Robotics

Xpeng VP Gu Jie says solid-state batteries designed for the Iron humanoid robot have entered small-batch production, while Iron itself is still pre-SOP. Mass production is targeted for the end of 2026, with Xpeng stores first in 2027.

KDDI and ELYZA have launched ELYZA Robotics, a physical-AI company backed by ¥30 billion (about $190 million) in R&D through fiscal 2030. The goal: more than 1,000 robots working at real job sites, starting with Lawson and other KDDI group companies.

Schaeffler has opened a 7,500-square-meter humanoid robotics factory in Taicang, China, where six humanoids at five stations assemble actuators for the next generation of humanoids. The German supplier says its humanoid orders have reached about €400 million (about $448 million).

Amap and Alibaba's Token Hub have released λ0, a whole-body humanoid model trained mainly on 500 hours of first-person video and motion data from people doing everyday tasks. The team says it runs zero-shot on a Unitree G1 with a 62.5% success rate, though nobody has reproduced it yet.

Japan's EV subsidy shrinks from January, Tesla Japan adds V2L, Toyota's Arene gets a guardrail, BYD's Seagull seats five, and NIO's Firefly goes 560 km. The week on EVX News in five stories and one number.

Four of Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics' $399 Microduck robots joined Jensen Huang on stage at GTC Berlin, sitting, standing and mostly napping on cue. The sold-out robot was NVIDIA's demo for agent-driven robot training on Isaac Sim and RTX Spark.

At Unitree's World Physical AI Conference in Hangzhou, founder Wang Xingxing said the company is researching a self-evolution loop where AI writes, simulates, tests and rewrites robot code, and that embodied AI's ChatGPT moment could come as early as next year.

Musk says Optimus is in early production in Fremont but will take at least a year to reach 20,000 a week. The hand is still the hard part, a new video could come in a month or two, and AI5 goes into Optimus around April 2027.

Figure's humanoid has walked nine straight days and 1.2 million steps on a treadmill in a stress test that's still running. Here's what it does and doesn't prove.

Atlas now gets built in a day, Geely's humanoid spoke three languages in Paris, and DexForce trains robots in virtual worlds.