 2024.
1X NEO Beta (2024-08-30) — 1X unveils NEO Beta, its first humanoid designed for the home, with safety as the priority and a few units placed in selected homes in 2024 for research.
Amazon licenses Covariant's models (2024-08-30) — Amazon signs a non-exclusive license to Covariant's robotic foundation models and hires its three founders, Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan, plus part of the team.
1X World Model (2024-09-17) — 1X unveils a world model that acts as a virtual simulator for its robots: from one image sequence it imagines several futures depending on proposed actions, to evaluate policies without a physical robot.
Fourier GR-2 (2024-09-30) — Fourier unveils the GR-2, second generation of its GRx series: 1.75 m, 63 kg, 53 degrees of freedom and 12-DOF hands with tactile sensors, plus a detachable battery with doubled capacity.
ByteDance Research GR-2 (2024-10-08) — ByteDance Research unveils GR-2, a robot agent pretrained on 38 million web video clips to learn world dynamics, then fine-tuned to generate both video and actions.
Amazon unveils its Shreveport fulfillment center (2024-10-09) — Amazon unveils its next-generation fulfillment center in Shreveport, Louisiana, with ten times more robotics: Sequoia, Proteus, Sparrow, Robin and Cardinal cover every key production area.
Tsinghua RDT-1B (2024-10-10) — Tsinghua University releases RDT-1B, a 1.2-billion-parameter diffusion transformer for two-arm manipulation, pretrained on the largest multi-robot data collection of its time.
Tesla Optimus (Gen 2) at "We, Robot" (2024-10-10) — At the "We, Robot" event, Tesla has Optimus Gen 2 robots mingle with guests and targets a price of around $30,000; the press notes they relied on teleoperation.
Kepler K2 "Bumblebee" (2024-10-14) — Shanghai-based Kepler unveils the Forerunner K2, the second generation of its industrial humanoid, at GITEX Dubai in October 2024. The K2 "Bumblebee" enters limited-series production in 2025, priced at $30,000.
Physical Intelligence π0 (2024-10-31) — Physical Intelligence unveils π0, a vision-language-action model that adds a flow-matching action head to a pretrained VLM to control very different robots: single arms, bimanual setups and mobile manipulators.
Xpeng IRON (2024-11-06) — At its AI Day, carmaker Xpeng unveils IRON, a 1.78 m, 70 kg humanoid with more than 60 joints, powered by its Turing chip. It already works in the group's factories and stores.
DEEP Robotics Lynx (2024-11-25) — DEEP Robotics launches Lynx, a $17,999 all-terrain wheeled-legged quadruped: 22 cm steps, 45° slopes, IP54 and 3 hours of runtime with hot-swappable batteries.
Tesla Optimus: new 22-DoF hand (2024-11-30) — Tesla shows a new Optimus hand able to catch a ball mid-air; it goes from 11 to 22 degrees of freedom (approximate date, late November 2024, based on a single press source).
Clone Robotics Clone Alpha (2024-12-05) — Clone Robotics opens pre-orders for the first 279 units of Clone Alpha, an android with water-powered artificial muscles and a 206-bone polymer skeleton.
Genesis: open physics simulator (2024-12-19) — Around December 19, 2024, an academic consortium releases Genesis, a Python physics simulation platform for robotics distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Pudu D9 (2024-12-21) — Pudu Robotics, known for its restaurant service robots, unveils the D9, its first bipedal humanoid: 1.70 m, 65 kg, 42 degrees of freedom and up to 2 m/s, aimed at retail, hospitality, healthcare and cleaning.
EngineAI PM01 (2024-12-24) — EngineAI opens global sales of the PM01, a light, open humanoid 1.38 m tall and about 40 kg, with 24 degrees of freedom, offered at ¥88,000 at launch. In February 2025 it performs the first humanoid front flip.
GAC GoMate (2024-12-26) — Carmaker GAC unveils GoMate, a transformable wheeled humanoid that goes from 1.40 m in four-wheel mode to 1.75 m in two-wheel mode, with 38 degrees of freedom and all-solid-state batteries.
Samsung becomes Rainbow Robotics' largest shareholder (2024-12-31) — Samsung Electronics raises its stake in Rainbow Robotics to about 35% and becomes its largest shareholder, while creating a dedicated future robotics office. Korean authorities cleared the deal in March 2025.
Roborock Saros Z70 (2025-01-05) — At CES 2025, Roborock unveils the Saros Z70, the first mass-produced robot vacuum with a foldable mechanical arm (OmniGrip) that picks up socks and small objects. It sells for about $2,600 from spring 2025.
NVIDIA Cosmos (2025-01-06) — At CES 2025, NVIDIA launches Cosmos, a platform of world foundation models (WFMs), video tokenizers and data processing, to generate physically plausible video for robots and autonomous vehicles.
Unitree Go2-W and B2-W (2025-01-07) — At CES 2025, Unitree shows its wheeled-legged quadrupeds Go2-W and B2-W. The industrial B2-W supports 120 kg standing, drives at 15 km/h and covers up to 25 km with 40 kg.
Enchanted Tools Mirokaï (new version, CES 2025) (2025-01-08) — At CES 2025, Enchanted Tools shows a Mirokaï that is 80% new: voice activation, detachable arms, new shell and 4 hours of battery life, with a pilot use alongside children in radiotherapy.
Pollen Robotics Reachy 2 (2025-01-08) — France's Pollen Robotics shows Reachy 2 at CES 2025, an open-source research humanoid that can be teleoperated or programmed in Python, already deployed in more than 100 units.
Physical Intelligence π0-FAST (2025-01-16) — Physical Intelligence releases FAST, a robot action tokenization based on the discrete cosine transform, and π0-FAST, an autoregressive π0 variant up to 5x faster to train.
Symbotic acquires Walmart's robotics unit (2025-01-16) — Symbotic acquires Walmart's Advanced Systems and Robotics business for $200 million; the retailer will pay it $520 million to develop accelerated pickup and delivery systems for its stores.
CCTV Spring Festival Gala: Unitree H1 robots dance the Yangge (2025-01-28) — At the CCTV Lunar New Year Gala, China's most-watched broadcast, Unitree H1 humanoids dance the Yangge with dancers from the Xinjiang Arts Institute, staged by Zhang Yimou.
Physical Intelligence openpi (2025-02-04) — Physical Intelligence opens openpi, a repository releasing the code and weights of π0 and π0-FAST under Apache 2.0, with base models pretrained on over 10,000 hours of robot data.
Exotec Skypod (next generation) (2025-02-06) — French unicorn Exotec launches the next generation of its Skypod system: a more compact robot, a robot-to-robot picking station, 50% more throughput per station and up to 30% denser storage.
Foundation Phantom MK1 (2025-02-10) — California start-up Foundation shows its Phantom MK1 humanoid in public (1.75 m, 80 kg, 20 kg payload), designed for industry and defence (approximate date: first verified coverage).
Mentee Robotics MenteeBot V3 (2025-02-13) — Mentee Robotics unveils MenteeBot's third version: in-house actuators three times more powerful, 360-degree vision, swappable battery and a clear focus on industry and logistics.
Apptronik raises $350 million with Google (2025-02-13) — Apptronik, maker of the Apollo humanoid, announces a $350 million Series A co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with Google taking part, to scale up production.
Clone Robotics Protoclone V1 (2025-02-19) — Clone Robotics releases a video of Protoclone V1, a musculoskeletal android with more than 1,000 artificial muscles and 200 degrees of freedom, hanging from the ceiling and still far from practical use.
Figure Helix (2025-02-20) — Figure unveils Helix, a VLA controlling a humanoid's whole upper body: a 7-billion-parameter VLM "thinks slow" at 7-9 Hz and an 80-million-parameter policy acts at 200 Hz, fully onboard.
1X NEO Gamma (2025-02-21) — 1X unveils NEO Gamma, the home version of its humanoid: knitted suit, more natural gait, noise cut by 10 dB and ten times the hardware reliability.
Sanctuary AI Phoenix (Generation 8) (2025-02-21) — Sanctuary AI swaps Phoenix's legs for a wheeled base in its Generation 8, designed to capture high-quality training data (approximate date: single press source).
AgiBot GO-1 and AgiBot World (2025-03-10) — AgiBot publishes the technical report for AgiBot World, over one million trajectories across 217 tasks, and GO-1 (Genie Operator-1), a generalist policy built on latent actions.
iRobot Roomba (2025 lineup) (2025-03-11) — iRobot overhauls its entire Roomba lineup with ClearView LiDAR navigation on every model, from the Roomba 105 to the Roomba Plus 505 Combo. It is the largest launch in its history, months before its bankruptcy.
AgiBot Lingxi X2 (2025-03-11) — AgiBot unveils the Lingxi X2, a compact 33.8 kg bipedal humanoid with 28 degrees of freedom that walks, runs, dances and rides a bicycle, with multimodal interaction designed to respond within milliseconds.
X-Humanoid Tiangong Ultra (2025-03-16) — Beijing innovation center X-Humanoid shows the Tiangong Ultra, an upgraded Tiangong built for long-distance running. A month later, it won the first humanoid robot half marathon in Beijing.
Locus Robotics Locus Array (2025-03-17) — At ProMat, Locus Robotics unveils Array, a fully robotic order fulfillment system combining a mobile robot, onboard storage and a vision-guided picking arm.
KUKA KMP 3000P (2025-03-17) — At ProMat, KUKA shows the KMP 3000P, an omnidirectional autonomous mobile robot that carries up to three tons in any direction, with no floor guidance.
Dobot Atom (2025-03-17) — Cobot specialist Dobot enters the humanoid race with Atom, a full-size robot with straight-knee walking, 28 upper-body degrees of freedom and a claimed precision of ±0.05 mm.
Dexterity Mech (2025-03-18) — Dexterity launches Mech, an AI-driven dual-arm mobile manipulator that loads trucks autonomously, lifts up to 130 lb and stacks boxes up to 8 feet high.
NVIDIA Cosmos Predict, Transfer and Reason (2025-03-18) — At GTC 2025, NVIDIA organizes Cosmos into three families: Predict to generate future world states, Transfer to turn simulations into photoreal video, and Reason, an open physical reasoning model.
NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1 (2025-03-18) — At GTC 2025, NVIDIA releases Isaac GR00T N1, billed as the first open, fully customizable foundation model for humanoid robots: a dual-system VLA of about 2 billion parameters.
X-Humanoid Tiangong 2.0 (2025-03-27) — At the Zhongguancun Forum, X-Humanoid shows the Tiangong 2.0 for the first time: adaptive walking on complex terrain, hot-swappable dual batteries for continuous operation and millimeter-level manipulation accuracy.
Samsung Ballie (with Gemini) (2025-04-09) — Samsung and Google Cloud announce that Ballie, Samsung's spherical companion robot, will run Gemini and ship in summer 2025 in the US and Korea. It never shipped: the project was reported shelved in January 2026.
Fourier N1 (2025-04-11) — Fourier launches the N1, a 1.3 m, 38 kg humanoid whose bill of materials, blueprints, assembly instructions and core control code are released openly. It runs at up to 3.5 m/s and lasts over two hours.
Hugging Face acquires Pollen Robotics (2025-04-14) — Hugging Face acquires French start-up Pollen Robotics, maker of the open-source Reachy 2 humanoid, for an undisclosed sum, making open robotics a strategic focus.
First humanoid robot half marathon in Beijing, won by Tiangong Ultra (2025-04-19) — In Beijing, 21 humanoids started the first half marathon open to robots, alongside about 12,000 runners. Only six finished; X-Humanoid's Tiangong Ultra won in 2 h 40, the only one under the 3 h 10 limit.
Physical Intelligence π0.5 (2025-04-22) — Physical Intelligence unveils π0.5, a VLA derived from π0 and co-trained on heterogeneous data, that cleans a kitchen or bedroom in entirely new homes.
DEEP Robotics Lynx M20 (2025-05-01) — DEEP Robotics unveils the Lynx M20, the industrial version of its wheeled-legged quadruped: 33 kg, IP66, -20 to 55 °C and a 96-beam LiDAR for inspection and emergency work in extreme environments.
Amazon Vulcan (2025-05-07) — Amazon unveils Vulcan in Dortmund: its first robot with a sense of touch, stowing and picking items in tightly packed storage pods thanks to force-feedback sensors.
Universal Robots UR15 (2025-05-12) — At Automate in Detroit, Universal Robots introduces the UR15, its fastest cobot: 15 kg payload (17.5 kg wrist-down), 5 m/s at the tool center point and cycle times up to 30% shorter.
Boston Dynamics Stretch: DHL plans 1,000+ more robots (2025-05-13) — DHL signs a memorandum of understanding with Boston Dynamics to deploy more than 1,000 additional Stretch robots by 2030, automating container unloading and then case picking.
NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.5 and GR00T-Dreams (2025-05-18) — At Computex 2025, NVIDIA announces Isaac GR00T N1.5, the first update to its open humanoid model, and the GR00T-Dreams blueprint, which produced its training data in 36 hours.
Boston Dynamics Spot and Orbit 5.0 (2025-05-20) — Boston Dynamics releases version 5.0 of Spot and its Orbit fleet software: AI-driven anomaly detection, panoramic site views and over-the-air updates for industrial inspection.
Hugging Face HopeJR (2025-05-29) — Hugging Face announces HopeJR, a full-size open-source humanoid with 66 actuated degrees of freedom, built with The Robot Studio, for about $3,000, with first units targeted for late 2025.
Hugging Face SmolVLA (2025-06-03) — Hugging Face releases SmolVLA, a 450-million-parameter open VLA that runs on consumer hardware, trained only on datasets shared by the LeRobot community.
Wandercraft Calvin (2025-06-07) — France's Wandercraft, known for its exoskeletons, unveils Calvin, a headless industrial humanoid designed for Renault's plants under a strategic partnership (date of first press coverage).
1X Redwood AI (2025-06-10) — 1X unveils Redwood, a 160-million-parameter vision-language model that drives end-to-end mobile manipulation for its NEO Gamma humanoid at home, entirely on the onboard GPU.
Meta V-JEPA 2 (2025-06-11) — Meta releases V-JEPA 2, a self-supervised video world model pretrained on over one million hours of video, whose V-JEPA 2-AC variant plans robot motions without data from the target environment.
Dyna Robotics DYNA-1 (2025-06-24) — Dyna Robotics unveils DYNA-1, a dexterous manipulation foundation model that folded over 850 napkins in 24 hours with no human intervention and a 99.4% success rate.
Neura Robotics 4NE1 (third generation) (2025-06-24) — At Automatica in Munich, Germany's Neura Robotics unveils the third generation of its 4NE1 humanoid (1.80 m, 80 kg, up to 100 kg payload) and launches Neuraverse, its app ecosystem.
KUKA KR TITAN ultra and iiQKA.OS2 (2025-06-24) — At automatica in Munich, KUKA unveils the KR TITAN ultra, able to handle up to 1,500 kg, along with its new iiQKA.OS2 operating system, the iiQWorks suite and the KR C5 controller.
Amazon passes one million robots and launches DeepFleet (2025-06-30) — Amazon delivers its one millionth robot to a fulfillment center in Japan and unveils DeepFleet, a generative AI model that coordinates fleet movements and cuts travel time by 10%.
K-Scale Labs K-Bot (2025-07-01) — K-Scale Labs opens pre-orders for K-Bot, a 1.40 m open-source humanoid priced under $10,000; the start-up shut down in November 2025 for lack of an investor (approximate date: summer 2025).
Toyota Research Institute Large Behavior Models (2025-07-07) — The Toyota Research Institute publishes a rigorous evaluation of its Large Behavior Models: blind, randomized trials in simulation and on real robots showing the value of multitask pretraining.
MagicLab MagicBot Z1 (2025-07-08) — MagicLab launches the MagicBot Z1, a compact bipedal humanoid with 24 degrees of freedom expandable to 50 and joints above 130 N·m, offered in standard and developer editions.
Hugging Face Reachy Mini (2025-07-09) — Hugging Face opens pre-orders for Reachy Mini, a 28 cm expressive open-source robot built with Pollen, at $299 (Lite) or $449 (Wireless), for embodied AI experiments.
UBTech Walker S2 (2025-07-17) — UBTech unveils the Walker S2, an industrial humanoid that swaps its own battery in three minutes without shutting down, enabling 24/7 work. It lifts 15 kg and becomes the brand's mass-production model.
ByteDance Seed GR-3 and ByteMini (2025-07-21) — ByteDance Seed releases GR-3, a large vision-language-action model that generalizes to unseen objects and instructions, and ByteMini, a two-arm mobile robot designed to run it.
Robotera L7 (2025-07-23) — Robotera, a Tsinghua University spin-off, launches the L7: a full-size 171 cm, 65 kg biped with 400 N·m joints and a 12-DoF hand, able to dance as well as sort parcels.
Unitree R1 (2025-07-25) — Unitree announces the R1, a bipedal humanoid starting at ¥39,900 (about $5,900), far below its $16,000 G1. Lightweight, with 26 joints and multimodal AI, it performs cartwheels and walks on its hands.
Skild AI Skild Brain (2025-07-29) — Skild AI unveils the Skild Brain, an "omni-bodied" foundation model controlling quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms and mobile manipulators with a two-frequency hierarchical architecture.
LimX Dynamics Oli (2025-07-30) — LimX Dynamics launches Oli, a full-size 165 cm humanoid with 31 active degrees of freedom and a modular hardware-software architecture, offered in Lite, EDU and Super editions for embodied AI research.
Unitree A2 (2025-08-05) — Unitree launches the A2, a 37 kg industrial quadruped with front and rear LiDAR that supports 100 kg standing, carries 25 kg while walking and covers up to 20 km unloaded.
Fourier GR-3 (2025-08-06) — Fourier unveils the GR-3, its first full-size "care-bot" humanoid: 165 cm, 55 degrees of freedom, a soft and warm exterior, and multimodal perception of voice, touch and expressions, for hospitals, eldercare centers and schools.
NVIDIA Isaac Sim 5.0 and Isaac Lab 2.2 (2025-08-11) — At SIGGRAPH 2025, NVIDIA makes Isaac Sim 5.0 and Isaac Lab 2.2, its open-source robot simulation and learning frameworks, available on GitHub, alongside NuRec neural rendering and the 7B Cosmos Reason model.
First World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (2025-08-15) — From August 15 to 17, 2025, Beijing hosted the first World Humanoid Robot Games: 280 teams from 16 countries, 26 events, from running to soccer and warehouse sorting. Unitree dominated track events.
WIRobotics ALLEX (2025-08-18) — South Korea's WIRobotics unveils the upper body of ALLEX, a general-purpose humanoid that senses forces without dedicated sensors: a 15-DoF hand sensitive to 100 gf, 40 N fingertip force and an arm with ten times less friction than a cobot.
Boston Dynamics and TRI: Large Behavior Model for Atlas (2025-08-20) — Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute present a 450-million-parameter, language-conditioned end-to-end policy controlling the full Atlas humanoid at 30 Hz for long manipulation tasks.
Techman TM Xplore I (2025-08-21) — Techman Robot, a subsidiary of Taiwanese giant Quanta, unveils the TM Xplore I, billed as the first industrial humanoid designed in Taiwan. Wheeled and developed with NVIDIA, it targets electronics factories, warehouses and logistics.
NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor (2025-08-25) — NVIDIA ships Jetson AGX Thor, an onboard computer with a Blackwell GPU and 128 GB of memory delivering up to 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS within 130 W; the developer kit starts at $3,499.
Tesla Optimus V2.5 (2025-09-07) — A golden, more rounded Optimus appears; Elon Musk clarifies it is version 2.5 and that V3 has not yet been shown (approximate date: first identified press coverage).
Universal Robots UR8 Long (2025-09-08) — Universal Robots launches the UR8 Long at FABTECH: an 8 kg payload cobot with the UR20's 1,750 mm reach, 30% lighter, for welding and bin picking in tight spaces.
Unitree UnifoLM-WMA-0 (2025-09-15) — Unitree releases the code and weights of UnifoLM-WMA-0, a multi-robot world-model-action architecture whose world model serves both as a data simulator and as a decision aid for the policy.
Figure raises over $1 billion at a $39 billion valuation (2025-09-16) — Figure AI announces a Series C of more than $1 billion, led by Parkway Venture Capital, valuing it at $39 billion post-money.
Humanoid HMND 01 Alpha (wheeled) (2025-09-18) — London start-up Humanoid unveils HMND 01 Alpha, a 2.20 m wheeled humanoid mobile manipulator developed in seven months, for warehouses, logistics and retail.
PAL Robotics Kangaroo (2025-09-22) — Spain's PAL Robotics showcases Kangaroo, a 1.60 m research biped with linear actuators, aimed at dynamic locomotion and reinforcement learning (approximate date: single press source).
IFR World Robotics 2025: 542,000 industrial robots installed in 2024 (2025-09-25) — The IFR World Robotics 2025 report counts 542,000 industrial robots installed in 2024, twice as many as ten years earlier, for a global fleet of 4.66 million units. China accounts for 54% of installations.
NVIDIA Newton (beta) (2025-09-29) — At CoRL 2025, NVIDIA releases the beta of Newton, an open-source GPU-accelerated physics engine co-developed with Google DeepMind and Disney Research and governed by the Linux Foundation.
Universal Robots UR18 (2025-10-06) — Universal Robots adds the UR18 to its range: a compact cobot with 18 kg payload, 950 mm reach and up to 4 m/s, for pick-and-place, assembly and material handling.
SoftBank to acquire ABB Robotics (2025-10-08) — SoftBank Group announces the acquisition of ABB's robotics division for $5.375 billion. ABB drops its planned spin-off, and closing is expected in mid-to-late 2026.
Figure 03 (2025-10-09) — Figure AI unveils Figure 03, a third generation fully redesigned for the home and mass production: new vision, tactile hands, wireless charging and a BotQ plant sized for 12,000 robots a year.
AgiBot G2 (2025-10-16) — AgiBot launches the G2, a wheeled industrial humanoid: 7-DoF force-controlled arms, hot-swappable dual batteries for 24/7 operation and NVIDIA Jetson Thor compute, aimed at precision assembly and logistics.
Unitree H2 (2025-10-20) — Unitree unveils the H2, the full-size successor to the H1: about 1.80 m, 70 kg, 31 joints and a bionic face. The launch video, "H2 Destiny Awakening", shows dancing, kung fu and a catwalk.
Booster Robotics K1 (2025-10-21) — Booster Robotics launches the K1, a 95 cm humanoid priced at $4,999 for education and research. It is the platform of the team that won the RoboCup 2025 KidSize league.
Chery AiMOGA Mornine (2025-10-22) — At its Global Innovation Conference, Chery presents Mornine, the humanoid from its AiMOGA subsidiary designed as a multilingual car sales assistant. In April 2026, it went on sale to consumers on JD.com at ¥285,800.
Noetix Bumi (2025-10-22) — Noetix Robotics unveils Bumi, a 94 cm, 12 kg bipedal humanoid priced at ¥9,998 (about $1,370). It is billed as the first high-performance humanoid under ¥10,000, for families and education.
Amazon Blue Jay (2025-10-22) — Amazon unveils Blue Jay, a ceiling-mounted station coordinating several robotic arms to pick, stow and consolidate items, built in about a year. The project was shut down four months later.
1X NEO (pre-orders at $20,000) (2025-10-28) — 1X opens pre-orders for NEO, the first home humanoid sold to consumers: $20,000 or $499 a month, US deliveries planned for 2026, with remote human assistance.
NVIDIA Cosmos Predict 2.5 and Transfer 2.5 (2025-10-28) — NVIDIA releases Cosmos Predict 2.5, merging three models into a single architecture trained on 200 million clips, and Cosmos Transfer 2.5, faster and 3.5x smaller than its predecessor.
Leju Kuavo 5 (2025-10-30) — Leju launches the Kuavo 5, a modular humanoid: interchangeable arms and hands, a wheeled Kuavo 5-W variant, a 20 kg payload and over 8 hours of battery life. The launch follows a funding round of about $200M.
Generalist AI GEN-0 (2025-11-04) — Generalist AI unveils GEN-0, a family of embodied foundation models pretrained on over 270,000 hours of real-world manipulation, and claims the first clear scaling laws in robotics.
Xpeng IRON (next generation) (2025-11-05) — At its 2025 AI Day, Xpeng unveils the next-generation IRON: humanoid spine, bionic muscles, soft skin, 22-DoF hands, three Turing chips and an all-solid-state battery. Target: mass production by late 2026.
Unitree G1-D (2025-11-13) — Unitree introduces the G1-D, its first wheeled humanoid, built to collect data and train AI models. It ships with a full software stack, from data acquisition to deployment.
UBTech Walker S2: mass production (2025-11-17) — UBTech starts mass production and delivery of its Walker S2 industrial humanoid: a first batch of several hundred units, a target of 500 deliveries in 2025 and more than ¥800M in Walker orders since early 2025.
Physical Intelligence π*0.6 and Recap (2025-11-18) — Physical Intelligence unveils π*0.6 and the Recap method, letting a VLA improve through reinforcement learning from its own deployments and human operator corrections.
Agile Robots Agile ONE (2025-11-19) — Germany's Agile Robots launches Agile ONE, its first industrial humanoid, with five-fingered hands featuring force and tactile sensing, and plans production in Bavaria from early 2026.
Sunday Robotics Memo (2025-11-20) — US start-up Sunday emerges from stealth with Memo, a two-armed home robot on a wheeled base that clears tables, loads dishwashers and folds socks, with a beta planned for late 2026.
Dyna Robotics DYNA-1 Pre-Training (2025-11-20) — Dyna Robotics announces a new DYNA-1 base model that folds laundry and sorts packages zero-shot in unseen environments, and reaches near 100% success after one hour of demonstrations.
Humanoid HMND 01 Alpha (bipedal) (2025-12-02) — Humanoid unveils the bipedal version of HMND 01 Alpha (1.79 m, 90 kg, 29 degrees of freedom), which reportedly achieved stable walking after only 48 hours of training.
EngineAI T800 (2025-12-02) — EngineAI unveils the T800, a 1.73 m bipedal humanoid with 450 N·m joints, then opens pre-orders from $25,000 (¥180,000). Deliveries are promised by June 2, 2026 at the latest.
Kawasaki Kaleido 9 (2025-12-03) — Kawasaki shows the ninth generation of its Kaleido humanoid at iREX 2025 in Tokyo: 1.90 m, 99 kg, LiDAR and stereo cameras to map its surroundings, autonomous or VR teleoperated control.
Medtronic Hugo RAS (2025-12-03) — The FDA clears Medtronic's Hugo surgical robot for urologic procedures. Already used in more than 30 countries, Hugo becomes the first serious challenger to da Vinci in the US market.
FANUC: open platform for physical AI (ROS 2, NVIDIA) (2025-12-03) — At iREX 2025, FANUC opens up its robots: an open-source ROS 2 driver, standard Python execution and a collaboration with NVIDIA (Jetson, Isaac Sim) to ease physical AI across its range.
Ghost Robotics: manipulator arm for Vision 60 (2025-12-11) — Ghost Robotics launches a six-axis manipulator arm for its Vision 60 quadruped, used by the US military: 3.75 kg payload at 50 cm, 1 m reach, IP67 sealed and field-installable.
Serve Robotics passes 2,000 robots (2025-12-12) — Serve Robotics says it has deployed more than 2,000 sidewalk delivery robots in the US, a twentyfold fleet increase in one year, driven by partnerships with Uber Eats and DoorDash.
iRobot files for Chapter 11 and is taken over by Picea (2025-12-14) — The maker of the Roomba files a prepackaged Chapter 11 and hands 100% of its equity to its Chinese contract manufacturer Picea. Shareholders are wiped out; iRobot emerges on January 23, 2026.
NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.6 (2025-12-15) — NVIDIA Research publishes the GR00T N1.6 report, an open ~3-billion-parameter humanoid VLA built on a 2B Cosmos VLM and a diffusion transformer twice as deep as N1.5's.
AgiBot Q1 (2025-12-31) — AgiBot introduces the Q1, an 80 cm humanoid that fits in a backpack: egg-sized quasi-direct-drive actuators, full-body force control and open SDK/HDK, for researchers, creators and enthusiasts.
LG CLOiD (2026-01-04) — LG announces CLOiD, a two-armed home robot on a wheeled base, demonstrated at CES 2026. Linked to the ThinQ ecosystem, it embodies the "Zero Labor Home" vision of a house where machines take care of chores.
Ecovacs LilMilo (2026-01-05) — At CES 2026, Ecovacs unveils LilMilo, a companion robot puppy with emotional AI that recognizes faces, gestures and voices and reacts to touch. It went on sale in May 2026 at $599.
Boston Dynamics Atlas (product version, CES 2026) (2026-01-05) — At CES 2026, Boston Dynamics unveils the product version of Atlas: 56 degrees of freedom, 50 kg payload, autonomous battery swapping. Production starts and all of 2026 is already booked by Hyundai and Google DeepMind.
NVIDIA at CES 2026: Cosmos Reason 2, Jetson T4000 and Isaac Lab-Arena (2026-01-05) — At CES 2026, NVIDIA releases Cosmos Reason 2, launches the Jetson T4000 module, opens Isaac Lab-Arena for policy evaluation and integrates its GR00T models into Hugging Face's LeRobot library.
Neura Robotics 4NE1 Mini (2026-01-06) — At CES 2026, Neura Robotics unveils 4NE1 Mini, a smaller version of its humanoid for education and research with the same cognitive capabilities, with deliveries announced for spring 2026.
Roborock Saros Rover (2026-01-06) — At CES 2026, Roborock unveils the Saros Rover, the first robot vacuum with a wheel-leg architecture: it climbs stairs, including curved or carpeted ones, and cleans each step. No release date has been announced.
Mobileye acquires Mentee Robotics for $900 million (2026-01-06) — At CES 2026, Mobileye announces the acquisition of Mentee Robotics, the humanoid maker co-founded by its own founder Amnon Shashua, for about $900 million in cash and stock.
Sharpa North (2026-01-06) — Singapore start-up Sharpa shows North, its first autonomous humanoid, at CES 2026. Wheeled and fitted with its SharpaWave hands, it plays ping-pong and assembles a paper windmill on its own.
Skild AI raises $1.4 billion (2026-01-14) — Skild AI raises a $1.4 billion Series C led by SoftBank with NVentures (NVIDIA), Macquarie Capital and Jeff Bezos, at a valuation above $14 billion.
Galbot S1 (2026-01-18) — Galbot launches the S1, a wheeled humanoid robot for heavy handling: up to 50 kg carried with both arms, running fully autonomously. It already works on CATL production lines.
Figure Helix 02 (2026-01-27) — Figure unveils Helix 02, extending its VLA to the whole body: a new 10-million-parameter "System 0", trained on 1,000+ hours of human motion, handles balance at 1 kHz.
Fauna Robotics Sprout (2026-01-28) — New York start-up Fauna Robotics unveils Sprout, a small 1.07 m, 22.7 kg humanoid designed as a safe, expressive development platform; Amazon acquires the company two months later.
Unitree UnifoLM-VLA-0 (2026-01-29) — Unitree releases the code and weights of UnifoLM-VLA-0, a humanoid manipulation VLA that completes 12 categories of complex tasks with a single policy, per the company.
Addverb Elixis-W (2026-02-05) — Indian automation firm Addverb unveils Elixis-W, its first wheeled humanoid, at LogiMAT India 2026 in Mumbai. Designed in India for factories and warehouses, local press presents it as India's first wheeled humanoid.
X-Humanoid Tien Kung 3.0 (2026-02-10) — The Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics (X-Humanoid) launches Tien Kung 3.0, an open humanoid platform presented as the first to combine dynamic whole-body motion with tactile interaction. Volume deliveries targeted for H2 2026.
CCTV Spring Festival Gala 2026: humanoids take center stage (2026-02-16) — A year after the Unitree H1s of the 2025 gala, robots from four Chinese companies (Unitree, Noetix, MagicLab, Galbot) take over China's most-watched TV night: martial arts, acrobatics and sketches.
Unitree As2 (2026-02-24) — Unitree introduces the As2, a quadruped of about 20 kg that exceeds 5 m/s, supports up to 65 kg standing and walks for more than 4 hours unloaded, in four versions from AIR to EDU.
Honor: first humanoid (MWC 2026) (2026-03-01) — At MWC 2026 in Barcelona, smartphone maker Honor unveils its first humanoid robot, which dances and attempts a backflip on stage. Honor targets consumer robots for shopping help, inspection and above all companionship.
NVIDIA at GTC 2026: Cosmos 3, GR00T N1.7 and N2, Isaac Lab 3.0, Newton 1.0 (2026-03-16) — At GTC 2026, NVIDIA announces Cosmos 3, makes GR00T N1.7 available in early access with commercial licensing, previews GR00T N2, a world-action model, and launches Isaac Lab 3.0 on Newton 1.0.
Amazon acquires RIVR (formerly Swiss-Mile) (2026-03-19) — Amazon acquires RIVR, a Zurich startup spun out of ETH that builds wheeled-legged quadruped robots for doorstep delivery. Terms were not disclosed.
Generalist AI GEN-1 (2026-04-02) — Generalist AI unveils GEN-1, raising average success to 99% on tasks where previous models reached 64%, about 3x faster than the state of the art, with one hour of robot data per task.
Toyota CUE7 (2026-04-12) — Toyota presents CUE7, the seventh generation of its basketball robot, at Toyota Arena Tokyo. Slimmed down from 120 to 74 kg, it adopts an inverted-pendulum two-wheel structure and combines reinforcement learning with model predictive control.
Boston Dynamics Spot with Gemini Robotics (2026-04-14) — Boston Dynamics plugs Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 model into AIVI-Learning, Spot's visual inspection: reading gauges, displays and levels, 5S audits and leak detection.
Physical Intelligence π0.7 (2026-04-16) — Physical Intelligence publishes its work on π0.7, a model that, per the company, gets robots to perform tasks they were never taught, coached step by step in plain language, with "early signs" of generalization.
AgiBot A3 (2026-04-17) — AgiBot launches the A3, a 173 cm, 55 kg humanoid built for entertainment, reception and education: 10 hours of runtime, a battery swapped in 10 seconds and positioning for 100-robot choreographies.
2nd Beijing humanoid robot half-marathon: Honor Lightning beats the human record (2026-04-19) — At Beijing's 2nd humanoid robot half-marathon, Honor's robot Lightning covers the 21.1 km in 50 min 26 s under autonomous navigation, below the human world record of 57 min 20 s. A year earlier, the winner took 2 h 40.
FANUC CRX-3iA (2026-04-20) — FANUC America launches the CRX-3iA, an ultra-light 11 kg cobot that one person can carry, with 3 kg payload and 692 mm reach, and adds new capabilities across the CRX range.
ABB PoWa (2026-04-22) — ABB Robotics launches its fast PoWa cobot family worldwide: payloads from 7 to 30 kg, up to 5.8 m/s, OmniCore controller and setup in under an hour. The range first launched in China in July 2025.
KyoHA SEIMEI (2026-04-28) — Japanese consortium KyoHA unveils SEIMEI in Kyoto, a 140 cm, 49 kg rescue humanoid prototype built from Japanese components. Damaged just before the presentation, it fails to walk on the day; a production model is targeted for March 2029.
MagicLab MagicBot X1 (2026-04-28) — In Silicon Valley, MagicLab unveils its flagship humanoid MagicBot X1 (180 cm, 70 kg, 31 degrees of freedom), the MagicHand H01 and the Magic-Mix world model. The company targets $14 billion in revenue by 2036.
1X opens the NEO factory in Hayward (2026-04-30) — 1X starts NEO production at its Hayward (California) factory, sized for 10,000 robots a year, aiming to exceed 100,000 units a year by the end of 2027.
Figure 04: design locked (2026-05-13) — Brett Adcock announces that the Figure 04 design is locked and that component deliveries are starting, calling it the biggest leap between two Figure generations. No specifications are published.
DEEP Robotics Lynx M20S (2026-05-18) — DEEP Robotics launches the Lynx M20S, an upgrade of the M20: 35 kg continuous payload on flat ground (233% of the previous generation), IP67 protection and operation from -30 to 55 °C.
Genesis AI Genesis World 1.0 (2026-05-27) — The Genesis simulator, launched in late 2024 as an academic project, reaches version 1.0 as Genesis World, backed by the company Genesis AI, with full non-convex collision detection.
Unitree H2 Plus (2026-06-01) — Unitree announces the H2 Plus, the first reference humanoid for the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T platform: an H2 fitted with Sharpa hands and a Jetson Thor computer, for 75 degrees of freedom in total. Availability planned for late 2026.
Dreame Cyber X (2026-06-01) — Dreame introduces the Cyber X, a tracked carrier that moves its X60 robot vacuums between floors and sweeps the steps along the way. It is announced for Europe in September 2026 at €1,199.
Amazon Proteus (next generation) (2026-06-04) — Amazon unveils the next-generation Proteus, its autonomous mobile robot that takes natural-language instructions and moves carts of up to 400 kg, as part of a plan worth more than €10 billion in Europe.
Neura Robotics announces a Series C of up to $1.4 billion (2026-06-10) — Neura Robotics announces a Series C of up to $1.4 billion, led by Tether with Qualcomm, Amazon, NVIDIA, Bosch and Schaeffler, to deploy its 4NE1 humanoids worldwide.
Agility Robotics goes public via a $2.5 billion SPAC merger (2026-06-24) — Agility Robotics announces its merger with SPAC Churchill Capital Corp XI at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value: it would become the first US listed company dedicated solely to humanoids.
Wandercraft Calvin (new generation, Renault) (2026-06-26) — Renault presents the new generation of Calvin, built with Wandercraft, able to carry 40 to 50 kg; about ten robots are planned by end-2026, then 350 in its French and Spanish plants by end-2027.
Apptronik Apollo 2 (2026-06-30) — Apptronik unveils Apollo 2, a modular humanoid offered in bipedal or wheeled versions, and opens a roughly 90,000 sq ft "Robot Park" in Austin to collect data with Google DeepMind.
UBTech UWORLD U1 (2026-06-30) — UBTech launches the UWORLD U1 range (Lite, Pro, Ultra), full-size "ultra-bionic" consumer humanoids: 88 degrees of freedom, from 119,800 yuan. The company claims 13,361 orders on launch day.
Figure 03 arrives at BMW Spartanburg (2026-06-30) — Figure deploys Figure 03 in Hall 52 of BMW's Spartanburg plant for a parts-sequencing task, more demanding than the sheet-metal loading done by Figure 02, which contributed to 30,000 cars.
1X NEO: 25-DoF hands (2026-07-09) — 1X unveils NEO's new hands: 25 tendon-driven degrees of freedom, fully force-controlled, IP68 waterproof and tested beyond 2 million cycles, with 10,000 hands to be produced in 2026.
Booster Robotics Booster T2 (2026-07-13) — Booster Robotics launches the Booster T2, its flagship humanoid platform for embodied AI development: about 1.40 m, 31 degrees of freedom and, in the Pro version, an NVIDIA Thor chip claiming 2,070 TFLOPS.
AgiBot A3 Ultra (2026-07-18) — At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, AgiBot presents the A3 Ultra, a full-size 1.74 m, 60 kg humanoid with 51 active degrees of freedom, built for long days in public venues. AgiBot claims its 15,000th robot produced.
Generative Bionics GENE.01 (2026-07-21) — Italy's Generative Bionics, an IIT spin-off, launches GENE.01, a humanoid covered in full-body tactile skin for safe collaboration with humans; first deployment planned with Fincantieri.
Unitree As2-W (2026-07-24) — Unitree introduces the As2-W, the wheeled-legged version of the As2: about 25 kg, 150 kg static load, up to about 6 m/s and 30 km range unloaded.
BYD Xiao Di (2026-08-04) — BYD enters humanoids with Xiao Di, a 1.61 m, 58.5 kg bipedal greeter robot with 31 degrees of freedom, shown in early August 2026 at its Zhengzhou experience center. Goal: two or three robots per dealership.
Dyna Robotics Dyna-2 (2026-08-15) — Dyna Robotics unveils Dyna-2, a world-action model pretrained on over one million hours of first-person human video, and claims the first human-to-robot transfer scaling law.
Skild AI S1 (2026-08-18) — Skild AI unveils S1, its flagship foundation model built from the ground up for in-context learning: it performs an unseen task, up to ten minutes long, from a single video and without post-training.
Generalist AI GEN-1.5 (2026-08-19) — Generalist AI unveils GEN-1.5, a model that learns a new physical task from a single 3-to-12-second demonstration without weight updates, or with 1 to 10 gradient steps on minutes of data.
Xiaomi "Tieda" (next-generation CyberOne) (2026-08-19) — At the World Robot Conference in Beijing, Xiaomi shows its next-generation humanoid, nicknamed "Tieda": 1.70 m, 66 kg and 66 degrees of freedom, 33 of them in the hands. It comes out of four months of training on its car factory line.
Galbot ET1 (2026-08-19) — Galbot, known for its wheeled robots, unveils its first biped at the World Robot Conference, the ET1 ("Galaxy Xingzai"): 1.23 m and 30 kg, driven by the same AstraBrain "brain" as its other robots. Pre-orders opened on September 3.
Unitree goes public on Shanghai's STAR Market (2026-08-19) — Unitree becomes the first humanoid maker listed in mainland China. Priced at 150.80 yuan, the stock gains more than 600% intraday and closes up 460%, despite Unitree's addition to the Pentagon's 1260H list in June.
2nd World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (2026-08-22) — From August 22 to 26, 2026, the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games bring together 666 teams from 16 countries and more than 2,000 robots in Beijing. Records fall, including a reported 9.39 s 100 m in the heats.
Xpeng opens the IRON production line (2026-09-08) — Xpeng commissions its humanoid production line, with more than 80% of core processes automated: a first IRON walks off it on its own. Mass production is targeted for late 2026, deliveries for 2027.
Unitree UnifoLM-ER-1 and UnifoLM-ER-Flow (2026-09-11) — Unitree releases under Apache 2.0 UnifoLM-ER-1, a 4-billion-parameter embodied reasoning model built on Qwen3-VL-4B, and UnifoLM-ER-Flow, which adds interaction-centric world modeling.
Universal Robots Gen 7 (2026-09-14) — At IMTS, Universal Robots launches Gen 7, its seventh cobot generation: three g-Series arms (UR10g-1750, UR17g-1300, UR18g-950), a more powerful CB7 controller and a platform built for physical AI.
Agility Digit 5 (2026-09-15) — Agility unveils Digit 5, a logistics humanoid built to work alongside people without barriers: 22.7 kg payload, 90 minutes of runtime for 9 minutes of charging and more than $300 million in orders.
Figure Helix 2.5 (2026-09-17) — Figure unveils Helix 2.5, pretrained on its Index human behavior dataset: the robot tidies living rooms, folds towels and makes beds in 30 unseen homes, with zero data collected on site.
IFR World Robotics 2026: over 600,000 robots installed and 5 million in service (2026-09-24) — According to the IFR World Robotics 2026 report, more than 600,000 industrial robots were installed in 2025 (+11%) and the global fleet hit a record 5 million. China accounts for 59% of installations; the US overtakes Japan.
Unitree UnifoLM-WLA-1.0 (2026-09-28) — Unitree releases UnifoLM-WLA-1.0-Base, a 6-billion-parameter humanoid foundation model trained on about 2,500 hours of real robot data, coordinating 64 tasks with one model, under Apache 2.0.
Dyna Robotics Dyna-2.1 (2026-09-29) — Dyna Robotics unveils Dyna-2.1, a "physical agent" paired with its new semi-humanoid robot Taku, autonomously running a full hotel laundry workflow for an uncut hour.