Latest from 42HOW
Li Auto's ME-Dex 1.0 Predicts Future Tactile States Alongside Visual Observations
Li Auto’s foundation model team released ME-Dex 1.0, a world action model that treats tactile sensing as a parallel prediction target to video. By aligning heterogeneous tactile data from five different hands into a unified representation, the system significantly improves success rates in high-contact dexterous manipulation tasks.
PrimeBot Launches Personal Robots at iPhone Price, Bets on AI as a Physical Terminal
Shangwei New Materials's PrimeBot released the Q1 and T1 humanoid robots starting at RMB 19,999, positioning them as personal AI terminals comparable in cost to high-end smartphones while aiming to build a developer ecosystem.
Crowdfunding Hits $1 Million in 20 Hours: Buyers for AI-Driven Desktop Automation
Shenzhen-based Violoop's desktop AI agent hardware raised over USD 1.28 million on Kickstarter within days of launch, signaling early market interest in local-first, screen-aware AI assistants that operate via physical mouse and keyboard simulation.
Tsinghua's Li Yi Team Releases PASSAGE for Humanoid Robots to Navigate Cluttered Environments
A joint team led by Tsinghua University released the PASSAGE paper on September 16, enabling humanoid robots to autonomously plan and execute traversal actions in cluttered spaces using 100 hours of scene-aligned motion data. Real-robot tests showed a 90% zero-contact success rate across 50 trials, with simulation results confirming that navigation performance scales with training data volume.
D-Robotics Raises USD 400 Million in C Round as Embodied AI Business Enters Mass Production
D-Robotics has closed a USD 400 million Series C round led by Future Asset, bringing its total disclosed funding since 2025 to USD 770 million. The company reports that its Sunrise S600 chip is entering mass production with over 20 clients, including TARS and UBTECH, while cumulative shipments of the Sunrise series have surpassed 8 million units.
Doubao’s Second-Gen Mobile Agent: A New Architecture for App Permissions and Privacy
Nubia is rolling out the consumer preview of Doubao’s second-generation mobile assistant, introducing a task-orchestration framework and the Screen Automation Execution Protocol (SAEP) to address previous app-blockade issues and privacy concerns.
Apple's AI Roadmap Is Clear, But Far From a Closed Loop
After defining the iPhone as an Intelligent Personal Hub, Apple outlined a three-layer architecture for Apple Intelligence that balances on-device processing with Private Cloud Compute. However, strict privacy constraints and fragmented data across single-point devices prevent the system from achieving true personal context understanding.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University Assistant Researcher Yang Lixin on Why Robots Need a '3D Time Axis'
Shanghai Jiao Tong University assistant researcher Yang Lixin discusses how LaMP, ChronoFlow-Policy, and Track4Action integrate 3D point flow to give robots spatial awareness, temporal memory, and understanding of environmental changes.
2026 Aggregated Intelligence Industry Development Conference to Be Held in Optics Valley
The 2026 Aggregated Intelligence Industry Development Conference will take place in Optics Valley on September 8-9, focusing on the synergy of smart vehicles, embodied AI, and low-altitude economy.
How Embodied AI Is Rethinking Robot Data
A Beijing humanoid robot data training center has ceased operations, highlighting that while embodied AI still lacks data, the industry needs high-quality, large-scale, diverse data infrastructure rather than just more robots.
Sharpa Reveals RMB 4.5 Billion in Funding as North Robot Debuts in Real DQ Store
Sharpa, backed by 4.5 billion RMB in funding, deploys its North robot at a DQ store. Founder Li Yifan argues that true embodied AI requires completing full workflows, not just performing isolated dexterous tasks.
Hugging Face’s Pollen Robotics Launches $399 Microduck Robot for Embodied AI Training
Hugging Face’s Pollen Robotics has opened pre-orders for Microduck, a $399 bipedal robot designed as an affordable development platform for reinforcement learning and sim-to-real deployment.
Newcomer Lingxi Zhiyong Ranks Top Three in World Humanoid Robot Games with ROSS Harness
Lingxi Zhiyong's robot achieved 160 points and ranked among the top three at the World Humanoid Robot Games. The company attributes this success to its self-developed ROSS Harness Agent, which bridges AI models and hardware execution.
Galaxea's Hang Zhao: The Next Embodied AI Scaling Goes Beyond Pre-Training
At the 2026 WRC Forum, Galaxea Chief Scientist Hang Zhao argues that Embodied AI's next scaling depends not just on pre-training data and models, but on continuous learning from real-world operations through post-training and real-robot reinforcement learning.
Why AgiBot Became the Top Medal Winner at the Robotics Competition
At the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games, AgiBot won 18 gold, 16 silver, and 12 bronze medals, ranking first in both gold and total medal counts. This success highlights its dual strengths in embodied AI motion control and commercial deployment capabilities.
RayNeo iO Launches With 'All-Day Memory' Feature, Betting on Wearable Form Factor
RayNeo has launched the iO AI glasses at RMB 1,996 after subsidies, prioritizing an all-day memory assistant over camera or speaker features. The device aims to prove that comfortable form factor is the prerequisite for viable embodied AI applications.
HopTo Technology CEO Fangzheng Wang: Building a Robot That Jumps and Flies
In an interview, HopTo Technology CEO Fangzheng Wang discusses the commercialization of Hopcopter, a hybrid drone-leg robot that transitions between jumping and flying. The company aims to launch its first product for overseas markets at under USD 1,000.
Daxiao Robotics and NUS Release ACE-Data-0, a High-Density Multimodal Embodied AI Dataset
Daxiao Robotics and NUS S-Lab released ACE-Data-0, an L5 multimodal embodied dataset. We discuss how high-density, physically grounded data is shifting the industry bottleneck from model architecture to physical supervision.
Huawei Veteran Zhou Shunbo’s New Home Robot Startup Secures Hundreds of Millions in Funding
Zhou Shunbo, founder of Ou La Wan Xiang, discusses his journey from Huawei to creating a wheeled home robot. He argues that data is the first principle of embodied AI and believes that high-value, non-AGI-dependent robots can succeed in family scenarios.
Ego2Robot: Scaling Robot Data Synthesis from Egocentric Human Video
Ego2Robot demonstrates that scalable robot data synthesis from egocentric human video relies less on model architecture and more on rigorous data governance, including action alignment, visual alignment, and multi-level quality filtering.