Humanoid

The first hotel run by robots is set to open its doors to the public next year. It comes as no surprise that it's happening in China – on the artificial island built for the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link, the cross-sea megaproject in the Pearl River Delta.

Faraday Future has had an awfully rough go of building an electric car brand. It's now shifting gears to wade into the world of robotics and physical AI – and it has a heap of robots on offer, including a multipurpose $90,000 humanoid.

Humanoids may be winning marathons and getting factory jobs, but after spending a few days with around 100 different robots of all shapes and sizes, one thing was clear: There's a chasm separating viral demonstration hype and reality.

A bipedal humanoid might not be the best design for operation in microgravity. A four-armed robot from an offshoot of ETH Zurich brings four arms into the equation – one pair to anchor Helios to surfaces while the other pair gets to work.

The first humanoid training school for bots of all shapes and sizes opens soon, bringing together more than 100 different models with the one goal – to learn real-world skills, and help future "students" get up to speed even faster. What a timeline.

Thanks to researchers at Georgia Tech, humanoid robots have taken new steps towards replacing human labor – and not simply for dangerous tasks such as mining the depths of the Earth, or difficult tasks such as high-speed mass-assembly of cars.

The next time you fly through Tokyo's Haneda Airport, your luggage might be taken care of by the dexterous hands of a humanoid robot. It's part of a pilot program to address a shortage of ground support staff in Japan.

A field of robots competing in a half marathon demonstrated how frighteningly fast the technology has developed in 12 months. Even if one bot had a race to forget, smashing into pieces at the starting line, Honor's Lightning instead smashed records.

This ain't teleoperation. Chinese researchers have tested a new, much quicker and easier method of teaching robots to play tennis, and the results look like a breakthrough in machine learning and real-world AI.

Texas Instruments has teamed up with NVIDIA to link technologies designed to "accelerate the path from simulation to the safe deployment of humanoid robots in the real world." The partnership fuses real-world sensing tech with massive computing power.

BMW is expanding its investigation of humanoid robotic workers at its factories. The automaker has just announced that it will trial a set of physical AI bots made by Hexagon for the first time at one of its European plants.

Shanghai robotics startup DroidUp has launched what it calls "a beautifully designed and expressive bionic robot" that is touted as "the world's first highly bionic robot that deeply integrates human aesthetics and advanced humanoid movement."