Robots have their own KPI now? At AGIBOT Innovation Day 2026, co-founder Peng Zhihui said: “From today on, we hope that when the industry talks about the value of robots, it won’t just be about specs and demos, but how many effective hours of intelligent work they’ve actually delivered.” AGIBOT calls this new metric Worken: active robots × autonomous working hours × output efficiency ratio.

AGIBOT Innovation Day 2026: Embodied AI, From Innovation to Real Work. 🤖 What does it take to turn embodied AI into real-world productivity? At AGIBOT Innovation Day 2026, we introduced Worken, a proposed framework for measuring the productive work robots perform in real-world environments — looking beyond deployment numbers to how autonomously and effectively they complete tasks. We also showcased advances across embodied AI: 🤖 AHA3 — our third-generation humanoid hardware architecture and first commercial “Three Intelligences in One” hardware platform 🏃 AGILE — advances in motion intelligence, including self-evolving agent capabilities 🧠 GO-3 Preview — our next-generation embodied AI foundation model 💬 WITA-Omni 1.0 — a multimodal foundation model for human-robot interaction 🏭 G2 Max — an industrial robot designed for demanding material-handling tasks in manufacturing and logistics 🌐 Link-U OS 1.0 — our embodied AI operating system, officially released at the event From hardware and models to industrial applications and commercial services, we continue to explore how embodied AI can translate into productive work. The next step isn't just smarter robots. It's more productive work. #AGIBOT# #Worken# #AGIBOTInnovationDay# #EmbodiedAI#

Another robot horse… this one’s built to carry your gear and run your errands. PHYMI just unveiled Sagi, a robotic centaur with a humanoid upper body, four wheeled legs and a cargo box on its back. The box carries the load between stops, leaving its arms free to handle things. Its launch film puts it to work hauling camping equipment, fetching items around an office and helping a courier with deliveries. PHYMI also describes LINK, a system for giving Sagi tasks and helping it when a decision needs your input. You can see what it sees, clarify what you want and let it continue the errand.

While humanoid makers work to bring robots into our homes, Japan’s MW plans to sell homes with a housework robot hanging from the ceiling. In MW’s design, MW bot travels along ceiling and wall rails, keeping its base off the floor. It uses two arms for chores, works alongside MW Cargo for transport and tucks away in a Nest when idle. Before anyone moves in, MW can plan counter heights, laundry stations and travel routes around the robot’s reach. That can reduce the variation it has to handle. MW demonstrated a prototype folding laundry in September, but it was teleoperated. The company is targeting an autonomous home demo in 2027 and sales of robot-equipped homes in 2028. For new construction, this approach makes sense. The trade-off is the installation work and a working area defined by the rails.

This robotic toilet might be more useful than a robot that does your chores. China’s Yueban built Xiaoban for people with limited mobility. Call it by voice or remote, and it comes to the bedside to help them use the toilet. It plans its own route, detects obstacles and navigates around them. Once in position, it locks its wheels and deploys supports so users can lean on the armrests as they sit down or stand up. It has a warm-water bidet and a warm-air dryer. Afterward, it heads to the bathroom, pumps waste into the existing toilet and rinses out its tank. No commode bucket for a caregiver to carry, empty or scrub. Yueban says the camera stays off while someone is using Xiaoban. It only turns on to locate the bathroom toilet during emptying. For older adults who struggle to get to the bathroom, especially in the middle of the night, this could be a huge relief.

Since unveiling Digit 5, Agility has announced four new customers: AGCO, which signed a pilot deal, and three unnamed companies. Now GXO is coming back for more. After 100,000+ tote moves at Flowery Branch, GA, it’s expanding Digit to Statesville, NC, and Lebanon, TN. Deployments are expected to start in early 2027 with Digit 4, then switch to Digit 5 once it’s commercially available. Agility’s been on a roll lately, with a Nasdaq listing getting closer.

Fourier’s GR-3 looks a lot less cuddly with its covers off 😂 CEO Alex Gu shared this clip from the team’s routine testing: GR-3 climbing up and down six floors autonomously, all in one take.

This ETH Zurich team is pushing humanoid climbing to a new level. Its Unitree G1 uses one policy for walking, climbing and crawling. The transitions between those movements aren’t manually scripted. The team trained ACP using 13.2 minutes of human motion data to learn contact patterns, then used reinforcement learning in simulation to adapt to new terrain. At runtime, onboard sensing and a goal guide where its hands, feet and knees go, without a reference motion to follow. The team says even the recovery sequence in the ladder demo wasn’t explicitly included in the human demonstrations.

Real home data is what robot training needs next. Maxinsights says it has captured over 2M hours of people doing everyday tasks, with 1.5M hours ready to train on. That includes people cooking and cleaning in real homes, at their normal pace. There’s a joke that robots can’t do housework because the people teaching them can’t either. Jokes aside, the people who do these chores every day have a lot to teach robots. The company just raised $30M in seed funding to expand data collection. It says eight of its 30+ customers are on recurring contracts.

This ETH Zurich team is pushing humanoid climbing to a new level. Its Unitree G1 uses one policy for walking, climbing and crawling. The transitions between those movements aren’t manually scripted. The team trained ACP using 13.2 minutes of human motion data to learn contact patterns, then used reinforcement learning in simulation to adapt to new terrain. At runtime, onboard sensing and a goal guide where its hands, feet and knees go, without a reference motion to follow. The team says even the recovery sequence in the ladder demo wasn’t explicitly included in the human demonstrations.

38 DoF... YQ Bionics has shared a first look inside the Y-Hand M2, which it calls the world's highest-DoF bionic hand. Look at the joints. Bone-like segments, cartilage-like components and braided ligaments work together around curved joint surfaces. The hard parts carry compression while the soft elements carry tension, giving the fingers compliance built into their structure. The pull comes from its in-house YQ Motors and YQ Muscles artificial muscle modules. Tendons running through sheaths carry that force across multiple joints, letting several actuators work together to move the fingers. Encoders and force sensors tell the controller how the hand is moving and what forces it's experiencing. Combined with vision, that feedback helps the fingers conform to an object's shape and maintain their grip.

The first Humanoid Hub Conference was incredible. Pulling off an event like this is far harder than I imagined, and it would not have been possible without the people around me. Thanks to @itsajchan and the team, who carried a huge amount of this.

Real home data is what robot training needs next. Maxinsights says it has captured over 2M hours of people doing everyday tasks, with 1.5M hours ready to train on. That includes people cooking and cleaning in real homes, at their normal pace. There’s a joke that robots can’t do housework because the people teaching them can’t either. Jokes aside, the people who do these chores every day have a lot to teach robots. The company just raised $30M in seed funding to expand data collection. It says eight of its 30+ customers are on recurring contracts.

H2-X has hooks in place of hands for this lift. That looks like an older Nissan Sylphy, around 1.2 metric tons in stock form. By that estimate, lifting the front wheels off the ground could put roughly half a metric ton across the two hooks. What do you think?

This is wild... 🤯 Unitree just unveiled H2-X, and it’s an absolute beast. Spinning kicks, aerial flips, powerful knee and elbow strikes. It jumps from a 4-meter platform onto mats, rolls with the impact, and gets back up. That whole sequence is a serious test of joint strength and whole-body control. The launch video even casts it as a personal bodyguard. It faces off with an intruder and, in a staged rescue, lifts the front of a car while someone pulls a dummy out from underneath. Unitree says the footage is real and not sped up. It also reports roughly eight hours of battery life while standing.

Oh, nice! HumanX just dropped the code behind those G1 basketball shots. 🏀 Now you can try recreating these skills on your own robot. The team has already taught Unitree G1 a range of skills, from shooting hoops and kicking a soccer ball to picking up boxes.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries is building a welder that can walk up steel walls. The four-legged prototype uses electromagnets to cling to the hull. It’s designed to use Physical AI for autonomous welding in shipbuilding. Experienced shipyard welders are getting harder to find, and Kawasaki wants to ease that shortage. Trials at its Sakaide Works are planned for 2027, with the goal of putting the robot to work in 2028. I’ve shared the RobotPlusPlus (ROBOT++) approach before: a wheeled magnetic base, dual arms and swappable tools for welding, rust removal and spraying. And this goes well beyond shipyards. Petrochemical storage tanks and wind turbine towers need inspection and maintenance, too. RobotPlusPlus says its existing robot lineup has already worked on over 10,000 ships and 1,000 storage tanks. Honestly, demand for this kind of work is huge. People shouldn’t still have to risk their lives hanging high above the ground to get it done.

Astribot brought its T1 humanoid to its North America debut at IROS 2026: a humanoid developers can actually put to work, starting around $18k. ~1.55m, 23 DOF, 5kg payload per arm, teleoperable out of the box for data collection and training, with an open SDK. The robot comes with the AI stack. Astribot builds its own models (the Lumo family) that run on the robots. They’ve showed S1 autonomously performing a backpack-packing demo: deformable objects, occlusion, multi-step, no teleoperation.