42HOW Robotics

Inside China’s robotics, embodied-AI and AI-hardware ecosystem. Research, interviews and reporting from the ground.

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IDC said global humanoid robot shipments neared 25,000 in H1 2026, up 432.1% YoY; China exceeded 19,000 (77.9%). Zhiyuan shipped over 8,600, holding 35% globally and over 45% domestically.

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A light bulb, a surprisingly tricky robotics task. @PaXiniAI robot takes on screwing in a bulb at #IROS2026

A task that demands careful alignment, a steady grip, and controlled twisting force on fragile glass.

Small task, big dexterity challenge.

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#IROS, catch the stick challenge by @SharpaRobotics , newly launched D01 uses stereo cameras to precisely locate the random sticks, then catches them securely with high-precision control as they fall. according to onsite obeservation, D01 success rate is around 90%,compared with roughly 30-40% average human participants. Few people can match the robots performance. In fact only one male has managed to do so by today.

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On Sept. 28, Qiyuan Robotics opened a 355-square-meter Shanghai store at Longfeng PRSCO, selling Qiyuan Q1 and T1 personal robots. Operated by Yongda Auto, it combines retail, demonstrations and experiences.

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On Sept. 28, Nvidia introduced its agent security platform and open-sourced OpenShell under Apache 2.0; existing Vera CPU and BlueField-4 systems need only a software update to enable it.

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At IROS in Pittsburgh on Sept. 28, Sharpa unveiled D01 humanoid, W02 dexterous hand and AE01 data glove, spanning motion, manipulation and data capture; D01 and AE01 demonstrated robot bartending.

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A tactile sensor inspired by a Magic Slate.

At IROS, @EdwardAdelson from MIT shows: GlowTact uses a black membrane over rough, clear gel. When an object presses on it, the surfaces touch and optically couple, so the contact area appears black to the camera. Where they don’t touch, a tiny air gap remains and the area looks gray.
Press harder, and the image gets darker. The demo showed raw camera video—no image processing—with enough sensitivity to detect an M&M’s weight and resolve grooves just 0.25 mm wide.
A simple optical trick could make tactile sensing easier to build.

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Zhiyuan Robotics and Chimelong opened an embodied AI theme park at Chimelong Spaceship Park, deploying 300+ robots across seven scenarios and delivering its 20,000th Expedition A3 Ultra robot.

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Galaxy General announced a partnership with Digital China: Galbot robots and AstraBrain will support a co-built development platform for retail, industrial, healthcare and education deployments.

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Mifeng Technology says Mifeng Pai’s one-month beta reached 20,000 registered users and collected 13,000 action samples from real-world scenarios for training physical AI models.

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On Sept. 22, Anthropic said Claude Opus 5.5 matches Claude Fable 5.1 on most tasks, cuts typical costs 40%, and is available via Claude, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

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At Alibaba’s Sept. 22, 2026 Yunqi Conference, CEO Wu Yongming said machine intelligence is under 3% of humanity’s thinking today but could exceed it 1,000-fold; Alibaba plans 5–10 trillion-parameter models.

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Lei Jun shared Artificial Analysis rankings: MiMo‑V2.6‑Pro scored 46.32, ranking as the highest-scoring open-source model and tied for sixth among all models.

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UBTECH released a humanoid robot ethics governance white paper on Sept. 20, outlining three protection goals and a seven-step risk-management framework spanning development, deployment, and retirement.

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At a Sept. 21 Open Day, Tsinghua University’s Institute for AI Industry Research unveiled ICCL self-evolving physical intelligence and Zeta-Ego, saying the model is first to extract physical causal priors from unlabeled Ego data.

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Zhishen Technology completed a strategic Series B financing of tens of millions of dollars on Sept. 20, led by UAE-based Stone Venture. By June 2026, it had mass-produced over 15,000 industry-grade embodied AI robots.

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Qiyuan Robotics unveiled its Q1 and T1 consumer personal robots at a Shanghai event on Sept. 20, and announced a partnership with Tencent WorkBuddy to add agent capabilities.

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UBTECH’s H1 2026 revenue rose 104.2% YoY to RMB1.27bn. Full-size embodied humanoid robots generated RMB590m, up 1,445%, becoming its largest revenue source; adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed 45.9% to RMB170m.

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On Aug. 25, Physical Intelligence posted a Software Engineer, Data Quality role for a Data Operations team managing third-party multimodal data, suggesting external data enters robot foundation-model training with formal supplier QA and audits.

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UDI Robot (Wuxi) passed HKEX’s hearing for a Chapter 18C main-board listing. Revenue rose to RMB318m in 2025, but it remained loss-making; top-five customers reached 83.2% of Q1 2026 revenue.