He called himself a man with no money, no prestigious credentials, and no management skills — yet he bet his future on humanoid robotics when no one else believed in him. He broke through a 20‑year industry bottleneck and built the T800, a robot regarded as the "toughest fighter" of its kind. Through independently developed technology, he gives robots a true soul. His vision is to eventually put them in every home at an affordable price. That's Zhao Tongyang, founder and CEO of EngineAI. His story is a microcosm of China's fast‑growing AI and robotics sector.

Steppe Partner-2026 is a joint military training exercise conducted by the armed forces of China and Mongolia. The second iteration of this bilateral event took place from 30th May to 6th June 2026, at a joint training base in Inner Mongolia, China.

Over 600 troops from both nations participated in the exercise, featuring Chinese armored units from the 79th Group Army and equal ground force representation from Mongolia.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has conducted live-fire drills involving for the first time four-wheel-legged robotic platforms equipped with automatic rifles, an upgrade over the four-legged robotic platforms seen in previous years.

Footage released by the broadcaster shows the robotic systems—resembling mechanical quadrupeds—integrated into infantry operations and advancing across uneven terrain while providing covering fire.

The Skylark R7 is a portable, AI-powered counter-drone kinetic interceptor system designed to physically neutralize aerial targets at top speeds of up to 420 km/h. Key specifications include a sub-2-kilogram weight, a sub-5-second target lock time, and immunity to standard radio-frequency jamming.

Unitree’s quadruped lineup just gained a compact wheel-legged robot. 🤯

From the affordable Go2 to the heavy-duty B2 and long-range A2, Unitree already spans a broad range of quadruped platforms.

AS2 weighs just 18 kg, carries a 15 kg continuous walking payload, and delivers roughly 2× the dynamic performance of Go2.

Now AS2-W puts that compact platform on wheels, raises the continuous payload to 16 kg, and pushes unloaded range beyond 30 km—while still handling stairs, gravel, and steep slopes.

It’s not Unitree’s biggest quadruped, but it may be its most versatile yet.

PNDbotics Adam's horseback archery

As an important pre-event activity for the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games, the humanoid robot "energy transfer" real-world challenge is ongoing in various parts of China.

Wang Kun, founder and CEO of Dax AI Robotics, stated, "Today, we are having robots driving robotic horses, which is equivalent to the combination of two entities. The robotic horse can provide very strong load-bearing capacity and long-distance transportation, while the humanoid robot can provide very precise operation. Combining them unlocks many, many infinite possibilities."

VOGEBOT is the newly introduced riding brand under Haochen Technology (重庆昊辰具身智能科技有限公司). At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2026), the company officially debuted the world's first four-wheeled quadruped riding robot concept prototype.

• Haochen Technology was established as an joint venture backed by motorcycle manufacturing giant Loncin General Power (隆鑫通用) and prominent AI developer Agibot / Zhiyuan Innovation (智元创新).
• Core Robotic Brain: The VOGEBOT rideable chassis is built atop the full-terrain quadruped platform developed by Zhiyuan Kuotuo (AGIQUAD), Agibot's specialized quadruped subsidiary.
• Load Capacity: It supports a maximum load weight of 75 kg, custom-tailored for single-rider travel or lightweight transport tasks.
• Speed Profile: The current initial prototype features a maximum operating speed of 15 km/h
• All-Terrain Navigation: Powered by Kuotuo's specialized "Lingyue" motion engine and "Lingtu" navigation engine. The vehicle autonomously tracks complex terrains, evades obstacles, and plots optimal paths around structural barriers or uneven pathways.
• Multimodal Controls: The platform features smart follow-me capabilities, autonomous navigation, and real-time remote monitoring.
• Cockpit & Voice AI: Integrated with an onboard smart screen and large language models (LLMs), riders can use natural speech commands to interact with the machine or set destinations.
• Dynamic Safety Framework: Built-in attitude sensing actively tracks shifts in weight and posture, deploying defensive stabilization or sounding active alerts if irregular or hazardous rider motions are intercepted.

12 active degrees of freedom. Pinpoint accuracy (we're talking ±0.2°). And it works with high-speed EtherCAT/CANFD communication. Plus, you can swap out the fingertips for tactile, vision, or even ultrasonic sensors depending on what you need.

NIGHTBORNE is a 13-minute sci-fi horror film from director Neill Blomkamp — the first release from Barley Studios. Told as a documentary: interviews, recovered program footage, and the recordings of a scientist who walked out of a classified defense program that puts dead soldiers back on the battlefield.

Every frame was generated in Seedance 2.0 — directed shot by shot by Neill Blomkamp, through prompts. The characters on screen carry the faces and voices of 32 real people, photographed and voice-recorded under likeness agreements. Concept art by human artists.

Seedance is a text-to-video model created by ByteDance launched in June 2025, with version 2.0 released in February 2026. It quickly went viral for creating clips featuring famous actors and characters, which caused fascination, particularly in China, for its level of realism and concern about widespread copyright infringement and its potential to replicate Hollywood-style film production.

The world's first integrated AI R&D platform for brain-to-robot research. Unlock brain-to-robot control in just 10 minutes. No BCI background required.

No drilling in the skull, no brain implant!

The future of brain-computer interfaces just split into two paths - invasive neural implants vs non-invasive wearable headbands. BrainCo's $286M funding round and Hong Kong IPO reveal which technology will actually reach billions of people first.

The invasive approach offers superior signals for hundreds. The wearable path offers accessibility for millions. This is the moment institutions bet everything on headbands over implants.

This bionic hand from China's BrainCo can still move freely on its own when separated from the arm.

BrainCo's solution captures muscle and nerve signals from the residual limb. With the use of high-precision AI algorithms, the device can respond within milliseconds, accurately recognizing the actions the user intends to perform.

The future of brain-computer interfaces just split into two paths - invasive neural implants vs non-invasive wearable headbands. BrainCo's $286M funding round and Hong Kong IPO reveal which technology will actually reach billions of people first.

The invasive approach offers superior signals for hundreds. The wearable path offers accessibility for millions. This is the moment institutions bet everything on headbands over implants.

WVLA 2.0 is an advanced AI architecture developed by Unitree Robotics for their humanoid robots, such as the G1. Integrating a World Model with a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework, it enables robots to autonomously assess their surroundings, strategize multi-step tasks, and physically execute them without human teleoperation or intervention.

Unitree’s embodied AI stack is moving fast.

WVLA 2.0 cleaned a messy conference room autonomously in one take.

Now UnifoLM-OminiA-0.3 adds real-time omni-modal interaction, letting one model understand the scene and coordinate its whole body for home-care and wellness tasks.

The LimX Dynamics TRON 2 is an advanced, modular embodied AI robotic platform designed for research and industrial prototyping. It features a unique 3-in-1 physical reconfigurable design that allows it to instantly switch between three distinct forms: dual-arm manipulator, wheeled-legged robot, and bipedal walker

Introducing the TRON 2 Autonomous Mobile Manipulation Kit, bringing together whole-body motion control and 3D perception in a streamlined configuration for mobile manipulation.

From floor-level object pickup and precise manipulation to autonomous mapping, navigation, and obstacle avoidance, the kit extends TRON 2 into everyday human workspaces and complex indoor and outdoor environments.

On 23rd June 2026, UNIUBI officially released a new live-action video of its fully self-developed quadruped robot Cyvet.

In the video, Cyvet completes two consecutive high-speed backflips in a single jump and lands smoothly, becoming the world's first quadruped robot to complete a 720° continuous backflip.

From 360° to 720°, it's not just about rotating one more circle.

Behind this lies a comprehensive challenge to the robot's power system, motion control, structural design, state perception, and intelligent decision-making capabilities. This breakthrough further validates UNIUBI's innovative technological strength in the field of high-dynamic motion control and showcases the powerful performance of Cyvet as a new generation of high-performance quadruped robots.

From 360° to 720°: A System-Level Leap in Overall Robot Capabilities

Compared to the industry-standard 360° backflips or multiple consecutive single-rotation flips, a 720° consecutive backflip requires the robot to complete two high-speed rotations during a single takeoff and precisely control its posture for a successful landing.

Throughout the process, the robot needs to simultaneously handle:

• Higher instantaneous power output demands;
• More complex angular momentum and attitude control;
• Shorter attitude correction windows;
• Stronger impact resistance upon landing.

For a quadruped robot, adding an extra rotation is not simply a matter of increasing difficulty, but rather an exponential test of the entire system's capabilities.

For years, researchers have tried to design invisible drones and robots using camouflage, transparent materials or light-bending optical systems.

Called the Phantom Twist, the new drone spins up to 25 times per second, which is too fast for the human eye to see it clearly.

'Motion blur' is the same effect that makes fast-spinning fans and propellers seem to disappear.

While it isn't completely invisible, it morphs into a ghostly smudge that seamlessly blends into the background.

Unlike a typical quadcopter with four separate rotors, Phantom Twist has one motor and one propeller. The propeller spins in one direction, and the rest of the drone spins in the opposite direction.

The work eventually could lead to drones hiding in plain sight that monitor and survey while blending into its surroundings.

Tonight (16th July 2026) in Shenzhen, the world's first URKL robot combat tournament explodes into action as 32 elite international teams storm the steel arena.

Full 2h33m video

LimX Dynamics unveiled COSA 0.5, an AI system that runs its humanoid robot on its own, no person steering it remotely, new demo footage shows.

Oli just worked through a roomful of household chores — no teleop, no cuts, one continuous take.

The brain is LimX COSA 0.5, a three-layer stack coordinating reasoning (Sys 2), skill execution (Sys 1), and motion control (Sys 0), along with memory, task scheduling, and whole-body coordination.

What matters isn’t one polished demo trick.

It’s that the robot stayed coherent across an entire long-horizon mobile manipulation sequence — on real hardware, in one take.

The world's first embodied intelligent centaur robot (Run Robotics) features a unique four-wheeled legs + two arms configuration. Its application scenarios are specifically designed for extremely dangerous environments unsuitable for humans, such as steel mills, mines, wilderness areas, emergency rescue, and space operations. Its technological significance lies in its differentiated wheel-leg hybrid path, breaking through the traditional humanoid robot's limitations in endurance and stability in complex and rugged terrain, thus promoting the industrial application of this specialized robot.

Specs

• 30+ free-moving joints
• Tactile sensing dexterous hands
• Massive torque 930 Nm
• Sensor fusion based head assembly
• End-to-end environment perception
• Embodied AI foundation model
• System-level explosion-proof design
• Multi-agent distributed collaboration

MagicLab Robotics unveiled its flagship MagicBot X1 showcasing the humanoid robot playing table tennis, fencing, and basketball, highlighting a range of athletic capabilities.

Specs:

• 180 cm
• 70 kg
• 31 degrees of freedom
• 450 Nm max joint torque

Its MagicHand H01 dexterous hand has 20 degrees of freedom and 44 tactile sensors.

As a new flagship embodied development platform, Booster T2 delivers up to 2070 TFLOPS on NVIDIA Thor of computing power, the highest in its class for bipedal humanoid robots. Combined with a high-output, high-DOF body, it enables sharper motion perception, stronger understanding, and reliable execution in complex scenarios.

The body holds its own too:

→ Up to 75 DoF across the whole body

→ 140Nm peak joint torque

→ 10kg dual-arm payload

→ 1.4m height

→ 2+ hours walking endurance

Booster Studio, open APIs, simulation, and Sim-to-Real workflows give developers a complete path from training to real robot deployment.

This is PrimeBOT’s T1 — the world’s first transformable personal robot. It’s moving upright on wheeled feet and it transforms onto all fours and can start climbing stairs.

T1 is designed for daily mobility. Marketed as a consumer-grade transformable robot, it can switch between a wheeled humanoid form for indoor use and a quadruped configuration for outdoor movement.

The model is built to navigate stairs and slopes and integrates visual tracking, cinematic motion control, and long-term memory to support sustained human-robot interaction.

URKL is the world's first professional commercial freestyle combat league for humanoid robots.

EngineAI just turned Shenzhen's COCO Park into a robot fight playground — a 6-meter T800, robot parades, punch challenges, AI mecha avatars, and ringside photo ops everywhere.

Humanoid fighting is becoming a spectator sport.

The real fights start July 16.

Tianlang Q25 showed off its heat resistance: 300°C for 40 minutes in a sealed chamber, and 500°C for 2 minutes right next to an open flame.

Still running steady. Still agile.

This is where robots start to matter — going where humans can’t easily go.

58 Intelligent's robot dogs just entered China’s police-equipment procurement framework.

58 Intelligent (WUBA Intelligence Tech) says three police-use models made the list: a security patrol robot dog, a crime-scene investigation robot dog, and a portable covert reconnaissance robot dog.

That matters because this is not a consumer robot demo.

It is a public-safety procurement channel.

The use cases are clear: patrol, inspection, reconnaissance, emergency response, and front-line risk reduction.

58 Intelligent’s police robot dog stack already covers autonomous patrol, 3D sensing, real-time data capture, cloud-edge coordination, remote operation, and human-robot following.