SUMMARY
XPeng's robotics unit Dogotix raised more than $900 million at a $6.3 billion valuation, China's largest single private round in embodied AI — days after Unitree's post-IPO slide erased roughly 200 billion yuan of market value and reopened the question of what humanoids are worth. Beijing's second World Humanoid Robot Games closed with 2,056 machines and a shift from sprint records toward real work, while Teradyne took the collaborative-robot patent fight to Europe's Unified Patent Court.
TOP STORIES
Aug 27 — Teradyne Robotics ramps up fight against cobot copycats
Universal Robots filed at the Unified Patent Court in Copenhagen against JAKA's German unit — Teradyne's second European IP action against a Chinese cobot maker this year. | The Robot Report
Aug 27 — Unitree's stock slump since IPO stokes fears of a bubble in Chinese humanoid robotics
Shares fell to 615 yuan, well below their 1,100-yuan post-debut peak, cutting market value to 248.8 billion yuan and prompting fresh scrutiny of humanoid valuations. | South China Morning Post
Aug 26 — Games close, China's humanoid robots race on
The second edition closed at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval after five days, 1,301 matches and 51 events — 666 teams and 2,056 robots, against 280 teams a year ago. | Global Times
Aug 24 — Xpeng lands US$900m in funding for humanoid AI push despite wider quarterly loss
Robotics unit Dogotix raised over $900 million at a $6.3 billion post-money valuation from IDG Capital, Alibaba and Tencent, targeting 1,000 IRON humanoids a month by end-2026. | South China Morning Post
MARKET & FINANCIALS
Aug 28 — SoftBank-backed surgical robotics firm eyes Hong Kong listing to power mainland China push
Noah Medical plans a Hong Kong listing as early as next year to raise over $100 million; 90% of revenue is currently American, with some 15,000 patients treated. | South China Morning Post
Aug 25 — NEC Orchestrating Future Fund invests in U.S.-based Dexmate, provider of humanoid robot VEGA
NEC's corporate venture fund backed the California startup behind the VEGA humanoid and an integrated physical-AI platform spanning sensors, control and training data. | NEC
Aug 25 — Gatik scores new $200 million investment for its driverless truck tech
The Series D, led by the Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, follows 85,000 fully driverless orders and over $600 million in contracted revenue from Walmart, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods. | Forbes
Aug 25 — Robotics startup Generalist reaches $3B valuation
A roughly $200 million extension led by 8VC lifts the round to about $600 million; its GEN-1.5 model learns new physical tasks from a single short demonstration. | TechCrunch
Aug 25 — Airbound raises $37 million Series A and plans 10,000 daily drone flights across Andhra Pradesh
The Bengaluru startup's Greenoaks-led round, with DoorDash participating, funds a network across three Indian districts after 13,000 autonomous missions without failure. | DroneLife
Aug 24 — NEURA Robotics acquires ADLATUS to bring Physical AI to autonomous cleaning
The German firm's fifth acquisition in 16 months adds autonomous cleaning and sweeping robots, to be rebuilt on Neura's sensor stack and Neuraverse platform. | Tech.eu
PRODUCT LAUNCHES & BREAKTHROUGHS
Aug 28 — Robot from Japan lightens load of restocking New York grocery store
Tokyo startup Muse put its shelf-restocking robot into a New York grocery store, its first US deployment, aimed at American service-sector labour shortages. | Nikkei Asia
Aug 28 — Light-powered soft robots can keep jumping forever
A teardrop-shaped liquid-crystal elastomer ribbon contracts under infrared light, storing and releasing elastic energy so the robot keeps jumping without batteries, motors or manual reset. | NC State University
Aug 27 — Hugging Face is selling a cute $399 open source duck robot, Microduck
The 25-centimetre bipedal robot carries a camera, lidar and IMUs, and ships with an open SDK and full reinforcement-learning stack; pre-orders deliver before Christmas. | TechCrunch
Aug 27 — MIT engineers create a system for building shape-changing smart devices
“Bifur-circuits” keep electrical connections intact as a device changes shape, enabling reconfigurable grippers, assistive furniture and antennas that sense their own configuration. | MIT News
Aug 27 — How to train a cross-embodiment robot navigation policy with AI agents NVIDIA's COMPASS framework pairs a pretrained navigation model with reinforcement learning and simulation so policies adapt to new robots and scenes instead of retraining from scratch. | NVIDIA Technical Blog
Aug 25 — NVIDIA announces Jetson Orin Nano 2 robotics computer to redefine entry-level edge AI
The entry-level module delivers 78 TOPS — double its predecessor's inference — at 40% lower power in 15-watt mode, targeting smart drones, robots and vision-AI systems. | NVIDIA
Aug 25 — Waymo to launch robotaxi in Germany in 2027
Phased testing starts in Munich within weeks ahead of a 2027 commercial launch — Waymo's third international market and its first in the European Union. | CNBC
Aug 24 — Impossible Metals' Eureka II recovers itself from the ocean, fully autonomously
The underwater vehicle located and recovered itself without human intervention in an offshore test near Halifax, a step toward scaling subsea harvesting platforms. | Robotics Tomorrow
Aug 24 — China's humanoid completes 100+ tennis rallies without human control
Galbot's humanoids sustained more than 100 consecutive rallies using onboard perception and unscripted shot selection, covering serves, forehands and backhands. | Interesting Engineering
Aug 24 — ENGINEAI says general-purpose humanoid robot costs have fallen below RMB100,000
The Shenzhen maker says unit costs dropped from over RMB1 million three years ago, and stresses these are machines for factories and homes, not low-cost toys. | TechNode
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