Robotics Special: Unitree's first earnings report is in

Welcome back, Superhuman. Seamless synchronization has long been a coveted benchmark in robotics. Now, a Chinese startup has demonstrated the feat in the most spectacular way possible, and nabbed a Guinness World Record in the process. Meanwhile, Figure’s 04 humanoid robot is on the horizon, and according to the CEO, is meant to define the category the way the first iPhone did for smartphones.

1. 110 AgiBot humanoid robots dance their way into the record books: The Chinese robotics firm just put 110 humanoid robots through a synchronized dance routine, earning a Guinness World Record. At an event in Jinan, the robots jumped, formed wave patterns, and arranged themselves into the number 2026, tracked to within centimeters by the company’s coordination software, possibly putting the company within striking distance of deploying robots at scale. See the record-setting moment here.

2. Unitree’s quarterly revenue surges 70% as robot demand rockets: In its first earnings report, China’s best-known humanoid maker reported $100M in third-quarter revenue — a significant confidence boost for the industry. However, profit fell 17% and missed analyst expectations owing to increased research spending. Since Unitree has demonstrated profitability before, investors see it as an important test of whether China’s wider humanoid robotics boom has genuine commercial demand behind it.

3. Figure claims to have locked in the ‘iPhone 1’ of humanoid robots: Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock says the company’s next robot, Figure 04, is in full design lock, calling it the iPhone 1 of humanoids. According to Adcock, the robot’s hand alone has more actuators than the rest of the robot, pushing it close to human-level dexterity. Training it is expensive, however: the company says it burnt through roughly $8.1M on data in a single week, collecting human video through its Index app.

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💈 Braid Bot: Getting your hair braided can take six hours or more. Now, HaloBraid has dropped a robotic device that lets a stylist start each braid by hand, then finishes the repetitive weaving up to 5x faster. The demo video blew up on social media this week, racking up over 1.2M views. Founded by Harvard-trained engineer Yinka Ogunbiyi, the startup picked up $7M in funding earlier this year. See the viral robot in action here.

💥 Spark Free: Oil, gas, and chemical plants have mostly been off-limits to robots because a single spark could set off an explosion. Now, startup ANYbotics claims to have solved the problem with ANYmal X, a quadruped robot that’s built to avoid creating sparks or heat that could ignite surrounding gases. The robot could potentially take over from human workers on dangerous inspection rounds without requiring facilities to be modified.

🪱 Smooth Rollout: The small intestine runs over 20 feet of narrow, winding tissue, making it one of the hardest organs for doctors to examine. Now, MIT researchers have built BIOSENTER, a snake-inspired soft robot that inflates and extends to crawl through the intestine, using scale-like grips for traction and carrying tools for imaging, biopsies, and drug delivery. It aced testing in pigs, with human trials coming up next.

Here are the biggest developments in the robotics space that you should know about:

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Autonomy has launched NX1, an autonomous hub that monitors your email, finances, health data, calendars, and home cameras. The device processes upcoming events, spending patterns, and even calorie counts from meal photos. The product will start shipping to users this month.

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Solving a Rubik’s Cube is hard enough with two hands. Now imagine solving it with your feet.

That’s what ETH Zurich’s ANYmal-D quadruped robot just pulled off. The four-legged robot combines computer vision, cube-solving algorithms, and reinforcement learning to plan each move, then twists one layer without budging the rest. This could mean quadruped robots deployed in factories could soon press buttons and move objects without an add-on arm.

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Zain, Faiq, and the Superhuman AI team