Tag: humanoid robot

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Meet RP1, the Open-Source Humanoid Robot Anyone Can Study

At this year’s IROS robotics conference, one booth had a sign that said “Kick Me.” Visitors did. They pushed the robot, shoved it, kicked its legs — and the machine adjusted its posture, caught its balance, and kept standing. The robot was the RP1, and its maker, RoboParty, just unveiled it as what it calls the world’s first high-performance, full-stack open-source bipedal humanoid.

The “open-source” part is the story. Most humanoid robots are black boxes: proprietary hardware, secret software, research papers that tell you what the robot did but never how. The RP1 goes the other direction. RoboParty plans to progressively release the mechanical designs, motion-control systems, simulation environments, SDKs, training tools and its PartyOS development foundation. A lab that wants to study humanoid locomotion won’t need a nine-figure budget. It will need a download.

What the machine can do

The specs read like a serious research platform, not a toy. The RP1 delivers peak joint torque up to 160 N·m through in-house-developed Romomo actuator modules — enough power for dynamic movement, not just careful laboratory steps. A real-time motion-control system keeps it responsive, and the “Kick Me” demonstration at IROS put that responsiveness on public display. Disturbance recovery — staying upright when the world pushes back — is one of the hardest problems in humanoid robotics, and RoboParty chose to make it the demo.

Under the hood sits PartyOS, the company’s open R&D foundation for humanoid robotics. It integrates UFO, a training framework that discovers motor skills through unsupervised reinforcement learning — skill transitions, disturbance recovery, fall recovery — without relying on predefined motion trajectories. In plain terms: instead of engineers programming every movement by hand, the robot learns to move by trying, failing and improving in simulation, then transfers those skills to its real body.

The unveiling builds on RPO, or ROBOTO ORIGIN, RoboParty’s fully open-source humanoid project launched in January 2026. That project has already collected more than 2,500 GitHub stars — a respectable following for hardware, where open-source communities are far rarer than in software. The RP1 is the commercial-grade next step: the same open philosophy, with performance aimed at serious embodied-AI research.

Why open source matters for robots

Consider what open source did for software. Linux, TensorFlow, PyTorch — the shared foundations let thousands of teams build on each other’s work instead of reinventing it. Robotics never got that treatment, because robots are physical: expensive to build, hard to ship, and every lab’s hardware is slightly different. Research has been fragmented by necessity.

A capable open-source humanoid changes the equation. If hundreds of labs run the same platform, results become comparable. A locomotion paper from Tokyo can be reproduced in Berlin. Improvements to balance control, funded by one university, benefit every team on the platform. RoboParty is betting that this network effect — the same one that made open-source software unstoppable — will work for humanoid bodies too.

The timing is right. IDC estimates nearly 25,000 humanoid robots shipped globally in the first half of 2026, up 432% year over year, with Chinese vendors like Agibot and Unitree leading on volume. The manufacturing ramp is real. But most of those robots went to research labs, education, displays and data centers — not factory floors. The industry’s open question isn’t who can build the most robots. It’s who can make robots genuinely useful. Open platforms accelerate exactly that search, by putting capable hardware in the hands of the people most likely to find the answer.

The competition isn’t sitting still

The RP1 enters a crowded field. Boston Dynamics just gave its Atlas a dexterous new hand with 13 degrees of freedom, aimed at real factory work at Hyundai’s Georgia plant. Dyna Robotics’ Taku is already doing unsupervised laundry and kitchen workflows in hotels and restaurants. Agility Robotics is partnering on safety infrastructure to scale its Digit platform into warehouses.

RoboParty isn’t trying to out-manufacture those companies. It’s playing a different game: become the platform the researchers use, the way a generation of roboticists grew up on the same open-source software stack. If the RP1 becomes the default humanoid in university labs, RoboParty wins even if it never sells a robot to a factory.

What it means for researchers, industry and everyone else

For researchers and educators, the RP1 lowers the barrier to humanoid work dramatically. A graduate student with a good idea about balance control no longer needs her university to buy a million-dollar robot or build one from scratch. That democratization is how fields accelerate — the best ideas often come from the labs with the least money.

For industry, open-source humanoids are a talent pipeline. Every student who learns robotics on an RP1 is an engineer who can be hired to work on commercial platforms. Companies that once guarded their hardware are discovering what software firms learned decades ago: open foundations grow the ecosystem that feeds you.

For everyone else, the “Kick Me” demo is the detail to remember. A robot that can be shoved and stay standing is a robot that’s getting close to surviving the real world — cluttered, unpredictable, full of things that push back. The RP1 won’t be folding your laundry tomorrow. But somewhere in a university lab, a researcher is downloading its designs tonight. And that’s how the future usually starts: not with a product launch, but with a download.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: XPeng Brings Flying Cars and Humanoids to Paris

The Paris Motor Show is about to get a glimpse of the entire future at once.

XPeng announced on September 30 that it will make a major appearance at the 2026 Paris Motor Show, October 12 through 18, headlined by the global launch of its next-generation AI flagship SUV, the G9L. But the cars are only part of the story. Across a 1,000-square-meter stand in Hall 6, the company is building an immersive “Physical AI Museum” with four zones: its technology stack, AI-defined vehicles, humanoid robots, and flying cars.

It’s the clearest statement yet of where XPeng thinks the industry is going. Not just smarter cars, but a single technology foundation stretching from the road to the sidewalk to the sky.

## The G9L goes global

The G9L sits at the center of the stand, making its global debut in Paris on October 12. XPeng will open European order books and reveal European pricing at the show, marking the model’s transition from its China launch to a worldwide rollout. The G9L will also become the fourth XPeng model produced in Europe, part of the company’s “In Europe, For Europe” push.

The numbers behind that push are substantial. XPeng has delivered more than 100,000 vehicles overseas, including over 60,000 in Europe and more than 6,000 in France alone since entering the market two years ago. Overseas deliveries topped 20,000 in the second quarter for the first time, up 81 percent year on year. The L03 SUV coupe, which debuted globally in Munich in July, is about to begin its first European customer deliveries.

European R&D is doing the quiet work underneath. The company’s Munich center is localizing intelligent driving for European roads, traffic, and regulations, leaning on the generalization abilities of XPeng’s foundation models. The Turing AI chip and world foundation model architecture underneath it all is the same stack that powers everything else on the stand.

## Robots, flying cars, and a very exclusive test drive

The Physical AI Museum is where things get interesting. XPeng is advancing its IRON general-purpose humanoid robot toward mass production; the robot rolled off a newly commissioned production line in September. In August, the robotics business closed a first funding round of over $900 million, the largest single-round private raise in China’s embodied AI industry. Flying cars and robotaxi development round out the exhibit, all running on the same unified software and hardware foundation as the cars.

Then there’s the Autonomous Lab. XPeng and Tesla will be the only two automakers participating in the show’s official autonomous driving experience, putting XPeng’s NGP intelligent driving tech to a public test with its recently launched L03 SUV coupe. For XPeng, it’s the first large-scale NGP test ride experience outside China, giving European customers and media direct access to its latest capabilities.

Sharing that stage with Tesla is no accident. It’s XPeng positioning itself as one of the two companies whose self-driving technology is worth experiencing in person, on European roads, in front of the industry’s toughest audience.

## Building where it sells

The local-production angle deserves a closer look. The G9L becomes the fourth XPeng model built in Europe, and the company keeps returning to its “In Europe, For Europe” formula: European R&D in Munich adapting intelligent driving to local roads and regulations, European factories, European pricing. It’s a direct answer to the tariff and supply-chain anxieties hanging over every Chinese automaker’s export plans.

There’s a quiet statement in the stand’s size as well. More than 1,000 square meters in Hall 6 puts XPeng among the largest Chinese exhibitors, shoulder to shoulder with European legacy brands. A decade ago, Chinese automakers came to Paris hoping for attention. This year, one of them is hosting a museum of the future and sharing the autonomous test track with Tesla.

## What it means

For travelers, the G9L’s European order books opening on October 12 is the near-term news: another AI-defined flagship becomes buyable on the continent, with local production behind it. The longer-term signal is the museum concept itself. XPeng is betting that the company selling you a car today will sell you the robot in your hallway and the aircraft over your commute tomorrow, all on one platform.

For cities, the “In Europe, For Europe” model is the template to watch. Local manufacturing, local R&D, products tuned for local roads. As Chinese automakers expand, the winners will be the ones that build where they sell. Paris gets the debut; Munich gets the engineering jobs.

For investors, the $900 million robotics raise and the IRON production line say the physical AI story is no longer a side project. It’s a funded, manufacturing-stage business inside an automaker that already ships 20,000 vehicles a quarter overseas. The Paris stand is XPeng’s argument that the future of mobility is one integrated portfolio, not a collection of bets. On October 12, the industry gets to walk through it.

The press conference runs 11:10 to 11:25 a.m. on October 12 at Hall 6, Booth A51, preceded by an XPeng Paris Night brand event on October 11. Fifteen minutes on stage, and then the doors open on the museum.

For more on the future of flight and driving, see our [Breaking News coverage](https://newstodayworld.org/category/breaking-news/), including [DoorDash’s drone delivery system](https://newstodayworld.org/breaking-news/2026/09/30/doordash-air-brings-drone-delivery-to-doorsteps/) and [global humanoid robot shipments surging 432% in six months](https://newstodayworld.org/breaking-news/2026/09/30/humanoid-robot-shipments-surge-432-in-six-months/).

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: A $18,000 Humanoid Robot Just Debuted in the U.S.

Another humanoid robot maker just planted a flag in America, and this one brought a price tag meant to get attention.

Shenzhen-based Astribot is making its North American debut this week at IROS 2026, the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems running September 27 through October 1 at Pittsburgh’s David L. Lawrence Convention Center. The company is showing off its T1 humanoid robot alongside its full Physical AI stack, the first time it has brought the integrated platform to a North American audience.

The headline number: U.S. pricing starts at $18,000, with orders open now and immediate delivery available. In a market where humanoid robots often cost as much as a car or remain perpetually “coming soon,” a buy-it-today price under twenty grand is a statement.

## One system, not three

Astribot’s pitch is architectural. The company calls it “Design for AI”: the AI models, the embodied operating system, and the cable-driven robotic body are co-designed as a single system rather than bolted together afterward. It sounds like marketing until you watch what the robot does.

Running on the company’s Lumo-2 model, the T1 has demonstrated autonomous tidying, including sorting miscellaneous items into a backpack. That task sounds trivial until you think about what’s involved: deciding what goes where, then handling deformable objects like fabric with enough dexterity not to mangle them. Lumo-1 introduced the company’s Reasoning-Action Foundation Model framework; Lumo-2 pushes into latent world-action modeling for more complex physical tasks.

The hardware backs it up. The T1 stands about 1.55 meters tall, weighs around 66 kilograms, and offers 23 degrees of freedom excluding the end effectors, with a payload of up to 5 kilograms per arm. The cable-driven architecture gives it compliant, dexterous manipulation and fast movement, while feeding richer physical interaction data back into the AI stack. Practical boxes are checked too: automatic charging, quick battery swaps, and modular end effectors, computing modules, and sensors that can be exchanged for different jobs.

## Built for builders

Astribot is clearly aiming at developers first. The T1 ships with SDK and API access covering joint control, Cartesian motion, whole-body coordination, and sensor data. The embodied operating system includes meta-packages and skill libraries for orchestrating agentic behaviors, plus a natural-language interface that can generate a deployable robot application from a single-line requirement.

The developer bet already has evidence behind it. At the second Astribot OS Hackathon in Beijing, which concluded September 21, fifteen teams built and demonstrated more than ten functional T1 applications in just 36 hours. That’s the kind of velocity that turns a robot from a product into a platform.

The learning loop is deliberate rather than magical. The T1 doesn’t retrain itself live during deployment. Instead, Astribot collects multimodal data from robot operation and teleoperation, curates it, retrains models like Lumo-2, and pushes updated skills over the air or on-site. Customers can opt to contribute their own operational data back into the cycle. It’s a flywheel, and every deployed robot makes the next one smarter.

## Why Pittsburgh, why now

The location of the debut is part of the message. Pittsburgh’s robotics corridor, anchored by Carnegie Mellon, has become one of the densest concentrations of robotics talent in the world, and IROS is the field’s flagship conference. Unveiling the T1’s North American debut here puts Astribot directly in front of the researchers, developers, and investors who decide which platforms get built on.

The timing helps too. Global humanoid shipments are surging, with IDC tracking a 432 percent year-on-year jump in the first half of 2026, and the application mix is diversifying beyond research into industrial and commercial use. Astribot is arriving just as the market shifts from curiosity to procurement. An $18,000 developer-ready humanoid landing in that moment isn’t only a product launch. It’s a bid for the platform position.

## What it means

For travelers and consumers, the $18,000 price point is the story. Humanoid robots have lived in two worlds: six-figure industrial machines and research projects. A capable, developer-friendly humanoid at the price of a used car starts to look like something a small business, a lab, or eventually a household could actually buy. The home applications are still in training, but the direction is unmistakable.

For cities like Pittsburgh, hosting IROS matters. The robotics corridor from Carnegie Mellon outward keeps attracting global players who want to be near the talent. Astribot choosing IROS for its North American debut is a vote of confidence in that ecosystem.

For investors, watch the platform play. Hardware margins on an $18,000 robot are fine, but the real prize is the developer ecosystem: the skills library, the data flywheel, the app store dynamics. The company that owns the platform developers build on tends to win the category. Astribot just opened its doors to American builders. The 36-hour hackathon suggests they won’t wait long to walk through.

For more on the humanoid race, see our [Breaking News coverage](https://newstodayworld.org/category/breaking-news/), including [global humanoid robot shipments surging 432% in six months](https://newstodayworld.org/breaking-news/2026/09/30/humanoid-robot-shipments-surge-432-in-six-months/) and [Momenta’s plans for thousands of robotaxis in Dubai and Europe](https://newstodayworld.org/breaking-news/2026/09/30/momenta-plans-thousands-of-robotaxis-for-dubai-europe/).

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Agility’s Digit 5 Lifts More, Charges Faster, Plays Safer

The humanoid robot race has a new benchmark, and it arrived with little fanfare. Agility Robotics has unveiled Digit 5, the fifth generation of its industrial humanoid, and the spec sheet reads like a direct answer to every complaint about the last four.

The headline number: Digit 5 can repeatedly lift up to 50 pounds. That’s about 40 percent more payload than Digit 4. In a warehouse, where the difference between a robot that handles most totes and one that handles almost all of them is measured in pounds, that jump matters enormously.

Then there’s the battery. A redesigned pack delivers a stated 90-minute runtime with a nine-minute charge time. That’s a 10-to-1 run-to-charge ratio, which changes the operational math completely. Older warehouse robots spent a meaningful chunk of every shift tethered to a charger. Digit 5 can top up in the time it takes a human worker to take a coffee break.

The robot stands 5 feet 11 inches, weighs 284 pounds, and can reach as high as 7.2 feet. Those dimensions aren’t accidental. They’re sized for the shelves, conveyors, and workstations of real distribution centers, not a lab.

Safety is the real product

The most consequential change in Digit 5 isn’t strength or stamina. It’s the safety architecture, because a 284-pound machine sharing floor space with people lives or dies on trust.

Agility says Digit 5 combines multiple sensors and human-detection software with an independent safety controller. When a person enters an unsafe area, the system is designed to avoid the person, stop, or move into a seated position. Yes, seated. The robot is programmed to drop to its knees when a human gets too close, a deliberate “flinch” response that makes a large machine read as non-threatening.

The platform runs on NVIDIA’s IGX Thor chip and uses NVIDIA’s Halos robotics safety framework. That’s a notable pairing: one of the most powerful edge AI processors available, dedicated in part to making sure the robot never hurts anyone. In industrial robotics, safety certification is often the longest pole in the tent for deployment. Building it into the architecture from the start, rather than bolting it on later, is how you get robots onto real floors faster.

One robot, many jobs

Digit 5 also adds swappable end effectors using ISO-standard mounting flanges. In plain terms: the hands come off and get replaced, quickly, with tools suited to different jobs. One robot can move between tote handling, machine tending, kitting, sequencing, inspection, and palletizing instead of being permanently configured for a single task.

That flexibility is the difference between a robot that’s a capital expense tied to one workstation and one that’s infrastructure for the whole facility. Warehouse operators don’t want a fleet of specialists that sit idle when demand shifts. They want generalists that can be reassigned the way human workers are.

This is where the humanoid form factor earns its keep. A robot shaped roughly like a person fits into workflows designed for people: the same aisles, the same shelf heights, the same totes. No facility redesign required.

The competitive picture

Digit 5 doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. The humanoid field is crowded and moving fast. Figure Robotics recently demonstrated its Helix 2.5 software by sending a robot into 30 unseen San Francisco homes to make beds, fold towels, and clean living rooms without prior training, a striking demonstration of generalization. China’s XPeng put a humanoid production line into operation in early September and plans mass production of its Iron robot by year’s end, backed by a $900 million raise at a $6.3 billion valuation. Agibot has deployed more than 300 robots at a theme park in Zhuhai and delivered its 20,000th humanoid. A new Chinese factory opened September 12 with annual capacity above 10,000 robots.

Agility’s answer to all of that is focus. While others chase the home or the headlines, Agility is building for the warehouse and the factory floor, where the business case is clearest and the deployment path is shortest. Digit robots are already working in real facilities. Digit 5 is about making that work better, safer, and more flexible.

What it means

For workers, the honest version: robots like Digit 5 take on the repetitive lifting, the long carries, the jobs that wear bodies down. The facilities deploying them aren’t generally eliminating roles so much as struggling to fill them. Warehousing has lived with chronic labor shortages for years. A robot that lifts 50 pounds repeatedly without fatigue is filling a gap, not just cutting a cost.

For businesses, the math keeps improving. Higher payload means fewer robots per facility. Nine-minute charging means higher utilization. Swappable end effectors mean one platform across many tasks. Each of those pushes the return on investment further into obvious territory.

For investors, Digit 5 is evidence that the humanoid business is maturing from demos to products. Spec sheets with runtimes, charge times, payload ratings, and safety architectures are the language of equipment buyers, not science fairs. Agility is speaking that language fluently now.

The robot that kneels when you walk up to it might be the most important detail of all. The humanoids that win won’t just be the strongest or the smartest. They’ll be the ones people are comfortable working next to, shift after shift. Digit 5 was designed with that in mind.

For more on robotics reshaping work, see our Breaking News coverage, including how autonomous trucks are scaling toward 30,000 vehicles by 2030 and Waymo’s robotaxi fleet surging 49 percent in Texas.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: The Rideable Robot Is Real: Unitree’s GD01 Explained

Science fiction just filed for a curtain call. Unitree Robotics has unveiled the GD01 — billed as the world’s first production-ready manned mecha — a humanoid walking robot you climb inside and ride. And having just experienced the staggeringly high-tech The Lost Boys at the Palace Theatre on Times Square, courtesy of our friends Bonnie Comley and Stewart F. Lane, I can’t shake the thought: Broadway has always led what’s new, big, and next. A Transformers-style spectacle with a GD01 striding across the stage feels less like fantasy than scheduling.

What the GD01 actually is

Forget entertainment props and lab demos. Unitree presented the GD01 as a production-ready machine for real-world civilian use — roughly 500 kilograms with a passenger aboard, standing well above average adult height, with the pilot seated inside the body structure rather than operating it remotely. You don’t drive it like a vehicle. You wear it like a second skeleton.

The engineering is the story. The GD01 shifts between upright walking and a lower quadrupedal stance, adapting its posture to terrain — a flexibility that separates it from every static exoskeleton concept that came before. It moves, frankly, with more confidence than machines this size have any right to: LiDAR and depth-camera systems feeding real-time balance, responsive motor control, and stabilization that looked mature even in early footage. One widely shared test had it smashing through a concrete wall — a demonstration of industrial power as much as mobility.

Why it went viral

The design refuses to hide. Joints, actuators, and structural systems stay visibly engineered — closer to serious hardware than consumer gadgetry — and that honesty is part of the spectacle. Generations raised on anime, gaming, and cinema about piloted mecha watched a fictional silhouette walk through an industrial space with a human inside it. In the social media era, that kind of visual clarity is everything.

Unitree’s framing matters too. The company has repeatedly positioned the GD01 as civilian technology — transportation, industrial application, public demonstration — rather than a defense platform, a distinction worth insisting on when machines this powerful naturally invite military associations. Pricing chatter puts entry configurations around $650,000, firmly in specialized-premium territory for now. But a listed price means a real product, and a real product means the category has begun.

The bigger picture

The GD01 arrives as humanoid robotics accelerates worldwide, with companies across the US, China, Japan, and Europe racing toward agile machines for physical work. Most chase labor automation. Unitree chased something more emotional: personal robotic mobility — the feeling of the machine as an extension of the body rather than a replacement for it.

Landmark machines reshape imagination before they reshape daily life; the automobile and the airplane were symbols before they were infrastructure. The GD01 occupies that symbolic space now. And if Broadway — the industry that has always known how to turn the new and the enormous into a night out — is watching, I wouldn’t be surprised. The stage has hosted revolutions before.

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Originally published on Times Square Chronicles.