SUMMARY
Washington chose negotiation over tariffs: a Section 232 proclamation found robotics imports a national-security threat but ordered trade talks instead of duties. The humanoid trade kept moving toward public markets, with Agility Robotics setting a $465 million raise and a November Nasdaq debut while Unitree's first post-IPO quarter paired 70% revenue growth with falling profit. Demand data turned decisively positive, North American robot orders rising 24.8%, and Waymo took its next robotaxi to Toyota for Japan and the UK.
TOP STORIES
Gross proceeds comprise $164 million held in trust, a $201 million PIPE led by Foxconn and $100 million already funded. Closing is expected November 4, with Nasdaq trading under AGLT. | Agility Robotics
Toyota will build autonomous bZ4X robotaxis at its Takaoka plant in Japan, integrating Waymo's driving hardware on the same line. Testing and validation there begin in 2027. | Waymo
Oct 28 — Trump opts for trade talks over tariffs for robotics, industrial machinery
A Section 232 proclamation found robotics and industrial machinery imports threaten national security but imposed no tariffs, directing Commerce and the USTR to negotiate and report within 180 days. | Manufacturing Dive
Oct 28 — Unitree reports 70% surge in quarterly revenue, though AI investment weighs on net profit
In its first post-IPO filing Unitree posted third-quarter revenue of RMB665 million, up 69.9%, while net profit fell 17.4% to RMB113 million as research spending rose 249.6%. | South China Morning Post
MARKET & FINANCIALS
Oct 29 — FCC Opens 50 MHz of Cellular Spectrum for Drone Operations
Report and Order FCC 26-72, adopted 3-0, lifts a longstanding airborne-use restriction on 50 megahertz of licensed 800 MHz spectrum for drone command, control and payload links. | DRONELIFE
Oct 29 — Opentrons Announces $40M Series E Round to Standardize AI-Driven Science on Its Robots
Healthcare investor Avego led the round alongside BroadOak Capital Partners, joining existing backers SoftBank Vision Fund and Khosla Ventures in the lab-automation company. | Opentrons
Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital co-led the pre-seed round for the Paris-based Inria spinout, whose software teaches industrial humanoids a task from about ten demonstrations. | EU-Startups
Oct 29 — WeRide's Physical AI Data Unit Jingshuo Raises Over USD10 Million at USD311 Million Valuation
The CNY70 million pre-Series A values WeRide's data subsidiary at CNY2.07 billion in its first external fundraise, backed by Vision Knight Capital and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks. | Yicai Global
Oct 28 — North American Robot Orders Increase 24.8% in Third Quarter of 2026
Companies ordered 10,989 robots worth $723.5 million, up 24.8% in units and 26.1% in value, led by semiconductors and electronics. Automotive OEM orders grew for the first time this year. | A3
Oct 28 — LG Electronics to Quintuple Robot Training Data, Eyes Home Humanoids by 2030
On its third-quarter earnings call LG said it will enter the home humanoid market in 2030, after manufacturing and logistics, and raised its training-data target to 500,000 cumulative hours. | EDAILY
The binding agreement with the California produce hauler is Kodiak's first commercial deal for driverless trucks on public highways. Deliveries are due to begin in 2028. | Kodiak AI
Oct 27 — Robotics Lab Physical Intelligence in Talks for a $20 Billion Valuation
Avenir and Lux Capital are in talks to lead a round of at least $1 billion, roughly doubling the robot foundation-model company's $11.5 billion valuation from earlier this year. | Bloomberg
Oct 27 — Teradyne Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results
Group revenue reached $1.31 billion, up 70% year over year. The Robotics segment contributed $96 million, which Teradyne called its highest third-quarter robotics revenue to date. | Teradyne
Oct 27 — London robotics startup Machenta raises $40M seed investment
Creandum and Union Square Ventures co-led what Tech.eu calls the largest UK robotics seed round to date, for robot models the Imperial College team trains purely in simulation. | Tech.eu
Boston Dynamics has asked selected Korean suppliers, led by Hyundai Mobis, to prepare for purchase orders covering 10,000 Atlas units. No delivery or production schedule was given. | Korea Economic Daily
Oct 27 — KDDI launches Elyza Robotics with JPY 30 bln investment in physical AI
The KDDI-ELYZA joint company will spend ¥30 billion on physical-AI research through fiscal 2030, targeting more than 1,000 robots deployed at real-world sites. | Telecompaper
Oct 26 — This startup's self-driving excavators help dig up $600M in new funding
CapitalG and Emergence Capital co-led Bedrock Robotics' $600 million Series C at a $4.1 billion valuation, two months after its autonomous excavators began paid work on job sites. | TechCrunch
Oct 26 — GXO and Agility Robotics Expand Partnership to Accelerate Deployment of Humanoids in U.S. Operations
Digit moves to e-commerce fulfilment sites in Statesville, North Carolina and Lebanon, Tennessee from early 2027, starting on Digit 4 and migrating to Digit 5 when available. | Agility Robotics
PRODUCT LAUNCHES & BREAKTHROUGHS
Oct 30 — Hyundai puts parking robots in driver's seat
Hyundai Motor, Hyundai WIA and Hyundai E&C demonstrated resident-summoned parking robots at a Siheung apartment complex, Korea’s first such pilot at a residential car park. | The Korea Herald
Oct 29 — AGIBOT Introduces Worken to Measure Productive Robot Work at AGIBOT Innovation Day 2026
At its Shanghai event AgiBot proposed Worken, a productivity metric for deployed robots, and previewed the GO-3 model on its WRAM reasoning architecture, promising open source by end-2026. | AGIBOT
Oct 29 — Magnetic sensors track muscle movement, for better prosthetic limb control
Three people with below-knee amputations had magnetic beads implanted in ankle muscles; skin sensors read them at up to six centimetres depth to drive an on-screen cursor task. | MIT News
Oct 28 — A soft robot could help doctors diagnose and treat disorders of the small intestine
Reported in Science Robotics, the tethered enteroscope travelled about two metres through animal small intestine using anchoring balloons, spraying drugs, clipping tissue and imaging as it went. | MIT News
Oct 28 — The Mars 2020 OnBoard Planner: Increasing autonomy mission productivity of the Perseverance rover
JPL researchers describe an onboard planner that lets Perseverance reschedule its own sol activities around actual time, energy and data use, recovering slack left by ground-planned sequences. | Science Robotics
Oct 28 — Equinor opens Kårstø Marine Robotics Centre
Equinor and Gassco opened a NOK 16 million test centre at the operating Kårstø gas plant in Norway, covering inspection, autonomous operations and environmental monitoring. | Equinor
Oct 27 — ROKAE delivers its 10,000th humanoid force-controlled arm
The Chinese maker said five Helios wheeled humanoids fitted with its AR Series arms now work at Schaeffler's lighthouse factory in Taicang. The milestone unit shipped in September. | ROKAE
Driverless in-plant movements passed one million across Dingolfing, Leipzig, Regensburg and MINI Plant Oxford, averaging about 3,500 moves a day at over 99.5% availability. | Embotech
Oct 27 — Zipline Now Making Quieter Deliveries with Acoustics Breakthrough
A fleet-wide upgrade uses onboard wind sensing and an acoustic model to pick the quietest transition to fixed-wing flight. Zipline's own modelling claims 68% less sound exposure per flight. | Zipline
Oct 27 — Whole-Body Manipulation Outside the Lab
RAI Institute had a Spot robot roll, upright and drag a 15-kilogram tyre too heavy for its arm alone, running fully onboard with depth cameras and no motion capture. | RAI Institute
The 97-kilowatt crawler drives piles up to seven metres for utility-scale solar and battery-storage foundations, with a cycle time Xpanner says is 45% faster than its previous generation. | Xpanner
Oct 26 — Alibaba's Amap unveils humanoid model that learns whole-body tasks from human movements
Built with Alibaba Token Hub, λ0 trains on first-person video synchronised with body and hand motion, and reports a 62.5% success rate on real-world loco-manipulation tasks. | TechNode
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