Robotics Embodiment: AI News Week Ending 04/24/2026

Robotics Embodiment: AI News Week Ending 04/24/2026

April 24, 2026

Image created with gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview with claude-opus-4.7. Image prompt: Using the provided reference image, keep the pure white landscape background, exact vertical type hierarchy, galaxy-punchout Milky Way letterforms, and the unchanged ‘(we could be)’ tagline and ‘FEATURING.’ label, but replace ‘HEROES’ with ‘ROBOTS’ in the identical bold condensed grotesque galaxy-punchout, replace ‘ALESSO’ with ‘EMBODIED HELPERS’ in the light geometric all-caps galaxy-punchout, and replace ‘TOVE LO’ with ‘TACTILE MANIPULATION’ in the condensed grotesque galaxy-punchout, matching tracking, weights, and starfield texture exactly.

# The Path Forward for AI Startups A lot of founders are messaging each other after the SpaceXAI <> Cursor “IPO-deferred acquisition”. Common discussion topic: what is the future for independent startups? Must ~everyone ultimately be acquired by a frontier lab or go extinct?
https://x.com/russelljkaplan/status/2047077659985981616

Better AI models enable more ambitious work · Cursor
https://cursor.com/blog/better-models-ambitious-work

Sources: Cursor in talks to raise $2B+ at $50B valuation as enterprise growth surges | TechCrunch

Sources: Cursor in talks to raise $2B+ at $50B valuation as enterprise growth surges

SpaceX and Cursor Have Explored an AI Team-up With Mistral – Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-xai-explored-collaborating-with-mistral-cursor-2026-4

SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI. The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2046713419978453374

The structure of the deal is pretty interesting here. I think what’s happening is: 1. xAI is having trouble training a SOTA coding model (hence cofounder departures), bunch of idle GPUs 2. Cursor doesn’t have capital to blow on a $5B training run to compete with Codex/Claude 3.
https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478

Figure shows a serious humanoid production ramp. Brett’s graph doesn’t have a y-axis. Assuming June 2023 = 1 unit and the graph is linear: 2023: 2 units 2024: 26 2025: 79 2026 (till Apr 21st): 312 Annualized run-rate based on the past 21 days of production: 2,589/year.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2047041923387695504

Humanoid robots manufactured at Figure by month
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2046975249686941711

To prevent dangerous airbase bird strikes, the US military last year replaced $75k Boston Dynamics’ quadrupeds with $3k rovers attached with plastic coyote decoys. Making security robots look as human as possible will serve as a similar psychological visual deterrent.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044860410420183489

Elon on Q1 call, confirming what he posted last week: “”AI5 chip will (first) go into Optimus and the data center. It’s looking like we’ll be able to achieve unsupervised robotaxi with AI4, which is far better than human safety, so AI5 is certainly not immediately needed in
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2047075601312633316

Elon on Q1 earnings call: – Optimus v3 is functional, but there are some aesthetic elements to be worked on. It may be unveiled in the middle of 2026. – We’re a little hesitant to show it off because we find our competitors do a frame-by-frame analysis and copy everything we
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2047070791234375765

In the Q1 shareholder deck, Tesla shared the latest picture of the interior of the Cortex 2 data center at Giga Texas, which will be used to train Optimus.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2047051071701561842

Misleading headline alert: “”Tesla Plans to Produce Humanoid Robots in Shanghai, Aiming for 100,000 Unit Capacity by End of 2026″”, except that’s not what Tesla said. Tesla VP Wang Hao said Shanghai Gigafactory has the potential to build humanoid robots. No timelines, no
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044811653762650619

Tesla in Q1 2026 Shareholder Update: – Preparations for our first large-scale Optimus factory will begin shortly in Q2. – First-gen line designed for 1M robots/year will replace Model S/X lines in Fremont Factory, second-gen line is being prepared at Giga Texas (long-term
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2047049489874383097

Tesla published five new patents yesterday, all for the Optimus robotic hand and arm: 1. Covers cable routing through the wrist joint. The key innovation is that cables are arranged in a lateral stack on the forearm side and transition to a vertical stack on the hand side,
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045270641210011767

Tesla showed off its first tendon-driven hand in October 2024, but demos of Optimus grasping things with integrated tendon-driven hands remain scarce. Here’s an instance of grasping action. The forearm packaging is impressively compact. Notice how the hand springs back after
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2046502804093800822

A knee is “”killed,”” but Figure 03 walks away on its own to the repair station. Self-awareness will be a critical safety feature in humanoid controls. A sudden malfunction or part failure shouldn’t result in dangerous falls or uncontrolled flailing.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044817510667853987

Great having friends from UAE in the house!
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2046782865321734495

New swag at Hark for the team 😍
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2045525722060722271

The most general-purpose form will be one that can close the automation loop and repair any special or general-purpose robot, including itself. This is how Grok imagines Figure 03 would repair its knee😆
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044824517609238531

When you’re thinking about what to wear, I’m in the office putting in the work
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2046808720957636690

Boston Dynamics just gave its robot dog a brain that reasons about the physical world. Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics model is now running inside Spot, the four-legged robot already deployed at thousands of facilities worldwide. The upgrade centers on something called
https://x.com/rowancheung/status/2046245892328743221

MIT engineers built an AI wristband that controls robots by reading your hand muscles. It works by using an ultrasound to capture images of the muscles and tendons in your wrist. An AI algorithm then translates those images into the exact position of all 5 fingers, tracking 22
https://x.com/rowancheung/status/2045158931367072104

Asimov v1 An open-source DIY humanoid kit you can build at home. Price goal $15,000, available to pre-order for a refundable $499 – 1.2m (3’11″”), 35kg (77 lb), 25+2 DOF – Ships this summer with the full BOM, CAD files, sim environment, and a pre-trained walking policy, all on
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2047045456157651298

At the Beijing Humanoid Half Marathon, the Unitree H1 robots ran carrying backpacks filled with ice for supplemental cooling.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045702643449037287

Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon is tomorrow, April 19, 2026. – Bipedal only – “We are not a car!” – Over 300 humanoid robots from 76+ teams (nearly 5× last year) – ~40% will run fully autonomous – Height limit: 2 ft 6 in – 5 ft 11 in Key Rules – 20% penalty added to
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045417862236618755

Bot purging was way more aggressive than my “”New Followers”” graph shows. Those red bars should have been bigger than the blue ones for a lot of days in the last 4 weeks.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044826997604716624

bro just died 😭
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045175725557465384

Deep learning curriculum for robotics. [📍 Link to Playlist below ] Modern robotics workflows often integrate deep learning models with traditional algorithms for mapping, localization, and control. This playlist builds it from scratch: Single neurons → Backprop → CNNs →
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2046498175444222110

Dwarkesh: “Wheeled humanoids do make sense in a lot of use cases.” Legged humanoid:
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044876911604838463

Everyone in robotics knows this pain
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2045768586799497615

Everyone is hyped about humanoid robots right now. But almost no one is talking about what actually breaks when you try to deploy them in the real world… That’s exactly what we’ll discuss today: “Deploying Humanoids in the Real World: What Breaks Between Demo and Production”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2046862319079092659

Got ratioed by a random trillionaire 😭
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2046268812270633176

H20 humanoid by Agile Robots lands a Webster flip.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044897579033620701

Honor Lightning robots swept the podium at this year’s Beijing Half Marathon. Unitree’s “”bipedal”” robot next year:
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2046662854095634438

Humanoids as autonomous mobile scarecrows are a no-brainer at this point.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044854792665907302

I’ve been following this team for a while now, and if you’ve been tracking the buzz around Physical AI…. You know the biggest hurdle is moving from a polished simulation to a messy, real-world factory floor. At @hannover_messe this week, @FRANKAROBOTICS is showing exactly how
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2046287801197482015

Introducing Vulcan – a new Al robot controller This is an important safety feature that allows F.03 to lose up to 3 actuators in the lower body and still hobble around without falling Check it out
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2044797356965757065

It seems like the billboard with the blurred humanoid in Times Square I posted a couple of days ago was part of the reveal of @XSquareRobot’s newest move. They are already deploying robots into real homes. They’ve partnered with 58[.]com to run human and robot home cleaning
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2045197798518161553

Korean robotics leader ROBOTIS has unveiled the ‘AI Sapiens’ humanoid, a direct challenge to Unitree’s G1 and R1 models. – 4’3″” (130 cm) tall and weighing 34 kg. – Features 23 DOF, powered by the brand-new Dynamixel-Q actuators. The robot is a fully open-source hardware system
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2046485417458110702

MIT researchers just replicated human muscles with AI-controlled fibers. Inside each fiber is a sealed tube of electrically charged liquid and a tiny electric pump. When the pump activates, one side contracts while the other relaxes, just as your biceps and triceps do when you
https://x.com/rowancheung/status/2046970405219713065

POV: You just realised you can train lab robots without ever touching a real lab
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2045563762493534688

robotics demo are aaaalways flawless. a warehouse? not so much. Everyone deploying knows, that gap has been the open secret of the industry for years: Perfect lighting, perfect items, perfect choreography on stage. Then the truck backs in with a thousand mismatched SKUs and
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2044687800113471763

Scott Walter (@GoingBallistic5) explains Tesla Optimus’ innovative rolling contact finger joints from the newly published patents.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045900216407323082

Skild showed something similar last year but with quadrupeds. Skild brain, trained on 100,000 diverse simulated robot types enabled remarkable real-time adaptability. In-context adaptation allows the brain to discern the robot form and adapt to extreme changes in its body.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044841083734217085

So many robotics companies trying to solve everything at once… Last year I talked to @NimaGard, Director of AI at @PathRobotics about this… Doing one thing really really well. They went after welding. Today they’re introducing Rove™, which embodies Obsidian™ (Path’s
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2044791803241504984

Stanford CS223A — Introduction to Robotics (Oussama Khatib) Kinematics, dynamics, force control; the mathematical foundations of robotics. Students go through modeling, planning, control, and trajectory generation. A full lecture series covering the core of robot systems.
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2045125205555630168

The Beijing Humanoid Half Marathon (21.1 km) just concluded! The humanoid winner was significantly faster than the top human finisher. – 1st place: Monkey King Team – Honor Lightning robot, 50 min 26 seconds – 2nd place: Mixue Ice City Team – same Honor Lightning robot,
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045698430316769538

The CRAFT hand is an open-source, tendon-driven robotic hand that costs under $600 to build. – features rigid links for strength – uses soft, rolling-contact joints to absorb impact – driven by 15 motors in the forearm, it can perform all 33 Feix grasp types
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044633558355268029

The Honor Lightning humanoid is built tough!! During the Beijing Half Marathon, it fell just metres from the finish line, got back up, and kept going. It crossed the line with the fastest time of 48m 19s, but was penalized with a 1.2x time multiplier for being teleoperated and
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045725310092771361

The humanoid acceleration is here. Don’t resist the inevitable.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045410494815813988

The progress in just one year is staggering. Last year’s Beijing Half Marathon winning humanoid vs. this year’s: 2 hours 40 min 50 min
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045732254375440549

This is who put up that huge billboard in Times Square this week: X Square Robot, who is already deploying its technology in real homes. They’ve partnered with 58[.]com (Craigslist of China) to bring cleaning robots to homes. On April 21, they’re announcing a robotics
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045191867474845994

This text-to-motion tool is fun to play with.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2044648398427668712

This was quick. A Japanese engineer already made a functional mockup of the Tesla Optimus hand patent that has recently surfaced.
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045182077239476439

We’ve just open-sourced the SONIC training code, the training data, the algorithms used to generate the data, and more to come. You now have the full recipe for building SONIC whole-body controllers for your own humanoids. Enjoy! Code: https://t.co/z8ZxRIzo1R Web Demo:
https://x.com/yukez/status/2044797463022748109

Elon enters the chat
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2046029187480449149

The contrast is striking. Tesla is inviting people to watch Optimus cheer from the sidelines at the Boston Marathon. Meanwhile, 300 humanoids from 26 Chinese OEMs actually participated in the Beijing Half Marathon. Multiple robots finished faster than the human winner, 40%
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2045720955096559954

It cruises over grass, stone steps, shallow water, and steep hills like it was born for the outdoors. 📍 open-source 4WD AGV: No more indoor-only experiments, suddenly your „project” can actually go explore. It’s DFRobot’s open-source 4WD AGV chassis: four direct-drive hub
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2046135804750086191

An Open Source Dev Kit for AI-native Robotics 📍GitHub:
https://t.co/U11gUQXipc Saying hello to me friend and founder of the robot learning company, @JannikGrothusen. Great for beginners! —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2045926158030573893

Robots don’t feel, they just follow positions. That’s why they fail in the real world. This paper shows what changes: It lets robots feel force while acting. Not just where to move, but how hard to push. That’s the difference between demo and real work. Thanks for sharing,
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2045049462066676179