News.

UBTECH and Nero Group advance a nearly $440M robot production project in Almaty

Kazakhstan's Nero Group and China's UBTECH said at the Kazakhstan-China Investment Forum in Almaty that a project to localize robot production, research and programming has begun in a special economic zone, with an initial investment of nearly $440 million. Educational robot production is due to start in October, targeting about 30 Almaty schools by year-end. Kazakh press reports say humanoid and service-robot production follows from the second quarter of 2027 at up to 1,000 units a year; the Astana Times piece gives no capacity figure. It would be UBTECH's first robot plant outside China.

FDA issues draft premarket guidance for robotically assisted surgical devices

The FDA published draft guidance on the nonclinical testing, clinical evidence and labeling it expects in premarket submissions for robotically assisted surgical devices, meaning software-controlled systems that help a surgeon position and control several instruments. It covers human-factors testing, emergency procedures, software interoperability and cybersecurity. Comments are due November 24, 2026 under docket FDA-2026-N-9505. The guidance is nonbinding and not yet final.

Agility Robotics says it is exploring wheeled robots alongside Digit

Agility Robotics CEO Jonathan Hurst told The Robot Report the company is exploring a range of designs, including wheels, for different operating environments and customers. A wheeled humanoid appeared in the launch video for Digit 5. Hurst gave no timeline and called it too early to say whether a wheeled product will ship. Agility agreed in June to go public through a SPAC merger.

IFR: 5 million industrial robots now in operation; China installed 59% of 2025 units and the US passed Japan

The IFR's World Robotics 2026 report puts the global operating stock of industrial robots at a record 5 million, after 2025 installations rose 11% to more than 600,000. China installed 354,200 units (up 20%, 59% of the world total). The US installed 38,400 (up 12%) and became the second-largest market as Japan fell 19% to about 36,200. Chinese suppliers held 55% of their home market, down from 57% in 2024. The IFR forecasts 655,000 installations in 2026. It also counted nearly 7,000 full-size humanoids sold in 2025 from 174 makers, more than half of them Chinese.

Amazon plans a $100M+ Indiana plant for its robotics and fulfillment equipment

Amazon will invest more than $100 million in a 585,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Greenwood, Indiana, due to launch by 2028 with 300 jobs averaging nearly $100,000 a year. The plant combines fabrication, robotic welding, automated powder coating and assembly to make products for Amazon's fulfillment and robotics network across North America. Amazon says it has built more than 1 million robots in the US, deployed across more than 300 facilities, and that Greenwood follows an August announcement of a robotics manufacturing investment in Texas.

Feather Robotics launches a $29,990 modular humanoid platform for developers

Feather Robotics, founded in 2025 by Hoa Mai and Parsa Bakhtiari, is selling a modular wheeled humanoid platform for developers at $29,990, roughly half the price of Unitree's H2 Edu. It is backed by a $7.6 million pre-seed led by Gradient Ventures and says revenue has passed $1 million, with robots working as restaurant cooks and lab cleaners. Mai previously sold a humanoid startup to 1X; Bakhtiari is a former Tesla engineer. Feather sells the body and runs third-party models rather than building its own. The revenue figure is company-reported.

AgiBot delivers its 20,000th robot as Chimelong opens a 300-robot theme-park deployment

AgiBot and Chimelong Group launched the first phase of an embodied-AI deployment at Chimelong Spaceship Park in Zhuhai with more than 300 robots across seven scenarios, including performances, guided tours, retail stations and hotel services. The launch coincided with AgiBot's 20,000th robot coming off its production line, double the 10,000th it marked on March 30. The customer is an entertainment operator, so the deployment is closer to attractions than to factory or warehouse work.

Qualcomm to acquire PickNik, the company behind the MoveIt motion-planning framework

Qualcomm Technologies agreed to acquire PickNik, which maintains the open-source MoveIt manipulation framework and sells the commercial MoveIt Pro platform. Qualcomm plans to integrate MoveIt with its Dragonwing robotics platform and says MoveIt 1 and 2 stay open source and keep supporting third-party hardware. Terms and a closing date were not disclosed. MoveIt is widely used in ROS-based arms, so the deal ties a chip vendor to a common piece of robot software.

Skild AI shows S1 learning soccer through 140 simulated years of self-play

Skild AI published a preview of post-training its S1 robot foundation model by self-play: the policy played soccer against recent copies of itself in NVIDIA Isaac Sim for about 140 simulated years, then transferred to a real humanoid that played against people. Skild says dribbling, shielding and tackling emerged without hand-written rewards, and argues self-play is a route past the human-level ceiling of models pre-trained on human data. The post gives no success rates, robot model or match results, so the real-world claim rests on a video.

KAIST quadruped RAIBO2 runs a full marathon on one battery charge, Nature reports

A KAIST team published in Nature on 23 September a quadruped robot, RAIBO2, that finished the 42.195 km Sangju Marathon in 4 hours 19 minutes 52 seconds on a single charge of its 2,016 Wh battery. Its cost of transport was 0.25, against a human benchmark of 0.37, and the authors estimate it could have gone about 25 km further. The gains came from lightweight legs, a low-loss electrical design and a reinforcement-learning gait trained in simulation.

PitPro puts its first commercial tire-changing robot into a Calgary Kal Tire shop

San Francisco startup PitPro Automation installed its first commercial tire-changing system at a Kal Tire location in Calgary, Alberta. The system uses two oven-sized robots that fit an existing service bay and changes a full set of four tires in under 15 minutes. CEO Jeremy Conrad cited a labor shortage in tire shops and the seasonal winter-tire swap as the near-term market. PitPro did not disclose funding in the announcement.

Isaac ROS 5.0 brings AI agents to robotics development, says NVIDIA

Isaac ROS 5.0 adds agent-assisted workflows and support for robotics development. The open-source ROS 2 stack offers tooling; deployment claims need independent field evidence.

Intrinsic open sources key parts of its platform for easier development

Intrinsic says it is releasing key infrastructure from its industrial robotics platform as Intrinsic Core. Check the published license and repository before treating the full platform as open source.

Cognex to acquire Intel spinout RealSense for about $500M

Cognex agreed to buy RealSense, the depth-camera maker Intel spun out in 2025, for about $500 million in cash, with closing expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. RealSense expects $80 million to $90 million of revenue in 2026, up more than 50%. Cognex sizes robotic perception at about $600 million a year today and $1.6 billion by 2030. It will also fund a three-year, $56.5 million retention program for RealSense employees. The deal puts a sensor supplier used across AMRs, quadrupeds and humanoids under an established US machine-vision company.

Vesoma exits stealth in Munich with a 60-person team and a humanoid that learns from its own experience

Vesoma, founded in December 2025 by Synapticon co-founder Nikolai Ensslen and Easybrain co-founder Peter Skoromnyi, came out of stealth with more than 60 staff across Munich and Limassol, Cyprus. Martin Riedmiller, formerly a research director at Google DeepMind, is chief AI officer. The company builds its own humanoid body and trains it with reinforcement learning from its own experience rather than human demonstrations; its first prototypes walk on a self-learned policy. It targets warehouse, factory and care work and rules out weapons, military and surveillance uses. No funding was disclosed.

XPeng opens a dedicated IRON humanoid line and holds a supplier conference

XPeng opened a dedicated production line for its IRON humanoid in Guangzhou on September 8, with more than 80% of core processes automated, and held a supplier conference on September 22 at which it signed supplier designation agreements. XPeng targets mass production by the end of 2026, with first deployments in its own stores and campuses. The carmaker's humanoid unit, Dogotix, raised $900 million in August.

Apptronik CEO says the US lacks a gear supply base and actuators can reach 60% of a humanoid BOM

Speaking on Fox Business on September 22, Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas said the US has major shortages in items such as gears and that actuators can account for up to 60% of a robot's bill of materials. He said Apptronik has developed more than 80 electric actuators, and that the US leads in AI while China has the stronger industrial-robot manufacturing base. This is one company's view, relayed by a trade outlet.

South Korea outlines a 2027 robot AI program starting with postal and logistics trials

At Humanoids Summit Seoul, an official from South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT described a program starting in 2027 that combines robot foundation and world models, a physical-data library and field trials in postal and logistics work. The budget is not final and should not be read as the earlier KRW 2.3 trillion plan that runs through 2030.

Show HN: InstinctFlash – High-Performance Serving Runtime for Robotics Models

Hey HN, Guanming here, cofounder of General Instinct. We just released InstinctFlash, a high-performance serving framework for robotics models. It’s licensed under AGPL-3.0.On Jetson Thor, we see spee

Graphlin – Jev-Enabled Live Architecture Visualizer