In early June, NVIDIA and Unitree unveiled the Unitree H2 Plus — the first open reference design for a full-size humanoid robot. In plain terms, it’s a ready-made kit: Unitree supplies the body (the 1.8-meter H2 platform), the company Sharpa supplies five-fingered tactile hands, NVIDIA supplies the onboard computer (Jetson Thor), and the “brain” and … Read more

On June 5, a modified Unitree G1 humanoid named Pemba reached the summit of Ecuador’s Chimborazo volcano — 6,200 meters up, and, measured from the center of the Earth, the most distant point on the planet’s surface. Against the usual stream of videos of robots dancing and doing backflips, this one stands apart: the robot … Read more

Based on Vingroup’s press release, reporting from ICRA 2026, and coverage by Interesting Engineering and TechTimes. When people talk about the humanoid robot race, they habitually split the field in two: the US and China. Figure and Tesla against Unitree and AGIBOT. But in early June, another player muscled into that list uninvited — and … Read more

Based on AGIBOT’s press release (June 3, 2026), the dataset page on Hugging Face, and reporting by The Robot Report and RobotToday. A robot picks up a paper cup of water, squeezes a little harder than it should — the cup crumples, and water runs across the table. In most product demos, that shot would … Read more

Based on Business Matters (bmmagazine.co.uk), reporting by The Next Web and the BBC, and Figure AI’s public demonstration (May 2026) The UK’s Sharp Group has put a human-shaped robot named Alpha to work at its recycling plant in Rainham, east London. The story is almost tailor-made for a “robots are replacing people” headline: injury and … Read more

When people talk about the humanoid race, they list the companies building the robots: Figure, Tesla, Unitree, AGIBOT, 1X. The logic seems obvious — whoever builds the best robot takes the market. Yet over the past six months, the company the stock market has rewarded most isn’t a robot maker at all. And that, arguably, … Read more

Based on the research paper MotionDisco: Motion Discovery for Extreme Humanoid Loco-Manipulation dated June 4, 2026. If you have two minutes, watch the video accompanying the paper. In it, a humanoid robot climbs onto a table holding a box, walks across it, climbs onto another table, and sets the box down. In another clip, it … Read more

Based on the official Yandex Robotics website and publications in Forbes, Kommersant, CNews, and ComNews. I write a lot on this blog about the major global players in robotics — China’s AGIBOT, the Norwegian-American 1X, Hong Kong’s robotics labs, Shanghai’s training grounds for humanoids. Today, a piece about a Russian player. Yandex Robotics is the … Read more

An analytical breakdown of John Koetsier’s interview with Dr. Yao Maoqing, president of the embodied AI business unit at AGIBOT — “World’s Biggest Humanoid Robot Maker Says Tipping Point Is Near”, Forbes, May 19, 2026. The full interview is at the link. Shanghai-based AGIBOT is the world’s largest maker of humanoid robots: 5,100 units shipped … Read more

Image: 1X.tech We just covered how China is building a network of training grounds for humanoid robots to be first to mine the “training ore” of embodied AI. Today, the mirror image from the Western side: Norwegian-American 1X Technologies has announced the launch of the 1X World Model Lab — a new research organization dedicated … Read more