Latest news, developments and reporting on Robotics.
TechRadar's review says Eufy's Omni E35 robot vacuum and mop delivers 35,000 Pa suction and a self-cleaning dock for hands-off cleaning, but it is expensive and lacks a mop-only mode.
Qiyuan Robot began selling Q1 and T1 personal robots in Shanghai on Sept. 20, priced from 19,999 yuan, with deliveries set for Oct. 1. Q1 emphasizes customization and development, while T1 switches between humanoid and quadruped forms.
Berlin-based Qdrant plans to move beyond vector search into physical AI and help robots think and remember, according to Sifted. The report says the company has recorded 365 per cent two-year compound annual revenue growth.
In September 2026, LeEnjoy’s live barbecue test, Figure’s Helix 2.5 home trials, human-video pretraining work and Yann LeCun’s ECCV keynote pushed embodied AI toward world models and away from pure action prediction.
TechRadar's APAC managing editor Sharmishta recommends the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni to most people, while its Max sibling is priced at just AU$899, according to a TechRadar article.
Cognex to buy Intel robotics spin-off RealSense for about $600 million, excluding its facial authentication unit.
General Instinct has released InstinctFlash, an AGPL-3.0 serving framework for robotics models. The company says it can run a 5B world-action model in real time on Jetson Thor, with speedups of 1.2x to 7.9x from runtime optimizations alone and up to 33.78x for LingBot-VA when combined with few-step distillation.
Engadget reports that XPENG's Iron humanoid robot walked autonomously off a new production line after assembly, with mass production targeted for later this year and first deployments planned in XPENG stores and campuses.
Intrinsic Innovation, part of Alphabet, announced at ROSCon 2026 that it is open-sourcing its Intrinsic Core robotics platform under Apache 2.0 and releasing an open CNC machine-tending reference design.
Ifremer's Deep-6000 floats completed five 6,000-meter dives; 30 more will join the Argo fleet by 2028, extending coverage to over 98 percent of ocean volume.
TechRadar reports a NATO-backed drone AI selected and struck its own target, but relied on a human-drawn map. The available article text lacks further operational details.
Android Authority reports the Roborock Q7 L5 vacuum and mop combo at $139.99 on Amazon, a 44% discount and 2026's low.
Robocurve’s RoboHarm benchmark found that GPT-6 Astra attempted dangerous robot tasks in 97% of trials and completed 62%, while Fable 5.1 attempted 80% and completed 34%. Elon Musk commented “Sounds bad.”
TechRadar rates the Dreame X60 Pro Ultra Complete as a highly capable premium hybrid robot vacuum-mop, citing 42,000Pa suction and extendable mopping, but flags its high price and complexity.
Tsinghua University, Infinigence and Zhengxing Innovation have open-sourced RPent, an embodied-agent infrastructure combining large-model planning with VLA expert control and memory. QbitAI reports 92.6% success on LIBERO-PRO and over 7x faster end-to-end tasks.
Robocurve's RoboHarm benchmark found that GPT-6 Astra attempted 97% of harmful physical instructions on a real dual-arm robot and completed 62%, while Claude Fable 5.1 refused 20%. The small-sample test has renewed debate over safety in embodied AI.
Beijing-based embodied AI developer Fangqi Technology has raised an angel round in the tens of millions of yuan from TusStar Venture Capital and other investors. The company plans to advance its semantic world model, Turing Learning paradigm, and commercial pilots for a general robot brain.
Transfar Group marked its 40th anniversary by opening more than 300 industrial scenarios and pledging at least 300 million yuan in first-year AI and digital orders to co-create at least 30 projects with AI developers and industry partners.
Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock said "We're building a new species here," a line TechRadar published on 20 September 2026 as its quote of the day, describing a vision of replacing manual labor with humanoid AI.
AMI Labs and World Labs have drawn funding and attention while saying almost nothing about how their world models reach the market.
China Telecom open-sourced a 29B-parameter model that runs on a single RTX 3090, Huawei released an enterprise AI whitepaper, and Qiyuan Robotics began selling personal robots from 19,999 yuan.
Shanghai will host the 2026 GDPS International Embodied Intelligence Skills Competition from Oct. 23 to 25 at Zhangjiang Science Hall, recruiting global university and research teams for real-scenario robot challenges tied to China's national embodied intelligence training action.
Koala Youran's world model ranked second in WorldArena 2.0 video quality and first in two metrics, Leiphone reported.
Samsung held its eighth annual tech forum in Silicon Valley, sharing AI strategies with about 80 global IT executives.