Every week, I organize 400 to 700 links into roughly 60 categories as part of my ongoing effort to learn about AI. This is my personal notebook, which I enjoy sharing with friends… a hobby and a labor of love, rather than a commercial publication or product.
If you arrived here through a search or shared link, this page collects the links I found for Robotics Embodiment for the week ending August 28, 2026.
As part of my learning process, I like to automate the category covers. It gives me a chance to learn Python and APIs.
This week’s cover prompt was written using Claude Opus 4.7, and the image was generated using Nano Banana 2.1.
Category Cover Image Prompt: A mid-1980s murder-mystery movie poster in dense pen-and-ink engraving on pure black, wide three-story Victorian mansion with turrets, lit arched windows showing campy robot suspects (a tin automaton with an oil can, a sleek humanoid android in evening wear, a quadruped robot posed like a hound) plus windows crowded with gears, servos, and circuit boards, and one window with a lone robotic hand pressed to the glass, open front door with a slim silver-haired butler in black tailcoat holding a silver tray with an envelope sealed by a tiny cog symbol, fat rounded white title lettering reading Robots above the roofline, warm amber window light, 16:9.
This Week in Robotics Embodiment News
Summary by Claude Sonnet 5.5 based on this week’s links:
- Robot data is the new bottleneck: Figure's Index app, which crowdsources robot training video, reports 264K downloads, 44K weekly contributors and 16M uploads, with $1B pledged to data and compute over 12 months. Skild's S1 pointed the same way: its team says a single video demonstration was worth about 380 teleoperation episodes.
- Microduck made home robots cheap and hackable: Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics announced Microduck, a $399 open-source biped you train with reinforcement learning, shipping before Christmas. Thomas Wolf said it was selling one every 5 seconds, and a simulator lets buyers try the same policies while they wait.
- Big money keeps flowing in: Reported deals included SoftBank in talks for a majority stake in 1X at roughly $6B, and XPeng's robotics unit raising over $900M at a $6.3B valuation. Hark also announced a multi-year compute partnership with NVIDIA.
This summary was generated by Claude Sonnet 5.5 to help you explore the links below. Rest assured, I select, organize, and check the links by hand in Google Sheets, and write the introduction and personal commentary in The Main Newsletters myself each week as a labor of love.
This week's links related to Robotics Embodiment
Hark is building models that can use computers better than humans Handoff operates across the internet, which is most of the computer use worldwide and a genuinely noisy place to work in I’m looking forward to the day I stop using a traditional computer”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2092057875019624680
Today Hark is announcing a multi-year partnership with NVIDIA with gigawatt-scale compute capacity on next-generation Vera Rubin platforms Hark is building multimodal systems that remember who you are and what you plan to do. Our work with NVIDIA will support frontier model”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2092989234189869211
$6B. For 1X ! In this market. That’d be daylight robbery. SoftBank is in talks to buy a majority stake in 1X Technologies at a ~$6B valuation, per The Information. The part that stands out from the report: OpenAI reportedly discussed acquiring 1X outright last year. SoftBank”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2093018111352139857
Home humanoids are a decade away. Warehouse humanoids? Bad business case. The real money… Welding ships. This small team from Houston just raised $42M to prove it. Here’s how they’re doing it 🧵”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2091524393717408005
The sense of touch is the most criminally under-explored modality in robotics. Imagine doing sleight of hand wearing thick oven mitts. That’s exactly how a robot feels today if it were alive. A magnetic piece snapping into place, a paper cup peeling out of a stack, a USB”
https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/2090832821036470626
This robot just beat Figure’s package sorting speed. Robotic arms powered by X Square Robot’s WALL-B embodied AI sorted 10K parcels in 5 hours 14 minutes. That’s 1.88 sec per parcel, ~35% faster than Figure’s reported 2.88 seconds per parcel. Figure’s 9-day continuous demo in”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2090666295796588970
15 feet up. 15 feet down. Fully autonomous”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2091204189947105619
One interesting point: this is a real customer use case. We have to climb up this exact ladder to a mezzanine to do the work, then just climb back down when the shift is over”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2091907366401069491
We’re now over 43,000 weekly active users collecting data to train Helix, our AI model for F.03 robots This data collection project, Index, is our answer to the data problem: the largest useful robot training dataset in the world Extrapolate out, and this is the pretraining”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2092628102262477268
Introducing Index Today we’re coming out of stealth with Index, the largest & most diverse robot dataset in the world → 30min of video uploads/sec → 16M video uploads → Paid $15M to date → 264k downloads We’re committed to spending $1B the next 12 months on data & compute”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2092303633559982106
Figure takes vertical integration to another level. Figure built its own egocentric data collection pipeline. Index is a crowdsourcing platform where anyone can collect data. – 264K app downloads across 108 countries – 44K weekly active contributors – 16M videos uploaded, 30″
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092388111083065555
BIG ANNOUNCEMENT FROM HUGGING FACE TODAY: We’re unveiling Microduck 🐥🤖 It’s a tiny $399 open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning. It can walk, pick things up, get back up when it falls, and even roller-skate. Welcome to the era of open-source”
https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2092931447644442635
Home robots are coming. The first ones in will be the small ones that are safe around kids and pets. Hugging Face’s Pollen Robotics just opened pre-orders for Microduck, a $399 biped. 25cm, under 800g, 15 motors, a camera, a small LiDAR, two IMUs, and an articulated beak that”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2093015638331769030
Sharing some fun experiments with Microduck Basically, once you have an open-source robot with so many sensors, the sky’s the limit Here we vibe-coded an image detector integration to detect and follow a laser pointer. More at
https://x.com/Thom_Wolf/status/2092959363992326236
AGIBOT and X-Humanoid ran away with the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. AGIBOT took 18 golds. X-Humanoid took 15. Every other team combined managed 12. Here’s AGIBOT’s gold-medal run in the 100m obstacle race.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2093009334712291349
We’re excited to release the best open-weight model for robotics. Isaac 0.5 is a 36B, 2.5B active per token model, one sparse backbone serving video perception, embodied reasoning and robot control.”
https://x.com/ArmenAgha/status/2092682391794155885
Absolute madness at the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games. In the 100m final, robots crossed the line and immediately became hot scrap. Team Tianjiao won gold at 8.64 seconds. Another record. Human world record is 9.58 second”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092640392303067562
New record for humanoid 100m sprint: 8.86 seconds. Funny that robots end the race by crashing into a mattress. They should disqualify anyone who can’t come to a controlled stop within 50 meters of the finish line.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092295143764504626
Robot sacrificed itself to win the race.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2091185502385057972
Today, we’re kicking off the first phase of the research preview for Model Hardware Standard (MHS): a new standard for AI agents to safely operate physical equipment in scientific research and advanced manufacturing. Read more:
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2093038426140651791
This is very nice work from NVIDIA. Like all high-performing approaches on ARC-AGI-3, it uses deep learning-guided on-the-fly synthesis of symbolic world models, i.e. navigating the world by generating programs to represent what you know. To be clear, like with several other”
https://x.com/fchollet/status/2090838046937645398
XPeng’s robotics unit raised over $900M at a $6.3B post-money valuation. Largest single-round private raise in China’s embodied AI sector. IDG Capital led. Tencent, Alibaba, and Gaorong joined. Worth understanding the structure. XPeng Inc. is publicly traded, but this money did”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092133596098359762
Humanoid AI models are hungry for diverse egocentric data with high-quality hand pose annotations. Ropedia’s HOMIE Gen2 targets that demand. A 380g headset that captures 360° from four cameras plus four-channel spatial audio, and outputs depth maps, camera poses, 21 hand and”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092824006823227740
Excited to bring Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 to the world, this is an update to our anything in, anything out world model. It now supports: – 360p drafts, 4K up samplers – up to 10 seconds of video context when extending – video extensions in 10 second increments – video references”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2093014204324417881
Joining the MTS stream today at 10am PST to yap about world models and spatial intelligence!”
https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/2090836155906289667
Learning How the World Evolves Extrapolative Video World Models via Latent Dynamics Reasoning paper:
https://x.com/_akhaliq/status/2091958146596041142
Thanks so much for sharing! @_akhaliq 🥰 The core idea is to learn how the world evolves, rather than directly predict what the future looks like. LDR maps past frames into structured latent states and rolls them forward with kinematic integration, learning only the higher-order”
https://x.com/haodongli00/status/2091961954562887884
This week on Autonomy Signals presented by @KPMG, @gbrulte and @RobGsix discuss @Tesla’s upcoming Cybercab commercial launch and their self-certification path, @Waymo’s California monopoly and @Softbank’s $200M bet on @GravisRobotics. Episode Chapters 0:00 KPMG Sponsor”
https://x.com/RoadToAutonomy/status/2090863128061820982
“89% of the humanoid community has done this.” For years, researchers had to fight for every dollar they could get to work on humanoids. Then the market changed… the hype came. Suddenly, you could put together a pitch deck, talk about humanoids and embodied AI, and raise”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2092522687239500271
Humanoid startup co-founders, behind the scenes”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2091305570162880988
I still remember back when I was working at my first robotics startup and we built a station to test our system 24/7. The wild part about developing hardware at that speed was that after just a few weeks of continuous testing, the product had already evolved so fast that the”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2091071892694110333
The University of Michigan put their entire robotics degree on GitHub. Not one course. The whole curriculum. ROB 101 … Computational Linear Algebra for Robotics ROB 311 … How to Build Robots and Make Them Move ROB 501 … Mathematics for Robotics ROB 530 … Mobile Robotics Every”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2092883820877926851
Year 2050″
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2091559896315740376
Yes, Figure is accelerating again. We’re going through another step change in capabilities Tomorrow we’ll be sharing a critical update, one that’s required to solve general robotics”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2092094383843926099
You may or may not see Figure robots walking outdoors when driving around the Figure headquarters. Just saying. Saw some yesterday with @GoingBallistic5″
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2091270467567161528
Figure campus is a sci-fi movie”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2091663840832618591
From weather forecasting to robotics, intelligent decision-making relies on understanding the unknown. Our VP Research @ZoubinGhahrama1 explores with @fryrsquared why teaching systems self-doubt and probability can lead to safer, more reliable real-world decision-making. 🧠”
https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2093019627437662680
currently selling one Microduck every 5 seconds”
https://x.com/Thom_Wolf/status/2093014172531339383
I and my wallet were definitely successfully nerd-sniped by this”
https://x.com/gneubig/status/2092971650803208247
New models to know this week ▪️ MoE-ViE … Meta’s sparse mixture-of-experts vision encoder for efficient image and video understanding. ▪️ τ0-VLA – robot foundation model that “thinks” through possible outcomes before acting (AgiBot Finch) ▪️ 4DAnyone – turns a single casual”
https://x.com/TheTuringPost/status/2092420798539833839
Sergey Levine (@svlevine) is one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. We talked about where humanoid robotics is today, thoughts on the Chinese robotics ecosystem, and his predictions for future timelines. In this episode: •”
https://x.com/ryanlpeterman/status/2091873166927020478
Humanoid robots can now play tennis in the style of Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, learned from broadcast footage. AdaPT (Noitom Robotics, Shanghai AI Lab, Dobot, SJTU) extracts professional player motions from TV broadcasts, retargets them to a humanoid, and learns both”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2090670770808848539
Chinese humanoid robots for no reason”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092659591398178966
Europe has already lost the AI race.” I hear this bashing almost every single week on LinkedIn and X. Not so much when I talk to the teams who are actually working on it. They are trying to do something about it. Take @FeyerLabs. They are not building another generic wrapper”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2091798162952376655
Humanoids will soon become great practice partners for tennis and other sports. These robots, trained by Galbot, are preparing to play with celebrities at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. They’re fully autonomous.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2090826889694982307
I’m bringing a small group of Italy’s robotics ecosystem together in Turin this October. During Wave by Vento (formerly Italian Tech Week), I’m hosting a 22Astronauts side event: Building the Future of Italian Industry with Robotics 📍 Turin 📅 October 8 The idea is simple:”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2091950341440872460
In the long jump final at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games, Team Tianjiao’s robot cleared 7.97 meters to win gold.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092122355103564019
Go to New York, they said. It’s gonna be fun, they said. You will meet interesting people, they said. …They were right. A day with @viamrobotics. Full episode drops this Sunday.”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2090861993582346388
Generalist AI just released GEN-1.5. It might be robotics’ GPT-3 moment. What is one-shot learning via in-context prompting? In the case of language models like GPT-3, including a Q&A example in the prompt before the actual question improved performance across a broad suite of”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2090662734551818253
We have a huge news to share today! Today we are unveiling the first truly accessible RL robot – welcome Microduck A 25 cm tiny open-source biped with 15 actuators and packed with sensors (camera, speaker, LiDAR, NFC, bluetooth, wifi, etc) that you train yourself with”
https://x.com/Thom_Wolf/status/2092923071829049592
Perceptron’s Isaac 0.5 is a 36B open-weight embodied foundation model with only 2.5B active per token. The model – Perception, reasoning, and control all read from one shared backbone, so it makes visual decisions mid-trajectory – Null-expert routing lets each token use between”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092974952769048876
{ 📌 Robotics Resource} A working pick-and-place robot. Built from scratch in 24 hours. Filmed start to finish. Free to watch. The Technical Chief of Staff took two industrial arms (a UR5e and a UF850) and built a fully functioning pick-and-place system on camera. No pre-built”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2092673681369747734
A biped. With what’s effectively an angular-jaw gripper on a single arm.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2093033695766868100
Humanity has achieved reusable orbital rockets. And single-use robots.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092309371518882157
Humanoid Robot Games 2030″
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092652779001221189
Just look at these systems from CPS… they show what hyper-optimized automation actually looks like. Product arrives flat, a racetrack mechanism flips it upright, rows get grouped, and a bomb-door system drops the whole batch into the case. Fast, reliable, and dead simple. I”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2091224660440457388
Look at this thing go! 100-meter obstacle course final at the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092115570741387357
Lots of robot demos at WRC this year. This one stands out for what it’s attempting. A Symbiosis Robotics humanoid autonomously drives a go-kart. One take, no stitched clips. The hard part isn’t the driving. It’s climbing into a confined cockpit, sitting, then coordinating”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2091386008793411642
Me, 43, after getting out of bed:”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2090712672547356897
Mobileye’s next chapter in Physical AI is about turning advanced intelligence into robust, useful and economically viable systems in the real world. Humanoid robotics brings that challenge into a new domain. In an exclusive interview with @IZONmedia, @liorwolf, EVP of Humanoids”
https://x.com/Mobileye/status/2092611290665504784
SF-based Lightberry has launched Lumi, a friendly interactive robot with custom sensors and compute. Thanks for the office tour @aliattar. @emily_yu”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092678508329988480
waiting for the microduck robot to ship? 🦆 play with it on the microduck simulator space, running the same RL policies as the real robot ▶️
https://x.com/HuggingApps/status/2092994724214743063
We built a small biped robot you can teach new tricks to. Train it in simulation, run it on the real thing. Meet Microduck 🦆 $399, shipping before Christmas.
https://t.co/RflJlIUwOu
https://x.com/pollenrobotics/status/2092915032052879425
A new blog post detailing counterintuitive “mysteries” in behavioral cloning observed when training on real-world robot data: Key findings include overfitting being beneficial as it allows policies to memorize demonstration trajectories and reduce test-time distribution shift.”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2092159072392925390
The @SkildAI team put a number on what a video demonstration is worth: roughly 380 teleoperation episodes. On tasks it had never seen, Skild’s S1 hit 66% from a single video demonstration. Same data, same architecture, prompted with language instead… 9%. If you are really into”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2092307596166168716
AI can write code, generate video and pass some of the hardest exams we can throw at it. But ask a robot to clear your kitchen table and things get complicated very quickly. That gap is exactly what @onticlabs_io is going after. I spoke with co-founder @omidtaherii yesterday.”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2092235796921430036
Show it a single human demonstration of a long-horizon task and the robot performs it right away. No fine-tuning, no retraining. Skild has released S1, a robot foundation model where you specify the task with a video demonstration instead of a language instruction. Why video,”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2092301463989203250
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