Maven Robotics, a California-based startup developing general-purpose robots for industrial work, said on Thursday it raised $100 million in Series A funding to expand its logistics and manufacturing platform. The round included RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures, among others. Maven will use the proceeds to scale deployments and advance its system as it moves beyond palletizing and tote handling into broader industrial tasks. The company cited U.S. labor shortages expected to worsen as demand grows. It says its platform combines hardware, software and AI across robot, fleet and factory levels, and connects deployment data through a Maven network designed to share learning across systems. It targets industrial applications requiring reliable performance over multiple shifts. CEO Hamza Derbas, who...
Lightwheel and Peritas AI announced they have formed a strategic partnership to bring robots into perioperative healthcare workflows by combining infrastructure and orchestration technologies to enable deployment in clinical environments. According to the companies, the collaboration will integrate Peritas AI’s orchestration platform with Lightwheel’s physical AI infrastructure, allowing robotic systems to be trained, validated and operated within real-world hospital workflows. The companies said the multi-phase initiative, valued at about $56 million, could support deployment of up to 200 humanoid robots across 2026 and 2027. The companies noted healthcare operations, particularly in perioperative settings, remain highly fragmented, spanning sterile processing, operating rooms, logistics and equipment coordination across disconnected systems. The partnership is designed to address those gaps by enabling continuous, real-time...
Chinese robotics company Unitree said it has fully open-sourced an upgraded version of its general-purpose humanoid foundation model, UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, setting new state-of-the-art results on multiple global open-source embodied model benchmarks. The model can perform both tabletop manipulation and whole-body mobile manipulation with a single model, enabling cross-task and cross-end-effector generalization, Unitree said. It achieves a “one-model-driven, whole-body coordination” effect, the company added. Unitree said UnifoLM-WLA-1.0 was trained on large-scale general-purpose multimodal perception and understanding datasets and incorporates interaction-centric world modeling, significantly strengthening spatial perception and scene understanding. It outperformed several open-source competitors in China and overseas on multiple embodied reasoning benchmarks, with some capabilities comparable to mainstream closed-source models, according to the company. In real-robot tests, a single model completed...
Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng Inc. said on Tuesday it has commissioned its humanoid robot production line, with the first Iron unit completing automated assembly and walking off the line autonomously as the company transitions from prototype development to manufacturing. The line, which the company claims is the world’s first automated production line for advanced humanoid robots, achieves over 80% automation in core processes and integrates automotive-grade quality control systems to support future mass production and capacity expansion. The Iron humanoid features 76 degrees of freedom across its body and 21 degrees of freedom in each hand, with a fully enclosed flexible lattice structure designed for both human-like appearance and safety. Powered by three in-house Turing AI chips delivering 2,250...
Samsung is accelerating development of a humanoid robot prototype with the goal of an unveiling at the CES 2027 consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. The robotics project is being led by the company’s RX (Robotics eXperience) business group, which reports directly to co-CEO Roh Tae-moon, who also heads the Device eXperience (DX) division. In a rare organisational move, both the hardware development team and the AI software team within the RX group are being overseen by a single executive – Yoon Jang-hyun, president and chief technology officer of the DX division. Industry insiders said the decision to unify leadership of the robot’s “brain” (AI software) and “body” (hardware) from the earliest development stage is aimed at compressing the development...
Maniformer, a Shanghai-based physical AI data platform, won the All-Scenario Data Collection Technology Innovation Award at the Global Product Technology Innovation Awards during the IFA 2026 consumer electronics fair here, marking the first time a Chinese physical AI data infrastructure company has received recognition at the century-old exhibition. The awards, established in 2014 by International Data Group (IDG) and the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) with annual support from IFA, recognise product technology innovation and industrial application value. Other winners this year include Samsung, Sony, LG, Siemens and Dyson. Maniformer addresses what the industry sees as a critical bottleneck: as robots accelerate from labs to factories, commercial spaces and homes, scaling embodied AI models requires massive, high-quality real-world...
ACE ROBOTICS, in collaboration with the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Multimedia Laboratory and Nanyang Technological University, has open-sourced ACE-Ego-Hand, a 3D dual-hand shape reconstruction model designed for first-person video, generating approximately 5,000 hours of training data that could serve as a foundational dataset for embodied AI model training. The model extracts structured 3D bimanual manipulation trajectories from massive egocentric video footage, translating human grasping, assembly and hand-coordination actions into machine-learnable data. It marks the first time a video generation model has been repurposed as a DreamHand encoder for end-to-end training, outputting hand pose, shape and 3D position in a single forward pass without frame-by-frame detection or temporal regression. Efficiency gains over traditional approaches Unlike previous hand models reliant on...
Tingbo He, head of semiconductor research at Huawei Technologies, published a new academic paper on Thursday addressing concerns about heat dissipation in 3D-stacked chips, marking the company’s third paper on its “τ-law” chip design philosophy in less than four months. The latest paper, titled “Huawei’s τ Chip Was Supposed to Melt?”, responds to scepticism that folding circuits into three dimensions would inevitably lead to higher power density and thermal issues. “Heat is the most troublesome hidden concern of the τ-law,” She wrote. “Inside the chip, the main energy consumption does not come from computation itself, but from data transfer.” Contrary to expectations that circuit folding would dramatically increase transistor density and power density, the paper argues that folding actually reduces...
Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, predicted on Tuesday that artificial intelligence could expand the global economy by 20% to 30%, generating up to $30 trillion in annual economic output, while forecasting that at least 1 billion humanoid robots would emerge within the next decade. “The productivity gains from AI are already evident, and robotics will take that to a completely new level,” Musk said via video link at the G20 summit in Asheville, North Carolina. “To put this in perspective, I think AI could increase the size of the global economy by 20% to 30% – that’s a rough estimate – which means roughly $20 trillion to $30 trillion per year in additional output”. Musk expressed his...
Xiaomi’s CyberOne humanoid robot drew crowds of visitors and media at its first overseas exhibition during the IFA consumer electronics fair here, with the robot responding to onlookers with waves and victory signs. The Chinese tech giant originally unveiled the full-size humanoid bionic robot, internally codenamed “Tie Da”, in August 2022. The first-generation model stands 177 cm tall, weighs 52 kg, and features 21 degrees of freedom with 0.5-millisecond real-time response, powered by Xiaomi’s self-developed bionic perception, biomechatronic fusion and artificial intelligence technologies. This year, Xiaomi introduced a new-generation humanoid robot, also named “Tie Da”, which made its first public appearance at the World Robot Conference 2026 in Beijing. The new version stands approximately 170 cm tall, weighs 66 kg,...
