Tootfinder

China has unveiled an AI-powered humanoid robot that it plans to send to the #Moon as part of its 2029 Chang’e-8 mission: https://www.independent.co.uk/space/china-robot-moon-mission-humanoid-b2974130.html - the 100 kilogram robot will act as a porter to transport and install instruments at various lunar locations ahead of a crewed landing.

Beijing-based humanoid robotics company Robotera raised over $200M led by SF Group, after raising ~$146M in March at a ~$1.47B valuation (Du Zhihang/Caixin Global)
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-04-27/rob…

Robot Era Raises Over $200 Million as Humanoid Robot Race Heats Up - Caixin Global
Robot Era Raises More Than $200 Million as China’s Humanoid-Robot Race Heats Up - he SF Express-led round follows a 1 billion yuan financing announced in March that valued the startup at more than 10 billion yuan

Bernstein: 42% of China's 20K humanoid robot shipments in 2025 were education and R&D; data collection and human-robot interaction services each made up 19% (Ryan McMorrow/Financial Times)
https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/rede…

Life imitates art... or something... I find myself thinking of Becky Chambers novels. 😉
I, robe-ot: the android monk working to reboot the faith of South Korea’s Buddhists
Jogyesa temple in South Korea initiated Gabi, a humanoid robot into its order this week, as it combats falling participation and interest

I, robe-ot: the android monk working to reboot the faith of South Korea’s Buddhists
Jogyesa temple in South Korea initiated Gabi, a humanoid robot into its order this week, as it combats falling participation and interest

Chinese humanoid robot maker UBTech is seeking a chief scientist with an annual pay of as much as ~$18M; China's AI industry has eschewed mega pay packages (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-03/ch…

Melania Trump appeared alongside Figure AI's Figure 3 humanoid robot at the White House to promote integrating more tech and AI into US children's education (Katie Rogers/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/us/politics/melania-trump-robot.html…

Melania Trump Appears With a Robot, Saying More Children Should Be Educated by Them
The first lady, Melania Trump, believes that more children should be educated by “humanoid educators.”

Meta acquires a startup Assured Robot Intelligence to bolster its robotics team, which is working on humanoid hardware and the underlying AI that powers it (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

"Our key insight is that, despite being imperfect, such quasi-realistic data still provide priors about human primitive skills in tennis scenarios.... We also propose a series of designs for robust sim-to-real transfer and deploy our policy on the Unitree G1 #humanoid_robot . Our method achieves surprising results in the real world and can stably sustain multi-shot rallies with human p…

Sources: Chinese companies move to cement their role in humanoid robot supply chains as Tesla and others turn to China for components the US sees as strategic (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/under-the-skin-of-ameri…

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/.
toXiv_bot_toot

Encord, whose software helps companies developing AI models manage training data for robots and other uses, raised $60M at a $500M pre-money valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/robot-data-startup-raises-60-million

A Robot Data Startup Raises $60 Million
Companies developing AI models to power humanoid and other robots have been hard at work collecting videos and other data for training their models, even paying people to record themselves completing tasks in homes and workplaces.As these data-collection efforts start to pay off, and robots take ...

A look at Hyundai's Atlas humanoid robot, slated for assembly tasks in 2028; Hyundai has invested billions in robotics since acquiring Boston Dynamics in 2021 (Hyonhee Shin/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

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…

Pop Quiz: Which possesses a heart and a soul?
#irony #satire #Melania #robot

Sources: Amazon acquired New York-based Fauna Robotics, which is developing a human-like, 42-inch tall robot that can interact with people, walk, and dance (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026…