What is this?
AI robotics is where large models meet the physical world. The same technology that understands language now watches, reasons and moves. The race to a useful humanoid robot is one of tech's best-funded frontiers.
Key tools & players
- Google DeepMind — Gemini Robotics, the leading "robot brain" line
- Figure — Helix model, humanoids piloted in logistics
- Tesla — Optimus, betting on car-factory scale
- Unitree — China's affordable humanoids and robot dogs
- Boston Dynamics, 1X, Agility, NVIDIA (GR00T, simulation)
Milestones
- 2023-2024 — DeepMind's RT-2 moves web knowledge into robot actions, then Figure and OpenAI demo a talking humanoid
- 2025 — Gemini Robotics reaches many robot bodies, and Unitree cuts humanoid prices below $6k
- 2026 — Gemini Robotics 2 runs a humanoid's walking, balance and hands from one model (our coverage)
- Aug 2026 — Nvidia opens its 34B Alpamayo 2 driving model, and Pony.ai and Uber plan 2,000 European robotaxis (our coverage)
- Aug 2026 — Unitree lists in Shanghai and opens 629% above its offer price, the first humanoid maker with a daily share price
- Aug 2026 — Ukrainian investigators say a Russian drone picked its own target in Zaporizhzhia, the first documented autonomous kill (our coverage)
- Sep 2026 — XPeng's IRON walks off the world's first automated humanoid production line (our coverage)
- Sep 2026 — Alphabet's Intrinsic opens its industrial robot software base under Apache 2.0 (our coverage)
- Sep 2026 — Figure's Helix 2.5 does household chores in 30 homes it has never entered (our coverage)
- Sep 2026 — AMD buys World Labs for $8.2bn and makes Fei-Fei Li its chief scientist (our coverage)
Mini glossary
- VLA: vision-language-action model — sees, understands, then moves
- Teleoperation: humans remotely driving robots to collect training data
- Sim2real: training in simulation, transferring skills to real machines