Humanoid

Chinese humanoids are starting to move with extraordinary grace and agility, but Boston Dynamics is the OG in this field, and fresh video of its swivel-jointed Atlas robot running, cartwheeling and breakdancing shows it's still at the bleeding edge.

Figure is leveling up its humanoid robot business far more rapidly than any other robotics company I can think of. CEO Brett Adcock just announced it plans to begin alpha testing its robots in the home sometime in 2025 – two years ahead of schedule.

Cue the self-replicating robot revolution: Apptronik's humanoid Apollo robot is gearing up to assist in manufacturing copies of itself. The Texas-based company is dropping the bipedal bot on to assembly lines to produce more Apollos this year.

Chinese robotics company Zhongqing Robotics (aka EngineAI) just front-flipped into the humanoid robotics scene. The firm has posted a video of what is claimed to be the world's first humanoid robot front flip.

1X has just dropped a video of its new at-home robot helper, the Neo Gamma. It can clean, serve, and act as a voice companion. Never has a humanoid robot looked so huggable. Or in such need of a hug.

California's Clone Robotics has just posted a video of its full-body Protoclone humanoid robot, and well … it's a wee bit creepy. The prototype's less disturbing Clone descendants, however, could one day be vacuuming our carpets.

Chinese robotics company Unitree has shown 16 of its H1 robots busting moves alongside human dancers at a Spring Festival Gala event. They not only danced in sync, but each of them also flawlessly spun and caught a handkerchief in the air.

Two new videos from Chinese companies make it clear: it'll soon be no use trying to run from robots. Rapid upgrades in speed and agility mean robot dogs can now sprint at near-Olympic pace, and humanoids are running smoothly over tough terrain.

The AI behavior models controlling how robots interact with the physical world haven't been advancing at the crazy pace that GPT-style language models have – but new multiverse 'world simulators' from Nvidia and Google could change that rapidly.

Chinese startup Pudu Robotics wants you to put its latest robot to work. The company's new humanoid D9 can walk upright, carry loads up to 44 lb, stock grocery store shelves – and maybe even sell you your next car.

In the long list of tasks we'd like humanoid robots to perform for us, shooting hoops is probably close to the bottom. But the CUE6 bot from Toyota recently set its second Guinness World Record, for the farthest basketball shot by a humanoid robot.

In its latest video, Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot performs mundane tasks entirely autonomously using a machine learning vision model, but with a twist. And we do mean "twist."