Tootfinder

At the Beijing half-marathon, several humanoid robots beat human winners by 10 minutes; a robot made by Honor beat the human world record held by Jacob Kiplimo (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sports/humanoid-robots-r…

Fraunhofer eröffnet drei Humanoid Robots Experience Labs in Deutschland
Das Fraunhofer IOSB schafft mit drei Humanoid Experience Labs ein niedrigschwelliges Angebot für Wirtschaft und öffentliche Hand zum Einsatz humanoider Roboter.

Fraunhofer eröffnet drei Humanoid Robots Experience Labs in Deutschland
Das Fraunhofer IOSB schafft mit drei Humanoid Experience Labs ein niedrigschwelliges Angebot für Wirtschaft und öffentliche Hand zum Einsatz humanoider Roboter.

Hyundai's South Korea auto workers have gone on a partial strike over wages, AI, and the prospect of the company deploying its new humanoid robot in factories (Jiyoung Sohn/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/the-fig

The Fight Over Humanoid Robots Has Shut Down a Car Factory for the First Time
Auto workers for Hyundai Motor in South Korea are on a partial strike worried about their future job prospects

Japan Airlines will introduce humanoid robots on a trial basis from the beginning of May,
with a view to deploying them permanently as a solution to the country’s chronic labour shortage.
The Chinese-made humanoid robots will move travellers’ luggage and cargo on the tarmac at Haneda Airport,
which handles more than 60 million passengers a year.

A New York State school district is piloting a humanoid robot teacher by the company Realbotix to help students with summer school classes (Chase DiBenedetto/Mashable)
https://mashable.com/tech/new-york-school-testing-robot-teacher

New York school district is testing lifelike robot teachers
AI company Realbotix is piloting STEM robots for rural schools.

Seoul-based WIRobotics, which develops wearable and humanoid robots and is collaborating with Nvidia and AWS, raised a ~$68M Series B led by JB Investment (Lee Jaewoon/The Elec)
https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=10507

WIRobotics Raises 95 Billion Won in Series B Funding
WIRobotics said on May 15 that it completed a 95 billion won Series B funding round.The humanoid robotics company said the financing marks a major follow-on investment secured about two years after its 13 billion won Series A round in March 2024, underscoring recognition of both its next-generation

How Chinese manufacturers are dominating the humanoid robot supply chain, even as the industry struggles to find a purpose for such robots (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/busines

Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Build a Robot Without China
Building on the country’s electric vehicle industry, Chinese companies are making robot parts at a scale and price point others can’t match.

Remember the vacuum tube train? The car tunnels? The brain implant chip? The humanoid robots? Making government “efficient”? An AGI based on… tweets (wtf)?
But sure, colonizing Mars is totally real.

Can you imagine how hard it is to train robots to be as reckless as baggage handlers?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwp87j1llvo

Japan Airlines trials humanoid robots as ground handlers
These robots may in future help clean cabins and operate ground support equipment.

Trump-linked robotics startup tests humanoids in Ukraine, targets U.S. military use
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/30/humanoid-robots-ukraine-war-foundation-military-ai.html

Munich-based Microagi, which collects factory and household data to train humanoid robots, raised $55M led by Hummingbird in Germany's largest ever seed round (Éanna Kelly/Sifted)
https://sifted.eu/articles/munich-robotics-startup-…

Munich robotics startup Microagi raises $55m, Germany’s largest ever seed round
The deal was led by VC firm Hummingbird, with participation from investors Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and Redalpine.

MA-based Walden Robotics, a Toyota robotics spin-off that has started selling humanoid robots, emerges from stealth with a ~$300M seed at a $1.1B valuation (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

"Robotics has long taken cues from biology to figure out how it should move. Humanoid #robots copy our limbs. Quadrupeds borrow from dogs and horses. Small crawlers take cues from insects. That approach has produced impressive machines, but it also carries a bias. #Designers often start by asking …

This Weird 20-Legged Robot Moves Like Nothing Else on Earth and It Could Change How We Build Machines
Argus defies traditional robotics by being guided exclusively by mathematical symmetry rather than biological design.

Chinese robot maker UBTech launches U1, a line of humanoid robots for personal companionship with lifelike silicone skin and emotional AI, priced from $17,650 (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trend…

UBTech launches lifelike humanoid robots built for companionship in China
The unveiling of model U1, which has silicone skin and emotional AI, reflects tech firms’ drive to expand robotics beyond industrial use.

How companies like Nvidia and Neura Robotics are building safety systems for humanoid robots to minimize risks like a bipedal robot losing stability (John Keilman/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/the-quest-to-make

Simulating Infant First-Person Sensorimotor Experience via Motion Retargeting from Babies to Humanoids
Francisco M. L\'opez, Hoshinori Kanazawa, Ondrej Fiala, Yakov Balashov, Valentin Marcel, Lukas Rustler, Miles Lenz, Dongmin Kim, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jochen Triesch, Matej Hoffmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27583 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27583 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.27583
arXiv:2604.27583v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Motion retargeting from humans to human-like artificial agents is becoming increasingly important as humanoid robots grow more capable. However, most existing approaches focus only on reproducing kinematics and ignore the rich sensorimotor experience associated with human movement. In this work, we present a framework for simulating the multimodal sensorimotor experiences of infants using physical and virtual humanoids. From a single video, our method reconstructs the infant's body configuration by extracting its skeletal structure and estimating the full 3D pose from each frame. Then we map the reconstructed motion onto several developmental platforms: the physical iCub robot and the virtual simulators pyCub, EMFANT and MIMo. Replaying the retargeted motions on these embodiments produces simulated multisensory streams including proprioception (joints and muscles), touch, and vision. For the best-matching embodiment, the retargeting achieves sub-centimeter accuracy and enables a rich multimodal analysis of infant development as well as enhanced automated annotation of behaviors. This framework provides a unique window into the infant's sensorimotor experience, offering new tools for robotics, developmental science, and early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders. The code is available at https://github.com/ctu-vras/motion-retargeting/.
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Sources: Germany's Neura Robotics, which builds AI-powered humanoid robots, raised $1.4B from Tether, Qualcomm, Amazon, Nvidia, and others at a ~$7B valuation (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/237f10c2-b2b2-490b-bec1-8864e0a22772

Humanoid robot maker Apptronik raised ~$1B at a ~$5B valuation, including from Mercedes-Benz, which has a handful of Apptronik's Apollo robots in its factories (Joshua Brustein/Bloomberg)

Nvidia and LG expand their partnership in AI, robotics, and mobility tech, including building an AI Factory and co-designing future data center architectures (Choi Eun-Kyung/The Chosun Daily)
https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2026/06/08/L677RKI32FDF…

NVIDIA and LG Form Massive AI Team
NVIDIA and LG Form Massive AI Team Collaborating on humanoid robots, AI data centers, and mobility technologies

Nvidia unveils Halos, a new safety-focused OS derived from autonomous vehicle tech, designed to run on IGX Thor hardware for humanoid robots, and opens a lab (Ian King/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-22…

Humanoid robot maker Agility plans to go public via a merger with Michael Klein's SPAC, in a deal valuing it at ~$2.5B and listing under ticker symbol AGLT (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.co…