Best of LinkedIn: Robotics CW 44/45 2026

Humanoid robots moved from demos onto production lines this edition. Bosch will start series production of Humanoid's robots in Bühl, Apptronik humanoids running Gemini Robotics 2.5 reached 96% success on Mercedes-Benz lines, and GXO and AGCO expanded Digit deployments. Independent benchmarks exposed a wide reliability gap, with task success falling to 0.4% on the hardest RoboColosseum tasks. Data, evaluation and dependable operation on every shift are becoming the decisive advantage.

Date

November 13, 2026

Robotics

Thomas Allgeyer

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Humanoids Reach the Production Line

Bosch will start series production of Humanoid's robots in Bühl, its first site anywhere to industrialize humanoids.
Gemini Robotics 2.5 ran Apptronik Apollo 2 humanoids on Mercedes-Benz lines in Kecskemét and Sindelfingen with 96% success in automotive kitting.
At 96% per pick, a tray of 10 parts comes out perfect only about 66% of the time, and a tray of 20 roughly 44%.
GXO expanded its Agility Robotics partnership to sites in North Carolina and Tennessee after Digit moved more than 100,000 totes in Flowery Branch.
AGCO will deploy Digit at its Hesston, Kansas facility from 2027 for parts sorting, stacking and tote placement.
GXO also expanded its partnership with Apptronik after extensive real-world testing.

Europe's Humanoid Push

Renault Group plans 350 Wandercraft humanoids within 18 months.
BMW tests Hexagon's AEON in Leipzig, Audi tests Agile Robots in Ingolstadt and Mercedes-Benz works with Apptronik in Berlin.
E.ON plans field tests of NEURA humanoids in substations from 2027.
Almost all first deployments start with logistics: bringing parts to the line and carrying boxes.
NEURA unveiled 4NE1 Gen 4 at the TUM RoboGym opening: around 64 kg at 1.8 m, roughly 20% lighter and designed for series production.
The TUM RoboGym starts with around 100 humanoid and service robots across 48 training cells, backed by 17 million euros over three years.
NEURA cut the time to teach a robot a new task from 70 hours to 14 hours and expects 3 to 4 hours by year end.
With the EU Machinery Regulation applying from January 2027, validating learned behaviour will set time to market.

China Sets the Pace on Volume

Unitree has shipped 5,500+ G1 and H1 humanoids and AgiBot 5,000+, while UBTECH delivered 500+ Walker S2 units.
Leju shipped about 500 Kuavo robots and EngineAI about 400.
China prohibited SoftBank's acquisition of ABB Robotics' China business, putting the $5.4 billion deal at risk.
More than 90% of the robots ABB supplies to Chinese customers are manufactured locally.
One Chinese autonomous delivery company has 35,000 deployments, and warehouses there handle 15 million parcels a day.
Humanoids seen in Chinese logistics were still slow and needed extensive training.

Robot Foundation Models Multiply

NVIDIA's GR00T 2 solved 40 of 50 unseen tasks zero-shot, and five demos lifted success to 95%.
GR00T 2 Turbo ran onboard a Unitree G1 and served popcorn in all 48 trials.
Runway released Praxis-1 with open weights, 15.6x faster and 51x cheaper per completed task than a frontier LLM agent.
Scale and Hugging Face open-sourced FineART-VLA, lifting multi-step task completion from 16% to 76%.
RLWRLD's 8.1B-parameter RLDX-1 beat the next-best RoboCasa result by 10.7 points with about 20% of the training compute.
Microsoft's Rho ranked first in Poke & Wiggle's independent real-robot evaluation, ahead of MolmoAct 2, Pi0.5, DiT-Flow and GR00T N1.7.
Xiaomi's open-source XR-1 was trained on 100K+ hours and adapts to new tasks with under 10 hours of data.

The Reliability Gap

RoboColosseum ran more than 20,000 trials across 6,800 tasks and 150 scenes.
Success fell from 30.7% on easier tasks to 0.4% on the hardest, and no policy completed the five Unitree G1 tasks after fine-tuning.
Six VLAs and world models scored 96.5% to 98.1% in simulation but dropped to about 60% when the camera or robot changed.
One world model fell from 97% to 51% after the instruction was reworded.
An agent reached 76% against 13% for a VLA, but took about 150 seconds per task.
Panasonic's T-Rex averaged 65% success with fingertip touch across 12 tasks, against 42% without it.
A frontier robot model from Google DeepMind ties a trash bag only 44% of the time.

Data Becomes the Bottleneck

Robotics has no equivalent of the open web for fine motor skills and everyday physical tasks.
Human Archive's egocentric data gave the strongest results in 200 real-robot trials across four tasks.
Memories.ai launched Memories Upload to turn egocentric video into training-ready tokens.
RLWRLD launched DexBench, built from real industrial tasks across five domains.
Audi trains Agile Robots and Idealworks humanoids in production digital twins built with Dassault Systèmes and NVIDIA.
Hiring is shifting toward data infrastructure, simulation, teleoperation and evaluation.

Practical Automation Pays Off Now

An Elite Robots CS612 cobot cell tends CNC machines without retrofit, and 4 of 10 machines in one hall run with the same kit.
Corvus Robotics drones scan Dermalogica's warehouse 52 times a year, freeing around 120 labour hours every month.
Footshop's robotic warehouse helped lift revenue by 20% and EBITDA by 58% year on year.
Sereact's Cortex drives Universal Robots arms that process Zalando returns with CEVA Logistics in Germany and Poland.
Boston Dynamics launched Stretch Gen 2 from more than 100,000 operating hours, unloading up to 1,000 cases an hour.
Odin Robotics offers one interface for any robot arm, vision, AI and simulation.

Compute and Components

NVIDIA modules appear in 6 of 9 robots reviewed, and NVIDIA raised Jetson prices by up to 101% in July.
Qualcomm's Dragonwing IQ10 is rated at up to 700 sparse TOPS with 64GB of memory.
The Jetson Orin Nano Super delivers 67 TOPS for $249, and centimeter-level RTK comes from a module of about $110.
The costly parts of field robotics are now integration, ruggedization, safety cases, field data and service.
Bosch already makes the sensors, motors and actuators that humanoids need at scale.

Robots in Medicine

The FDA granted De Novo authorization to Virtuoso Surgical, the first device in a new class for endoluminal robotic surgery.
Its first indication is en bloc resection of bladder lesions.
Neuralink's R1 robot places 64 threads carrying 1,024 electrodes, and 21 people had been implanted as of January.
Mayo Clinic demonstrated a humanoid robot assisting in the cath lab at TCT 2026.
The TUM RoboGym opening highlighted hospital logistics as a major field for physical AI.

Thanks to Ulrich M., Vanessa Loiola, Igor Kulakov, Pascal BORNET, Philipp Wehn, Erdem Ürün, Jonathan Valladares, Mark Wallace, Srinivasan Vijayarangan, Lentin Joseph, Rubén Domínguez Ibar, Jean Ng, Shashwat Madan, Henri M., John Koetsier, Naresh Reddy Kotha, Christian Sauter, Henry J., Hendrik Benz, Danny Bernstein, Ribin Mathew, Guillermo Flor, Christof Hammel, Pranali Desai, Rafael Hostettler, David Reger, Alberto Rodriguez, Peter Kappes, Marco Pavone, Lukas M. Ziegler, Vignesh, Gwanghyun Kim, Francis deSouza, Alper Sametoglu, Carolina Parada, Aleš Pitro, Duke Herrell, Chris Yoo, Raphael Levy, Aris Zhu, Michael Beer, Ralf Gulde, Dr. Shivoh Chirayil Nandakumar, Daniel Diez, Sanjil Jain, Jens Peder Kristensen, Anthony Maggio, Vishwaak Chandran, Charles Wong, Mukundan Govindaraj, Alla Simoneau, Patrick Kelleher, Sri Elaprolu, Mike Kalil, Adrian Macneil, Robert Little, Aaron Prather, Raj Patel, Nikhil Kumar, Andrey Kolobov, Kal Mos, Michael Murray, Michelle Sun, Georg von Wichert, Cristiano R. Amon, Laura Modiano, Mladen Milicevic, Kurt Höller, Abdallah El Sabbagh and Anshu Arora and everyone else who contributed insights to this edition.

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Frequently asked questions

How far did humanoid robots move into industrial production in late 2026?

Humanoids are moving from pilots onto real lines. Bosch will start series production of Humanoid's robots in Bühl. Apptronik's Apollo 2, running Gemini Robotics 2.5, reached 96% success in kitting on Mercedes-Benz lines, and GXO expanded Digit deployments after more than 100,000 totes moved.

How reliable are robot foundation models outside the lab?

Much less reliable than demos suggest. RoboColosseum ran more than 20,000 trials and found success falling from 30.7% on easier tasks to 0.4% on the hardest. Six VLAs and world models scored 96.5% to 98.1% in simulation, then dropped to about 60% when the camera or robot changed.

How quickly can robots learn a new task today?

Teaching time is falling fast. NEURA Robotics cut it from 70 hours to 14 hours and expects 3 to 4 hours by year end. NVIDIA's GR00T 2 solved 40 of 50 unseen tasks zero-shot, and five demonstrations lifted success to 95%.

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