Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.
The Hamburg Regional Court on April 21, 2026 granted Teradyne Robotics a preliminary injunction barring Elite Robots Deutschland from distributing software that allegedly copies Universal Robots code. A week later Teradyne reported $91 million of first-quarter robotics revenue, about 7% of a record $1,282 million group total.
UBTech Robotics said on April 24 that it had completed the transfer of shares tendered in its partial offer for Zhejiang Fenglong Electric, taking its holding to 93,979,906 A shares, about 43.01% of the company. The Hong Kong-listed humanoid maker paid RMB17.72 a share in both steps of a deal worth up to RMB1.67 billion and later amended terms to nominate seven of eight Fenglong directors.
FANUC said on April 24 that sales for the year to March 2026 rose 7.6% to a record ¥857.8 billion and operating profit rose 15.7% to ¥183.8 billion, with robots now 44.1% of revenue. Fourth-quarter orders climbed 19.2% to ¥252.0 billion, led by a 55.2% jump in China, and the company guided for another record year while authorising a buyback of up to ¥50 billion.
AutoStore reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $165.8 million on April 23, 2026, up 92.9% from an unusually weak quarter a year earlier, with order intake up 27.0% to $179.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA more than tripled to $72.9 million, but the Norwegian cube storage maker warned that uncertainty over global trade could make customers more cautious and limit near-term visibility.
Tesla said in its first-quarter 2026 shareholder update that its first-generation Optimus line, designed for 1 million humanoid robots a year, will replace the Model S and Model X lines at its Fremont factory. It is also preparing Gigafactory Texas for a second-generation line designed for long-term annual capacity of 10 million robots, while reporting revenue of $22.4 billion and $44.7 billion in cash and investments.
Sony AI's autonomous table tennis system Ace won three of five matches against elite players and lost both matches against two Japanese T.League professionals in April 2025 trials, according to a paper published in Nature on April 22, 2026. The robot combines event-based vision sensors from Sony Semiconductor Solutions, an eight-axis arm and reinforcement learning policies trained in simulation, and reaches a perception latency of 10.2 milliseconds.
Dresden software firm Wandelbots, gripper and automation maker SCHUNK and consultancy EY said on April 19, 2026 they would combine SCHUNK's GROW automation cell, Wandelbots' NOVA platform and NVIDIA Omniverse into a standardised physical AI offer for mid-sized European manufacturers. The same day, W. Gessmann GmbH said it would show NOVA-based mobile robots at Hannover Messe.
The 2026 Beijing E-Town humanoid half marathon on April 19 drew more than 100 robot teams from 13 provinces, against five provinces a year earlier, and about 40% of robots navigated on their own. The winning robot, Lightning of the Qitian Dasheng team, finished the 21.0975-kilometre course in 50:26 while the men's human winner ran 1:07:47, according to the Beijing municipal government.
Shanghai-based AgiBot told its 2026 partner conference on April 17 that revenue grew from RMB300,000 in 2023 to more than RMB1 billion in 2025, and that its ten-thousandth robot had rolled off the line this year. The company launched four hardware lines including the full-size Expedition A3, six models and a five-year ecosystem programme worth more than RMB2 billion.
An 82-author team from Toyota Research Institute, Cornell University and MIT reported in Science Robotics on April 15, 2026 that multitask large behavior models, built on diffusion policy, outperform single-task baselines in blind, randomized trials and need far less task-specific data. The preprint version describes about 1,700 hours of robot demonstrations across more than 500 tasks and 1,800 controlled real-world trials.
Skild AI said on April 15, 2026 that it had acquired the robotics division of Zebra Technologies, the business Zebra bought as Fetch Robotics in 2021. Zebra's quarterly SEC filing shows the sale closed on March 27 for $20 million in cash, escrow and a minority stake in Skild, against the $301 million Zebra recorded when it bought Fetch.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 on April 14, 2026, an embodied reasoning model built on Gemini 3.0 Flash and offered as a preview through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. DeepMind said the model reads industrial instruments correctly 86% of the time, or 93% with an agentic zoom and code execution step, against 23% for ER 1.5. Boston Dynamics is using the capability for Spot facility inspections.
Generalist AI released GEN-1 on April 2, 2026, an embodied foundation model pretrained on more than 500,000 hours of human physical interaction data captured with wearable devices and no robot data. The company reports 99% average success on tasks where its previous model reached 64%, about one hour of robot data per task and task times roughly three times faster than the prior state of the art; the results are the company's own and have not been independently replicated.
UBTech Robotics said in its 2025 annual results that revenue from full-size humanoid robots rose 2,203.7% to RMB820.6 million on 1,079 units, lifting group revenue 53.3% to RMB2.0 billion. The net loss narrowed to RMB789.8 million, while three share placings raised RMB5.78 billion to fund capacity for more than 6,000 robots a year.
Shanghai-based AgiBot said on 30 March 2026 that its 10,000th humanoid robot had come off the production line, 112 days after it announced its 5,000th. The company said the step from 5,000 to 10,000 units ran four times faster than earlier phases, but its own December breakdown shows that only about a third of its fleet is full-size.
Japan's inter-ministerial AI robotics council on March 26, 2026 endorsed a national strategy that aims to win more than 30% of a multi-purpose robot market the government expects to reach about 60 trillion yen by 2040. The plan promises an open-source domestic robot foundation model by around June 2027, names 16 deployment fields and defers concrete sector targets to a roadmap revision due in May.
Fauna Robotics said on 24 March 2026 that it had joined Amazon and would operate as an Amazon company, keeping its Sprout humanoid on sale and its customers supported; no terms were disclosed. The deal gives the operator of more than 1 million warehouse robots a small, safety-first humanoid used by Disney, Boston Dynamics, NYU and UC San Diego, and a team drawn from Google DeepMind and CTRL-labs.
The Shanghai Stock Exchange accepted Unitree Robotics' application to list on the STAR Market on March 20, 2026, with the Hangzhou company seeking RMB4.202 billion. Its prospectus shows reviewed 2025 revenue of RMB1,708.21 million, up 335.36%, and more than 5,500 humanoids shipped in 2025, with humanoids overtaking quadrupeds as its largest product line.
NVIDIA used its GTC keynote on March 16, 2026 to preview Isaac GR00T N2, a robot foundation model built on its DreamZero world action model research that it says succeeds at new tasks in new environments more than twice as often as leading VLA models. It also put the 3-billion-parameter GR00T N1.7 into commercial early access and announced Cosmos 3 and Isaac Lab 3.0, with N2 due by the end of 2026.
China's legislature approved the 2026 to 2030 development outline on March 12, naming embodied AI a future industry and calling for national training grounds, integrated brain-and-cerebellum robot models and faster humanoid deployment. Official data show industrial robot output rose 28.0% to 773,074 sets in 2025 and 33.2% in the first quarter of 2026.