Update from the book
Robotics and humanoids
Where the race for humanoid robots stands, who is working on it and with how much money.
Section 13.2 leaves a single question to ask of every humanoid announcement: is it doing useful work, today, and for whom. This page is the answer as of 15 August 2026, company by company, with the date of each document it comes from alongside it.
Where the robots coming off the lines go
Look at the third column before the others. Call a paying third-party customer only someone who has received a robot by paying for it, and who is not the company itself, nor its shareholder, nor a laboratory it does research with.
| Who | Where the units go today | Paying third-party customers | Latest document |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tesla | To the in-house "Optimus Academy", for data collection. The Fremont lines are being installed in place of those for the Model S and X; in the table of installed capacity that Tesla publishes every quarter, next to Optimus is the word "construction" and the capacity cell is empty | none | 22 July 2026 |
| Figure | More than 350 Figure 03 units delivered from the BotQ factory, destined for internal research, data collection and the development of commercial use cases | two: BMW at Spartanburg, in logistics, since June 2026; Catalyst Brands at the Reno distribution centre, announced on 26 May 2026 | 30 June 2026 |
| Boston Dynamics | Two destinations announced in January, and they are all the destinations of 2026: the robotics application centre of Hyundai, which is Boston Dynamics' majority shareholder, and Google DeepMind, with which the collaboration is declared as joint research. On 21 September 2026 the Hyundai centre opened in Georgia and the Atlas units are being trained there; how many units they are the company has never written, and nothing has been published on Google DeepMind | none. The company places its first customers at the start of 2027 | 21 September 2026 |
| Unitree | On sale, at a public list price, to anyone who pays | yes: 5,632 humanoids sold between 2023 and 2025, of which more than 5,500 in 2025 alone | 11 August 2026 |
| 1X | To the in-house laboratory and to a testing programme in employees' homes. The Hayward factory has been producing since 30 April 2026; the pre-orders opened on 28 October 2025 exhausted the first year's capacity in five days, more than ten thousand units | none. The first deliveries to private customers are still declared within 2026 | 30 April 2026 |
| Nvidia | Does not build robots. Sells the other five the on-board compute, the simulation and the foundation models | the manufacturers themselves. 1X states that it trains NEO with Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab and fits it with a Jetson Thor on board | 31 May 2026 |
Of six protagonists, only one has already delivered humanoids to those who paid for them, outside an agreed pilot: China's Unitree. They are bought above all by those who do research and development, not by those who manufacture.
Announced against done
In this sector the distance between the two columns is measured in years, and knowing it is the only way to read the next announcement without being carried along.
| Stated target | Who, when | How it stands at 3 October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| About 5,000 Optimus produced in 2025 | Musk, Jan. 2025 | No count has ever been published, neither in the production reports nor in the quarterly filings |
| From 50,000 to 100,000 Optimus in 2026 | Musk, Jan. 2025 | Production had not yet begun at the end of July |
| Third generation of Optimus presented in the first quarter of 2026 | Tesla, Jan. 2026 | Postponed twice, then indicated for between the end of July and August. No official presentation appears to have taken place |
| BotQ up to 12,000 robots a year | Figure, Mar. 2025 | More than 350 units in four months, with a cycle time of one robot an hour demonstrated, which is a different thing from a cadence that is kept up. The factory does exist, though, and it produces |
| Fleets of Atlas shipped "in the coming months" | Boston Dynamics, 5 Jan. 2026 | After almost nine months there is a place where the Atlas units work, the Hyundai centre in Georgia, but no number of units and no confirmation of delivery to Google DeepMind |
| Hyundai robotics application centre opened in 2026 | Hyundai, 5 Jan. 2026 | Opened on 21 September 2026 at the Hyundai plant near Savannah, Georgia. The announcement says the Atlas units are being trained there, but does not say how many |
| First deliveries of NEO to private customers in 2026 | 1X, Oct. 2025 and Apr. 2026 | Not yet made. Less than three months remain |
| Up to 10,000 robots to the companies in EQT's portfolio between 2026 and 2030 | 1X and EQT, 11 Dec. 2025 | The announcement speaks of a "shared intention to facilitate" and leaves the decision to each company. No individual agreement announced. EQT is also an investor in 1X |
| Raising of 4.202 billion yuan at the listing | Unitree, 2026 prospectus | Exceeded: gross proceeds of about 6.10 billion yuan |
What it costs, where a price exists
Two manufacturers out of six show a price on a web page. Two others say it only in an interview, and the difference is worth keeping in mind when you read a figure.
| Model | Price shown | Indicative in euros | Release and notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unitree R1 | $4,900 | ≈ €4,250 | July 2025, launch price 5,900 dollars. 121 cm, 25 kg. It is the entry model of the humanoid range |
| Unitree G1 | $13,500 | ≈ €11,700 | May 2024. 1,320 mm standing, about 35 kg, 23 degrees of freedom, declared battery life of about two hours. The page states that taxes and shipping are excluded |
| Unitree H2 | $29,900 | ≈ €25,900 | presented October 2025, deliveries declared from April 2026. 1.8 m, 70 kg, 31 degrees of freedom |
| Unitree H2 Plus | $100,000 | ≈ €86,700 | 2026, high-end version |
| 1X NEO | $20,000 or $499/month | ≈ €17,300 ≈ €433/month | pre-order from 28 October 2025, with a 200-dollar deposit. Prices reconfirmed in April 2026. No delivery to a private customer appears to have taken place |
| Unitree H1 and H1-2 | — | — | 2023. The page points to a sales contact |
| Tesla Optimus | — | — | No list price. The range Musk has repeated since 2023 is 20,000-30,000 dollars at mass volumes |
| Figure 03 | — | — | No list price and no rental formula published. The founder cited in an interview a figure of between 400 and 600 dollars a month for home use |
| Atlas | — | — | No price published, and no number of units |
None of these manufacturers publishes a list price in euros. The euro column is a conversion at the European Central Bank reference rate of 13 August 2026, 1 euro = 1.1534 dollars, and it is a floor: on a machine imported into the European Union duties, VAT and transport are added, which the seller does not show. The G1 page writes it out in full.
Who drives the robot, when the robot cannot manage
It is the line that almost no article writes, and that changes the sense of every video you will happen to see.
The home robot closest to delivery, 1X's NEO, has a function called Expert Mode: for the tasks that autonomy does not cover, an operator from the company takes control remotely with a headset and looks inside the house through the robot's cameras. 1X does not hide it and defends it in public, with a set of declared rules: blurring of people, rooms the owner can exclude, recorded sessions, one supervisor for every eight teleoperators. The share of tasks that goes through it, though, nobody has published.
Teleoperation does not concern NEO alone. The Atlas data sheet declares three control modes, and teleoperation is one of the three. At the Beijing half marathon of April 2026 the teams split between autonomous navigation and remote control, and about six out of ten chose remote control. In the quarterly call of 22 July 2026 Musk said that the robot demonstrations circulating online are "pre-programmed or remotely controlled": it is an interested source, and on this point it coincides with what the others admit.
Of every video it is worth asking how much of that movement comes from the robot. Those who declare it deserve more credit than those who keep quiet.
The software: how open is it really
The word "open" in robotics is used as it is with language models, and with the same ambiguity: downloadable weights and a licence that allows you to sell on top of them are two distinct things.
| What it is | Date | Licence, and what it allows |
|---|---|---|
| Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1, foundation model for humanoids | 18 Mar. 2025 | Downloadable weights with a non-commercial NVIDIA licence. You study it and adapt it; you do not build a product on top of it |
| GR00T N1.5 | Jun. 2025 | Same licence. The model card says in full that it is ready "for non-commercial use" |
| GR00T N1.7, current version | Apr. 2026 | Here comes the commercial licence, which was not there before |
| Nvidia Cosmos, world models for generating training data | 6 Jan. 2025 | Permissive Nvidia licence, public weights. Trained on about 20 million hours of real-world video |
| Cosmos 3 | 31 May 2026 | OpenMDW-1.1 from the Linux Foundation: commercial use allowed, with attribution |
| Newton, physics engine | 29 Sep. 2025 | Donated to the Linux Foundation by Nvidia, Google DeepMind and Disney Research. The 1.0 production version is from March 2026 |
| Unitree UnifoLM-VLA-0, model for manipulation | Mar. 2026 | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: attribution, non-commercial use, share alike. The training data are not published |
Chapter 3 closes the four questions to ask of a language model with the licence, because it is the one that decides whether someone can switch it off for you, and in robotics the criterion holds identically. The direction is worth noting: between 2025 and 2026 these projects have opened up. With language models the direction is less clear-cut, and you will find it reconstructed on the page about the market for models.
China, document by document
Five acts on humanoids in three years, each with a different legal weight. Confusing them is the commonest mistake when Chinese industrial policy is described.
| Date | The act and who signs it | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Nov. 2023 | Guiding opinion on the innovative development of humanoid robots, ministry of industry and information technology, file 2023 no. 193 (signed on 20 October) | Defines humanoids a "disruptive product" after computers, smartphones and new energy vehicles. By 2025: finished products at the advanced international level and series production, two or three ecosystem companies with global influence, two or three industrial districts. By 2027: a major new engine of economic growth |
| 28 Feb. 2026 | Standards system for humanoid robots and embodied intelligence, 2026 edition, published by the ministry's technical standardisation committee, not by the ministry with an act of its own | Six parts, from components to the complete machine to applications to safety, written with more than 120 institutes and companies. It is the list of the standards that will be needed, with a first group of priority projects. The mandatory rules on product safety, algorithm ethics and privacy are still to be written, and the chairman of the committee said so that same day |
| 12 Mar. 2026 | 15th Five-Year Plan, approved by the National People's Congress | Robotics enters the eight strategic emerging industries, fifth on the list. The humanoids are elsewhere, though: in embodied intelligence, which is one of the six "industries of the future", a more experimental category, handled with research centres and pilot zones. In the Party's Recommendations of October 2025 the word "robot" did not appear even once |
| 9 Jun. 2026 | Joint act of the ministry and of the commission that oversees state-owned enterprises, file 2026 no. 256 (signed on 3 June) | By the end of 2026 humanoid robots must "open work mode" in representative scenarios, more than a hundred high-value ones must be distilled from them and a deployment capacity of the order of ten thousand units must be reached. Ten provinces involved, at least twenty scenarios each. Verification is to be measured on the real success rate on the task |
| 25 Aug. 2026 | Guide to building the national standards system for the humanoid robot industry, 2026 edition, put out for consultation by the ministry of industry and information technology until 23 September | At least 100 key standards by 2028 and more than 200 companies involved in applying them. It is still a draft, and this time the ministry signs it, where in February its technical committee signed |
The June 2026 document is the most instructive thing in the whole section. Two and a half years after a plan that promised series production by 2025, the state that wrote that plan still puts among the targets to be reached the fact that robots begin to work. And it expressly asks for work on structural durability, on thermal management and on fault tolerance in abnormal conditions, for continuous operation over long periods and under load.
No official assessment of the 2025 targets has been published.
The Beijing half marathon, two editions
| April 2025 | 19 April 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Teams | 20 | more than 100, with entrants from Germany, France and Brazil |
| Finishers | 6 out of 20 | the agency dispatch does not state how many |
| How it is driven | — | two categories: autonomous navigation and remote control, with the time of those going by remote control multiplied by 1.2. About 40% of the teams chose autonomous |
| Winner | Tiangong Ultra, 2h 40' 42" | "Flash" from Shenzhen Honor Smart Technology, 50' 26" in autonomous navigation |
| For comparison | — | the human winner of the same Beijing race finished in 1h 07' 47". The Xinhua agency puts the men's record over the distance at 57' 20", set in Lisbon in March 2026 |
In twelve months the winner's time has come down by more than three times, and the machine that arrived first finished under the time of the fastest of the human runners in that race. It has to be read knowing how the race is built: robots and people run the same course in separate lanes, the technicians change the batteries during the race, and the machine that won is designed to run, with legs of about 95 centimetres and liquid cooling.
Running on a closed course is the task robotics has learned fastest, because it is repetitive and the environment does not change. Grasping different objects in a place nobody has prepared remains the open problem, and a running race does not measure it.
Figures that circulate wrong
Some come from announcements read badly, others from interviews that became data by passing from article to article. You will find them all out there, and some were in the first draft of this book.
| What you read | What the source says |
|---|---|
| Unitree debuted on the stock market up 629% | That is the intraday high of a single day, 19 August 2026: 1,100 yuan against the 150.80 of the offer. The close that day was 845 yuan, up 460%, and that is the number a trading day leaves behind. On 30 September the stock closed at 450.40 yuan: down 59% from that peak. The peak of one day is not a valuation |
| Figure rents its robots for about 1,000 dollars a month | No company document publishes a price or a rental formula. The figure the founder cited in an interview is 400-600 dollars a month |
| Optimus Gen 3 has hands with 22 degrees of freedom and an OLED display for expressions | No Tesla document contains these numbers. Tesla does not publish a technical data sheet for Optimus |
| Unitree is aiming at 20,000 units shipped in 2026 | It does not appear in any document of the company or of the Shanghai Stock Exchange |
| Unitree is listing for 610 million dollars | The operation is in yuan: the fundraising plan was 4.202 billion, and the placement exceeded it by about 45%. The figure in dollars is a countervalue, and it refers to the plan |
| The G1 is 127 cm tall and starts at about 16,000 dollars | Those were the launch specifications in 2024. The official page today gives 1,320 mm and 13,500 dollars: the price has come down |
| The Figure 02 worked eleven months at BMW | Eleven months is the duration of the project, from delivery to return. The company declares 1,250 hours of operation and six months of daily service; BMW counts ten months. The 90,000 components loaded and the 30,000 vehicles are confirmed by both, but the robot contributed to a line, it did not produce those vehicles |
| Since April 2026 Figure's robots have been on trial at the BMW plant in Leipzig | The Leipzig robot is AEON, from Hexagon Robotics. The first test is from December 2025, the one of April 2026 is the second, and BMW claims the first for itself and in Germany |
| The Newton physics engine is up to 475 times faster than traditional engines | The comparison is between one solver inside Newton and the JAX version of MuJoCo, only on manipulation tasks, on a specific professional graphics card. On locomotion the factor is 252. It is a measurement between two programs on the same GPU |
| GR00T and UnifoLM are open models | The weights can be downloaded, the licences forbid commercial use (for GR00T up to and including version N1.5) |
| Unitree shipped 5,500 humanoids in 2025 and revenue grew by 335% | True, but they are two different perimeters set side by side: the 5,500 units are humanoids only, the growth concerns total revenue. In the same three years the company sold 33,294 quadrupeds against 5,632 humanoids |
What has changed
3 October 2026 · revision
Unitree has kept falling. On 30 September, the last session before the Chinese holiday week, it closed at 450.40 yuan, for a market capitalisation of 182 billion yuan, about 27 billion dollars at that day's ECB reference rate (the dollar figure is my own calculation): down 59% from the first day's high, down 47% from the first close. On the offer price it is still almost three times higher, up 199%.
The Hyundai centre has opened, and the Atlas units have a place to work. On 21 September Boston Dynamics opened the robotics application centre at the Hyundai plant near Savannah, Georgia, and the announcement says the Atlas units are being trained there. It does not say how many, and on Google DeepMind the company has published nothing. In 2027 the centre will move to a building about ten times larger. Hyundai remains the shareholder, so in the column of paying third-party customers the row does not change.
In China the ministry of industry put out for consultation, from 25 August to 23 September, a guide to the national standards system for humanoids: at least 100 key standards by 2028. It has entered the table as the fifth act, and it is still a draft.
Figure retired its Figure 02 fleet, the one used by BMW, on 30 September, and on 3 September signed a compute agreement with Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs, but it has published no new unit numbers and no new customers. 1X has delivered NEO to no private customer; its latest announcement is from 9 July and concerns the hands (the 18 September revision gave 1 May). Tesla does not mention Optimus in its 2 October production report, and the third generation has not been presented: the next occasion is the call on 21 October.
18 September 2026 · revision
Unitree has listed, and in three weeks the market did this page's job for it. It debuted on 19 August on the STAR Market: intraday high 1,100 yuan, close 845 yuan, market capitalisation around 445 billion yuan at the peak, about 66 billion dollars. On 9 September the close was 513.93 yuan: down 53% from the peak, down 39% from the first-day close, about 30 billion of market capitalisation. On the offer price it is still up more than 240%.
The distance between announcement and fact, which this page measures on the manufacturers, was here measured by the stock market in seventeen trading days. And it is not a judgement on the robots: Unitree remains the only one of the six to deliver humanoids to people who pay for them, and that fact has not changed.
Of the other five, none has produced a dated fact after 15 August. Reopened one by one: the third-generation Optimus has still not been presented, and the last dated source remains a trade fair in March; 1X has delivered NEO to no private customer, and the last source is from 1 May; on Figure, Boston Dynamics and Nvidia, nothing new. This is a declared perimeter, not a silence: they were looked at.
15 August 2026 · first publication
Unitree lists, and the market reacts as it never has. Application accepted on 20 March, committee cleared on 1 June: seventy-three days, a record for the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Price set on 6 August at 150.80 yuan, valuation around nine billion dollars, the retail tranche subscribed 5,526 times. The trading debut had not yet taken place at 15 August and is expected in the days immediately after: when it happens, this line changes.
For Tesla the constraint has moved upstream, to the on-board chip. On 22 July Musk said that without the semiconductor factory Tesla is building the capacity to scale Optimus will be limited, and that the new-generation chip will arrive in volume around mid-2027, going to the robots before the cars. No other humanoid manufacturer had until now pointed to an obstacle outside the robot.
The software side is the one that has kept its promises. In a sector where almost every production date slips, the models and the simulators came out when they had been announced, and in 2026 with broader licences than those of 2025.
What cannot be known
Declaring the gaps is part of the craft, and in this sector they are large.
- How many Optimus exist. Tesla has never published a count. The figures that circulate have no company source.
- How many Atlas units have been delivered. Since September one of the two destinations announced in January, the Hyundai centre, has been in operation; on the other, Google DeepMind, the company has published nothing.
- How much of the demonstrations is teleoperated. Nobody publishes a percentage, and nobody measures it from outside.
- The manufacturers other than these six. This page follows the protagonists of the book. Agility Robotics, Apptronik, UBTech, AgiBot and the dozens of Chinese companies that entered the sector in 2025 have not been verified here, and the next revision will have to deal with them.
Sources
- Tesla, quarterly shareholder updates for the fourth quarter of 2025 and for the first and second quarters of 2026, filed with the SEC; transcripts of the analyst calls of 28 January and 22 July 2026. Consulted on 15 August 2026. Production and deliveries report for the third quarter of 2026, 2 October 2026, consulted on 3 October 2026.
- Figure AI, announcements of 16 September 2025 (Series C), 9 October 2025 (Figure 03), 19 November 2025 (assessment of the deployment at Spartanburg), 29 April 2026 (BotQ production), 26 May 2026 (Catalyst Brands), 30 June 2026, 3 September 2026 (agreement with Nscale) and 30 September 2026 (retirement of the Figure 02 fleet). BMW Group, announcements of 27 February and 25 June 2026. Consulted on 15 August 2026; the September announcements and the news index on 3 October 2026.
- Boston Dynamics, announcements of 5 January 2026 on Atlas, on the collaboration with Google DeepMind and on Hyundai Mobis, and of 21 September 2026 on the opening of the application centre in Georgia (consulted on 3 October 2026). Hyundai Motor Group, announcements of 26 August 2025 and 5 January 2026. Consulted on 15 August 2026.
- Unitree, product pages and official store; Shanghai Stock Exchange, notices of 31 July and 11 August 2026 on the offering; model cards on Hugging Face. Consulted on 15 August 2026; the store prices re-checked on 3 October 2026, unchanged. No account, cart or payment page was opened.
- Unitree's trading debut: Italian and international financial press of 19 August 2026 for the offer price, the intraday high and the close; The Robot Report, 9 September 2026, for the 513.93 yuan close and the falls from the peak and from the first close. The three key figures - 150.80 at the offer, 1,100 at the high, 845 at the close - agree across every source consulted; the market capitalisation ranges between 50 and 66 billion dollars depending on whether it is measured at the close or at the peak, and both are reported here with the moment they refer to. Consulted on 18 September 2026. Close of 30 September 2026 and market capitalisation in yuan: Longbridge and Sohu, consulted on 3 October 2026; the dollar equivalent and the percentages from the peak, from the first close and from the offer are my own calculations.
- 1X Technologies, announcements of 11 December 2025, 30 April and 9 July 2026, and the news index of the site. Consulted on 15 August 2026; the news index on 3 October 2026.
- Nvidia, GR00T model cards on Hugging Face, Newton developer page and technical blog of 16 March 2026; Linux Foundation announcement of 29 September 2025. Consulted on 15 August 2026.
- Ministry of industry and information technology of the People's Republic of China, act 2023 no. 193 (full text) and joint act with the commission for state-owned enterprises 2026 no. 256; text of the 15th Five-Year Plan, approved by the National People's Congress on 12 March 2026 and published by the National Development and Reform Commission; Xinhua agency, 28 February 2026, on the standards system. Consulted on 15 August 2026. Guide to the national standards system for the humanoid robot industry, 2026 edition, under consultation until 23 September: Beijing Daily, 24 August 2026, consulted on 3 October 2026.
- Xinhua agency, 19 April 2026, on the Beijing half marathon. Consulted on 15 August 2026.
- Exchange rate: European Central Bank, euro reference rates, value of 13 August 2026 for the euro column, and of 30 September 2026 for Unitree's market capitalisation in dollars.