Humanoid Robotics

• RobotEra's L7 humanoid now sorts parcels in logistics centers built for human workers
• Chinese makers lead on actual robot deliveries while sector valuations run well ahead of shipped units
• Tesla, XPENG, BYD and Chery are racing to scale humanoid production lines, with mass manufacturing capacity set to decide the winner
• Europe lags the US and China in humanoid deployment despite strong engineering talent
• Agility Robotics argues its Digit humanoid already beats human labor cost ahead of a planned SPAC listing
• LimX Dynamics' TRON 2 humanoid is being tested on formwork assembly and rebar tying in construction
• Battery runtime, charging speed and energy density are emerging as the real constraint on humanoid adoption

‍

Foundation Models and Physical AI

• Skild AI's S1 learns unseen ten minute tasks from a single video demonstration, no fine-tuning, hitting 66 percent success where conventional models need fifty to one hundred hours of post-training data
• Anthropic is entering physical AI from the intelligence layer, introducing an open Model Hardware Standard after testing Claude's reasoning across humanoids, quadrupeds and robot arms
• NVIDIA's SONIC compresses 700 hours of human motion capture into a single humanoid control policy
• Isaac Lab paired with GR00T N1.7 achieved 82 percent success on simulated humanoid pick and place
• VOLT research finds robots trained on teleoperation data move slowly because the human demonstrations were slow, opening a path to selective speedup
• Hugging Face's Microduck, a 399 dollar open source biped with 15 motors and a full Rust training stack, aims to make robotics experimentation broadly accessible
• Flex-pi, a new world action model, jointly denoises visual streams and actions during training, outperforming standard vision language action baselines

‍

Medical and Surgical Robotics

• A caterpillar-inspired soft millirobot from the University of Hong Kong uses magnetic control, carries up to 100 times its own weight and targets drug delivery inside the body
• The surgical robotics market is projected to reach 27.14 billion dollars by 2030, a 14.7 percent compound annual growth rate
• The first European spine surgery using Medtronic's Stealth AXIS platform was performed in Cologne
• FDA authorization of J&J's OTTAVA surgical robot shifts competition toward workflow and operating efficiency
• Surgie, a teleoperated humanoid built at UC San Diego, has completed real surgical procedures
• Andromeda Surgical has raised a 15 million dollar Series A for autonomous surgical robots
• Teleoperated microsurgical robots now suture vessels under a millimeter wide, using tremor filtering and automatic tool changing

‍

Industrial and Manufacturing

• NEURA Robotics and Schaeffler have partnered to pair cognitive robots with industrial-scale actuators and drives
• FieldAI is partnering with Caterpillar to bring robot foundation models to heavy industry jobsites
• Analysts expect 609,000 industrial robot installations in 2026 as physical AI expands across factory floors
• Nexxis Technology has acquired BladeBUG, adding suction robots for wind turbine blade inspection
• Unitree's A2-W quadruped is positioned for inspection, security and autonomous operation in complex terrain
• Wandelbots frames its NOVA and Industrial AI Cloud adoption bottleneck as organizational, not technical
• Brightpick's Intuition stack combines lightweight and vision language action models with vision and tactile sensing for warehouse picking

‍

Funding, Market and Startups

• Robotics and physical AI startups have raised 55 billion dollars through July, a record pace
• Nineteen new European unicorns emerged in 2026, clustering in robotics, chips, batteries and drones
• The wearable robotics market is projected to grow from 3.52 billion to 64.23 billion dollars by 2034
• A new European Robotics House has launched in Zurich to bring together fifteen young European roboticists
• Teradyne Robotics is suing JAKA in Europe over alleged infringement of Universal Robots patents
• Sapphire Ventures maps physical AI across six layers, with five open questions still deciding the winners
• Three French physical AI startups, AMI Labs, UMA and Genesis AI, have been named ones to watch

‍

Infrastructure and Compute

• Qualcomm has launched a Japan Robotics Center as part of a long-term physical AI investment
• Gartner has named Schneider Electric a Market Shaper for physical AI services
• AWS is building an end-to-end physical AI stack, arguing data, simulation and cloud-to-edge operations, not models alone, determine whether deployments scale
• NVIDIA sells the compute that powers robots but partners rather than competes on layers that don't drive silicon demand
• AWS's Physical AI Fellowship reported results in solar panel placement accuracy and humanoid power tool manipulation
• FiftyOne 1.19 now opens MCAP robotics logs natively, syncing camera, LiDAR and IMU streams

‍

Thanks to Deepak Pathak, Jonathan Valladares, David Reger, Onur Sezgin, Leo Su, Mayuri Lamba, Andreas Klinger, Zeo Nam, Tim Carden, Cristiano R. Amon, Ramesh Kumar Jha, Daniël Telgen, Prof. Dr. Jan Bredow, Marc Theermann, Jesse Zhang, Alex Faustov, Ferenc Fekete, Yi L., Sergey Kochnev, Tobias Claus, Christof Hammel, Jaime Mineart, Gaarv Khanna, Antonio Lobusto, Jason De Silveira, Enzo Ghisoni, Mete Gultekin, Dalton Caldwell, Vaish S, Robert Little, Ryan Embrey-Jones, Jan Zizka, Stefano M. Sinicropi, Adam Liu, Aaron Prather, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lars N. Josler, Peter Kappes, Alla Simoneau, Sri Elaprolu, Michelle Sun, Yubing Ji, Kal Mos, Kingsley Advani, Dale Tutt, Lydia KHALFOUN, Moritz Pfriender, Jimmy Guerrero and everyone else who contributed insights to this edition.

‍

Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-linkedin-cw-34-35-robotics-thomas-allgeyer-eqazf/?trackingId=lKgUeeDX8MNPpGaaCpewnA%3D%3D