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Rohit Prasad, a veteran Amazon AI executive instrumental in developing Alexa, has been appointed as the new CEO of Boston Dynamics. His leadership comes as the robotics company prepares to scale up the production of humanoid robots.
Mecka AI has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia, with investors including Nvidia and Microsoft’s M12. The company, founded in 2024, collects human motion data through sensors and smartphones to train robots, aiming to replicate the success of data-labeling firms for AI models. This funding highlights growing investor interest in data-driven approaches to robotics development.
Noitom Robotics has published HiPHI, a whole-body human motion dataset totaling 617.5 hours captured with optical motion capture accurate to sub-millimeter precision. Of that, 245.7 hours cover human-object interaction with synchronized object trajectories and meshes, and the data is organized using FrameNet, a linguistic framework for categorizing human actions. A white paper from IEEE Spectrum and Wiley describes the dataset and shows reinforcement learning policies trained on it transferring from simulation to a physical humanoid robot.
Safeworld, founded by Carnegie Mellon's Dr. Ding Zhao, Kyle Wong, and Simo Rachidi, has emerged from stealth with a seed round exceeding $12 million led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun. The company evaluates robotic control systems using simulations populated with realistic human models, aiming to assess risk in generative AI-driven robots before deployment.
REK staged cage matches where YouTuber Frankie LaPenna fought three humanoid robots, taking hard kicks and punches that knocked him down repeatedly. The California State Athletic Commission issued a cease-and-desist letter on September 30, citing state laws requiring licensing for any combat exhibition involving a human. REK CEO Cix Liv publicly shared the letter on X rather than expressing concern.
Figure AI released a nearly four-minute promotional video showing its older F.02 humanoid robot units being thrown or made to leap into a vat of liquid steel at a foundry in Imatra, Finland. The video echoes a scene from "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and features Arnold Schwarzenegger. Figure says the robots were trained beforehand to dive off a balcony in test conditions, and the actual filming happened across six melts with only a 20-minute window per melt.
Micron's FY27 guidance states that demand from humanoid robots and other physical AI devices could outpace data centers as a driver of memory and storage demand. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said each humanoid robot needs roughly 200GB of DRAM and several terabytes of storage, and that current memory demand already exceeds supply by about 50%. The company expects new cleanroom capacity to be insufficient to ease the shortage soon.
Chinese robotics company AgiBot has released more than 300 autonomous humanoid robots into Chimelong Spaceship Park in Zhuhai, where they mingle with visitors performing tasks like playing table tennis, demonstrating martial arts, giving directions, and greeting hotel guests. The deployment is described as the largest public rollout of its kind in China to date.
The US Army has named five winners of its xTechHumanoid competition, run through the Army FUZE xTech program in partnership with the Humanoid Community of Collaboration. Among 103 submitted proposals, the winners include power systems, tactile fingertip sensors, software, and a humanoid robot called Alex, built by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Alex features 29 joints, custom backdriveable actuators, ballistic protection, and a hybrid autonomy system combining AI with human control.
According to The Information, Tesla has been struggling for over a year to build reliable, durable hands for its Optimus humanoid robot, prompting engineers to develop a swappable 'sensing glove' instead of embedded touch sensors. Most Optimus units built so far are used for internal testing rather than sold to customers, and remain limited to simple repetitive tasks despite extensive training data.
At the 2026 Inclusion Conference in Shanghai, the Yansyn-X2 humanoid robot was shown producing a tear after being asked to 'shed tears.' The demonstration highlighted engineering work in affective computing, aimed at helping robots recognize and respond to human emotional cues.
According to The Information, Tesla has converted its Fremont factory—no longer building the Model S or Model X—to Optimus humanoid robot production, shifting line workers and engineers onto the project. The report describes manufacturing difficulties with the Optimus V3, including trouble precisely aligning components and limits on production line speed, with output currently at hundreds of units weekly against a stated goal of over 1,000 per week by the end of 2026.