A hand-written CUDA inference runtime for Vision-Language-Action robots that decides what to remember, what to forget, and when it's simply too late to think.
Japanese technology giant NEC’s corporate venture capital fund has invested in US-based robotics startup Dexmate, developer of the VEGA humanoid robot and an integrated physical AI development platform. The investment was made through the NEC Orchestrating Future Fund (NOFF), with NEC and Dexmate planning to explore opportunities to deploy physical AI technologies across a range […]
The flashy company, which recently completed a blockbuster IPO, appears to be leading the pack of humanoid robot makers.
Increasingly, companies are building humanoid robots that perform impressive athletic feats to mark the field’s progress. Now, Chinese robotics company Unitree says its new “Superman” robot can run 12.66 meters per second, faster than Usain Bolt’s top recorded speed.
Getting a humanoid robot to run at all requires split-second control and has been a significant engineering challenge occupying roboticists for decades. That’s why sprinting, as well as jumping, have become popular targets for robotics companies keen to demonstrate their technology’s prowess.
Unitree’s latest demonstration pushes the boundaries by not only outrunning the fastest human ever, but also jumping around 6 feet 7 inches into the air from a standing start, a full foot more than the human record.
“This new machine has only been in development for a little over three months, with significant room for further improvement in the coming months,” Unitree said in an X post that accompanied a video of the accomplishments.
The records have not been externally verified, and the sprinting speed was a peak reading taken over a shorter stretch rather than a full 100 meters like Bolt’s record. The robot’s legs are also only 2 feet 9 inches long, according to Unitree, which results in an ungainly, arm-waving gait while running.
The effort is nonetheless impressive and adds to Unitree’s growing reputation as the company leading the pack of humanoid robot developers. And the timing of the announcement was no accident, coming just days before Unitree’s stock market debut and shortly before the World Humanoid Robot Games, which opened on August 22.
The company’s Shanghai IPO was a blockbuster, recording an initial 629 percent gain on the company’s first day of trading. It was briefly valued at around $66 billion before closing at a more modest $51 billion. However, some analysts have cautioned the excitement around the company’s technology may be getting ahead of market realities.
“The IPO is expensive, and the investment risk is already quite high,” Wang Zhuo, partner of Shanghai Zhuozhu Investment Management, told Reuters. “Unitree generates much of its sales from research and demonstrations, but wider application is still far away.”
But the company holds a dominant grip on the emerging humanoid market that may justify some of the hype. Chinese firms control roughly 90 percent of the global humanoid robot market, with Unitree alone shipping 5,500 of the 13,000 to 18,000 humanoids sold worldwide in 2025, the most of any manufacturer. In contrast, US humanoid champions Figure AI, Agility Robotics, and Tesla each shipped around 150 units.
China’s success is down to “a combination of policy support, public investment, mature supply chain, and advancements made in AI software and hardware,” Lian Jye Su, a tech analyst at consultancy firm Omdia, told Rest of World.
This is leading to an increasingly combative response from the US. On July 29 the Federal Communications Commission banned new imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots. The move was framed as a matter of national security, though it has also been seen as an attempt to give domestic developers a leg up.
Beijing predictably objected, with foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning telling a press conference that “protectionism does not make the US more competitive, and it will only hurt the interests of US companies and consumers.”
Given the rapid progress made by companies like Unitree, it seems likely it’s going to take more than trade barriers for the US to catch up. In the meantime, we might see more human athletic records fall to China’s leading humanoid developers.
Solar panel cleaning robots are often judged by how much dust they can remove in one pass. That matters, but it is not the whole engineering question. The brush roller is the component that repeatedly meets the module surface, so its design has to balance cleaning action with controlled contact, serviceability, and the cleaning limits […]
Most LLM inference runtimes have no idea a physical deadline exists. This one refuses admission rather than miss a 33ms robot control cycle, evicts KV cache by meaning instead of age, and is written entirely in hand-written CUDA — no cuBLAS, no libtorch.
Neura Robotics is expanding its physical AI ecosystem into another key application area. Neura Mobile Robots is acquiring 100 percent of the shares in Adlatus Robotics, an established provider of autonomous cleaning robotics. Following the recent addition of Bosch Rexroth’s Active Shuttle to its portfolio, this marks another step in Neura’s strategy: bringing together different […]
By Amber Atherton, early stage investor, partner at Patron For decades, science fiction has imagined the future of robotics as a single humanoid capable of doing everything around the home. Silicon Valley has largely adopted the same vision. Every few months brings another humanoid demo, followed by predictions that one general-purpose machine will absorb countless […]
Raise Robotics has unveiled plans to develop shipbuilding robots specialized in coating applications. The systems are designed to coat large surfaces autonomously without crawling on them, and to operate with the certifications required for explosive atmospheres, including engineering toward ATEX Zone 2 requirements used in paint halls and other hazardous coating environments. The ‘bottleneck is […]
The global nanorobotics market is forecast to reach $31.44 billion by 2034, driven by growing applications in targeted drug delivery, precision medicine and regenerative medicine, according to new research from Polaris Market Research. The research firm estimates the market at approximately $9 billion in 2025 and expects it to expand at a compound annual growth […]
Logic Robotics, a developer of autonomous, data-driven logistics solutions, has unveiled what is described “a breakthrough” in multimodal logistics automation with the introduction of its intelligent transloading solution, powered by the Logic Digital Twin Operating System. Designed for rail-to-road operations, the system integrates the Logic Pallet’s autonomous mobility with real-time digital twin visualization to eliminate […]
Robots need policies that can adapt to their sensors, environments, and tasks while running on onboard computing hardware. World models offer a foundation for...
Robots need policies that can adapt to their sensors, environments, and tasks while running on onboard computing hardware. World models offer a foundation for learning physical interactions, but their size can make on-device deployment difficult. This changes with the new NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Edge. Cosmos 3 Edge is a 4B omni-model (with a 2B NVIDIA Nemotron-based reasoner) in the Cosmos 3 family.
X Square Robot is showcasing its full portfolio of embodied AI technologies at the World Robot Conference 2026 in Beijing, presenting applications ranging from logistics automation and dexterous manipulation to household robotics and AI training-data collection. The Shenzhen-based company is exhibiting at booth C107 during WRC, which runs from August 19 to 23, bringing together […]
Faraday Future Intelligent Electric, a California-based global embodied AI ecosystem company, has announced its support for an orderly exit by AIxC Holdings, of which FF is the majority and controlling shareholder, from its digital asset treasury strategy. AIxC intends to focus on physical AI and robot sharing and rental, operations, and commercialization. The two companies […]
Hexagon Robotics and Schaeffler, a motion technology company, has announced the next milestone in their strategic collaboration as AEON enters Schaeffler’s Humanoid Gym in Germany, marking the next step towards the planned deployment of at least 1,000 AEON humanoids in the coming years. The Humanoid Gym provides a Train-Validate-Deploy model in a dedicated industrial environment. Schaeffler […]
Scientists have developed a hybrid robotic skin that combines electrical impedance tomography with pneumatic pressure sensing in an effort to improve force detection across large areas of a humanoid robot, as highlighted by RoboSkin. Described in a preprint published in May 2026, the system uses electrical impedance tomography (EIT) to determine where contact occurs, while four […]
Saminda Wattuhewa, senior lecturer and course leader in cyber security, University of Portsmouth A construction site is one of the worst places to rely on GPS. Concrete floors stack overhead, steel frames scatter the signal, and basements block it outright. Yet this is exactly the environment where autonomous robots are increasingly expected to work precisely […]
The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) and the Mahoning County Career & Technical Center (MCCTC) will offer no-cost robotics and automation training across Ohio through a $499,000 workforce grant that will help the state’s residents build skills for increasingly technology-driven careers. Awarded through Ohio’s Individual Microcredential Assistance Program (IMAP), the grant will support approximately 3,000 […]
Rodriguez has introduced a collaborative linear transfer system that can move a cobot between multiple workstations and extend its operating range to as much as 10 metres. The company is offering Thomson’s Movotrak Cobot Transfer Unit (CTU), which it describes as “a movable seventh axis” designed to allow a single cobot to perform tasks at […]
Brightpick, a provider of AI-powered warehouse automation, is significantly expanding its partnership with Dr. Max Group, Europe’s largest pharmacy chain. Following successful operations and progressive scaling at Dr. Max’s Prague distribution center, Brightpick will deploy an additional 44 Autopicker autonomous mobile robots across other facilities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The total number of […]