Jan 2, 2026 3 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 A Factory Milestone

Plus: Robots Crack E Waste, Welding Without Humans

Good Morning, Roboticists!

Across shipyards, recycling plants, and automated lines, robots are crossing a threshold.

HUMANOIDS

UBTECH Ships Humanoids at an Industrial Scale Now

👀 What’s happening: UBTECH Robotics has shipped its 1,000th Walker S2 humanoid robot, with more than 500 already operating in live industrial settings. The company reports roughly $113 million in orders booked during 2025 and says production has moved from prototype batches to repeatable factory output.

🌍 How this hits reality: This marks a shift from showcase videos to purchase orders. Automotive and electronics firms are committing $14 million to $35 million per deal for humanoids that can stand all day and work with minimal supervision. That puts robots into standard capex planning, not experimental budgets, and stresses assumptions about labor availability and uptime economics.

🤖 Key takeaway: Once humanoids enter procurement cycles, progress accelerates quietly. If reliability holds at scale, factories normalize them as infrastructure, forcing global robotics players to compete on cost curves, delivery speed, and service networks rather than demos.

RECYCLE

A robot quietly changes how e waste gets recycled

👀 What’s happening: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute just revealed a robot built to tear apart old electronics, starting with flat screen TVs. Instead of carefully unscrewing hundreds of fasteners, it uses controlled kinetic force to open devices in seconds. After five years of development, the system is leaving the lab for its first real recycling facility in Pennsylvania.

🌍 How this hits reality: E waste recycling usually fails at the disassembly step. Manual labor is slow, costly, and unsafe, so many displays are shredded or landfilled. TVs contain gold, silver, copper, and materials the US barely produces domestically. By removing the screw bottleneck, this robot makes material recovery fast enough to matter, easing supply pressure and reducing dependence on imports as electronics costs keep rising.

🤖 Key takeaway: This is not a demo robot. It is infrastructure. Expect more narrow, brutal machines like this, designed to unlock stalled economics in recycling, manufacturing, and resource recovery rather than chase general purpose intelligence.

HUMANOIDS

Humanoids move from demos to shipyard welding work

👀 What’s happening: Persona AI finally unveiled its first Gen1 humanoid alongside £33 million in pre seed funding. The Houston startup is not chasing general purpose demos. It is building a teleoperated welding robot for shipyards, designed to work inside hulls where heat, fumes, and confined spaces make human labor costly.

🌍 How this hits reality: The robot is remotely operated by skilled welders, with force feedback, dexterous hands, and human scale mobility. That lets existing shipyard tools and processes stay unchanged. A signed partnership with HD Hyundai pushes humanoids straight into core production, not pilots, stressing assumptions about automation timelines.

🤖 Key takeaway: Heavy industry is where humanoids can pay back first. If teleoperated robots absorb dangerous work now, autonomy can follow later. Shipbuilding could become one of the first proving grounds for embodied AI.

QUICK HITS

Scientists used a deep-sea robot to find hydrothermal vents and methane seeps coexisting at 1,300 meters depth.
RealMan Robotics launched three high-power-density joint modules alongside new open datasets and platforms.
Surgerii Robotics raised $100 million in Series D funding to accelerate global adoption of its SHURUI single-port surgical robot.
China’s Qingtianzhu launched a 1 RMB humanoid robot flash rental service across 10 cities to speed up real-world adoption.
AI² Robotics unveiled ZhiCube, a modular embodied AI service space using AlphaBot 2 and the GOVLA model for multi-scenario human–robot collaboration.

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