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The Robot Beat

Humanoid robots, embodied AI, and the machines that move

A robotics correspondent obsessed with the hardware that walks, grips, and thinks

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Recent briefings below

Recent Briefings

Friday, May 8, 2026 21 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: Robotera doubles down with a $200M+ raise, Agility outlines safety-certified Digit deployments outside the cage, LG CNS ships a multi-vendor robot OS, and edge-AI silicon gets…

Thursday, May 7, 2026 20 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: Genesis AI emerges in Paris with a $105M seed, a human-scale dexterous hand, and a foundation model meant to run on anyone's robot. Plus J&J's OTTAVA clears its pivotal trial,…

Wednesday, May 6, 2026 20 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: the consumer companion-robot thesis hardens with Colin Angle's Familiar getting the full press cycle and Figure pricing a home humanoid lease at $400–$600/month, while the emb…

Tuesday, May 5, 2026 22 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: Hyundai is reportedly pressuring Boston Dynamics for tens of thousands of Atlas units — and leadership is leaving over it. Colin Angle resurfaces with a non-humanoid consumer …

Monday, May 4, 2026 20 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: humanoid hype meets a market-size reality check, Meta buys its way into the 'Android of humanoids' race, Linkerbot turns dexterous hands into a standalone $6B category, and Ou…

Sunday, May 3, 2026 20 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: Cerebras' IPO turns out to be a $40B story — not the $4B figure circulating earlier this week — anchored by a $10B OpenAI inference contract. Alternative AI silicon is crackin…

Saturday, May 2, 2026 22 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: Meta buys its way into the humanoid AI stack, a flurry of new robot foundation models challenges the VLA orthodoxy, and solid-state LiDAR finally hits 180° at 30 FPS. Plus sur…

Friday, May 1, 2026 22 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: 1X opens America's first vertically integrated humanoid factory, Unitree drops dual-arm humanoid pricing to $4,290, Gemini Robotics 1.5 ships with cross-embodiment transfer, a…

Thursday, April 30, 2026 23 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: Figure hits one humanoid per hour, China's State Grid commits $1B to 8,500 robots, SoftBank floats a $100B data-center robotics IPO, and a Wired-profiled MIT spinout claims a …

Wednesday, April 29, 2026 23 stories

Today on The Robot Beat: humanoid production lines harden into real unit economics, edge-AI silicon gets a serious shake-up with NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Nano Omni and Stanford's sparsity-native Onyx, and …