A research team at the University of Hong Kong’s MMLab has proposed a simple and efficient self-evolving embodied AI baseline, PhysicalRSI 1.0, which ranked first on the RoboDojo benchmark with a 31.38% average task success rate at roughly 1% of the token cost of GPT-6 Astra, the team said. PhysicalRSI 1.0, short for Physical Recursive Self-Improvement, achieved a 36.27 score and 31.38% success rate under a unified five-category evaluation, compared with GPT-6 Astra’s 28.86 score and 22.21% success rate. The result represents a 39.6% relative improvement in success rate over Astra at a fraction of the cost. Astra reportedly consumes about 200,000 yuan in tokens for a full RoboDojo test run. The system uses a “System 1–2 Co-Evolution” framework in...
RoboColiseum, an embodied AI evaluation platform co-founded by Maniformer, Hugging Face, NVIDIA and Tsinghua University, said Claude Opus 5.5 ranked first among four flagship general-purpose models in its latest round of testing, with GPT-6 Astra second. GPT-6 Astra led in instruction following and overall disturbance adaptation, scoring 99.35 on instruction following, according to the results released on Oct. 20. Opus performed better in spatial reasoning and general manipulation, and took the top spot among flagship models with the lowest total token consumption across all evaluation rounds. GPT-6.1 Sol lagged the other three models in image-quality perturbation tests, the platform said. Despite Opus’s lead among general models, the top two positions in the overall ranking were still held by embodied policy...
Chinese humanoid robot startup LimX Dynamics is exploring U.S. business collaborations and holding talks with international investors as it pushes to expand globally. The Shenzhen-based company recently showcased its humanoid robot at CES in Las Vegas. LimX plans to enter overseas markets through local partners and investors, with the Middle East first on its roadmap. The startup aims to start shipping humanoids to the region this year and has secured its first foreign backer there, Zhang said. He declined to disclose details of the investors or the size of an ongoing funding round, which the company said would multiply its valuation from its Series A round. LimX has raised $69.31 million as of July 2025, according to PitchBook, with backers...
Unitree Robotics founder Wang Xingxing said physical AI could see major breakthroughs within one to three years, as the Chinese robot maker held its first partner ecosystem conference to mark its 10th anniversary. Speaking at the 2026 World Physical AI Conference in Hangzhou under the theme “Believe, Believe in AI as Much as Possible,” Wang said almost everyone worldwide, including himself, still underestimates AI. He noted he had recommended AI-related stocks to colleagues four or five years ago, saying some employees’ personal wealth could have grown tenfold or more had they believed in AI more strongly. Wang said the lag between technological breakthrough and mass adoption typically runs five to 10 years, citing the near-decade from the internet bubble around...
AGIBOT open-sourced the fourth installment of its AGIBOT WORLD 2026 dataset series, “Physical Reasoning,” describing it as the first real-world Physical Agent dataset designed to train robots not only to execute actions but also to decide what to do under changing conditions. The company said the dataset marks a shift in task design from manipulation difficulty to decision difficulty, linking goal understanding, process memory and action execution in real-world tasks. It covers nine categories of logical reasoning scenarios and, for the same task, deliberately captures multiple real-world states and execution branches. It provides both high-level question-answer annotations and low-level action trajectories, supporting coordinated training from task decision-making to real-machine execution. The release is the first installment of AGIBOT’s AI WAVE...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s third-quarter 2026 conference call that Optimus still needs further work on artificial intelligence, electromechanical systems, safety and durability, and that external deliveries are only “possible” by the end of next year, not a firm commitment. The update offered no breakthrough for investors and robotics enthusiasts who had hoped for a concrete commercial timeline. The Fremont factory has begun “early production” on a high-volume Optimus line, Musk said, and most of the equipment for a 1-million-unit annual capacity line is already installed. But reaching an annualized rate of 20,000 units a week, roughly 1 million a year, will take “probably at least a year, maybe a little longer,” he said, citing continuing design...
Hangzhou-based embodied AI startup Panhu Intelligent said it has completed an angel round of tens of millions of yuan, co-invested by Puhua Capital and Hengze Capital. Proceeds will mainly fund research and development of core technology products including its TigerMind multi-dimensional sensory cognitive world model, edge intelligence and industry-grade embodied intelligence systems, and will further advance joint validation with industry partners in real-world scenarios. Founded in 2026, Panhu Intelligent focuses on research and development of physical intelligence and embodied intelligence technologies. With TigerMind as its core, the company is building a technology system around Physical Interaction Intelligence (PII). TigerMind is being developed for environmental state understanding, action outcome prediction and task action decision-making. The company is focusing on multi-dimensional fused...
Tesla said on Wednesday it has begun producing Optimus humanoid robots at its Fremont, California, factory, a site previously dedicated to electric vehicle manufacturing. “The robots coming off this line are the first mass-production-grade robots we have built,” Tesla wrote in its third-quarter shareholder letter. “While we will continue to improve the hardware and manufacturing process, we have proven that Optimus’ current manufacturing process is suitable for a commercial product.” CEO Elon Musk said on a conference call that he views the output as “early production” and that the ramp will be slow and “somewhat bumpy, because it is an extremely aggressive new product.” He said Tesla aims to produce 20,000 Optimus robots per week by the end of 2027....
Robotics startup Eka Robotics said it has raised $150 million in a Series A round at a post-money valuation of $1.45 billion, co-led by a16z and F-Prime Capital. The company, founded in 2025 by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, focuses on developing Vision-Force-Action (VFA) models and dexterous robotic grippers. Eka said its VFA model is a robot foundation model that, unlike vision-language-action (VLA) models, places greater emphasis on force feedback when robots contact objects. It combines visual perception, force sensing and motion control so robots can adjust actions in real time based on contact conditions. For training, Eka uses a combination of physics simulation and large-scale reinforcement learning. Simulators model the different forces a...
Unitree Technology has unveiled the H2-X, a humanoid robot the Chinese company is presenting as capable of martial-arts-style movement and emergency response, according to a company video. The footage shows the robot, which Unitree says can run for up to about eight hours, carrying out high-impact maneuvers: denting a car door and front hood, vaulting onto a vehicle roof, landing from a 4-meter platform with a forward roll and recovering after repeated airborne kicks. In staged rescue and protection scenes, the H2-X lifts the front of a car to free a trapped mannequin, dives to push another mannequin away from an oncoming vehicle and intervenes against an attacker threatening a person. Unitree said the combination of long endurance and burst-power...
