Nov 17, 2025 3 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 World’s First Robot Army

Plus: The Edible Robot, The First Dental Robot

Good Morning, Roboticists!

Robots are no longer prototypes waiting in labs; they’re showing up everywhere at once.

HUMANOIDS

UBTECH Has Begun to Ship Hundreds of Humanoids

📌 What’s happening: Shenzhen-based UBTECH Robotics has begun large-scale industrial deliveries of its Walker S2 humanoid robot — the first verified mass rollout of humanlike robots to real factories, not labs. Orders have topped 800 million yuan (about $113M), with 500 units slated for delivery by year’s end to automakers including BYD, Geely, FAW Volkswagen, Dongfeng Liuzhou, and Foxconn. Each Walker S2 can autonomously swap its own battery, allowing genuine 24/7 uptime on factory floors.

🧠 How this hits reality: Forget show-floor demos. These robots are now punching in. UBTECH’s delivery video drew mockery from Figure’s CEO as “a bit too CGI,” but the contracts are real, the clients are tier-one, and the hardware is walking into production lines today. Even if most units start on low-risk logistics and handling tasks, this marks the first time a humanoid fleet has left the lab at industrial scale. Shenzhen just became the first city to deploy, not demo, a humanoid workforce.

🤖 Key takeaway: Mock the rendering all you want — when hundreds of humanoids clock in for shift work, the simulation became reality.

HEALTH

EPFL Made a Robot You Can Swallow on Purpose

📌 What’s happening: EPFL’s Floreano Lab just demoed the first fully ingestible soft robot with a battery, valve, and actuator all made from gelatin, wax, citric acid, baking soda, and a bit of gummy-bear engineering. It wiggles under CO₂ pressure, survives long enough to deliver meds, and dissolves without leaving a single gram of e-waste.

🧠 How this hits reality: Strip away the edible meme and this is a serious materials breakthrough. Fully biodegradable pneumatic power means you can deploy swarms in forests, oceans, farms, or disaster sites without adding plastic to the food chain. In wildlife management, this drops a new tool between darts and drones: cheap, moving, disposable bio-robots that “feed” animals vaccines or nutrients. In environmental robotics, it hints at a new class of field systems where the power source is as degradable as the body. It is soft robotics turning into ecology infrastructure, not another lab curiosity.

🤖 Key takeaway: Robotics may not have solved locomotion, but at least disposal is now trivial.

DENTISTRY

Neocis Upgrades Its Dental Robot and Keeps Everyone Else Out of the Mouth

📌 What’s happening: Miami-based Neocis, the only FDA-cleared dental robotics company, has unveiled Yomi S, an upgraded system for implant surgery featuring YomiPlan AI, a planning suite trained on nearly 100,000 past implants. The new unit adds longer arms, a 30% smaller cart, and full single-practitioner operation via foot pedal and touchscreen, designed for compact dental offices, not operating theaters.

🧠 How this hits reality: While orthopedic and surgical robotics chase billion-dollar hospital contracts, Neocis quietly dominates one of medicine’s biggest untouched frontiers: dentistry. With roughly 200,000 U.S. dentists and 200 million patients missing teeth, it’s building a moat through regulatory first-mover advantage and domain-specific precision. Yomi S automates implant planning, compensates for patient motion, and literally drills with the patient’s breathing — turning what used to be a “hand-feel” art into repeatable data. Backers like NVIDIA NVentures and Intuitive Ventures know: this is not a gadget, it’s the foundation of robotic dentistry.

🤖 Key takeaway: While everyone else fights over humanoids, Neocis just made the first robot dentists actually trust and can bill for.

QUICK HITS

Apptronik is seeking over four hundred million dollars at a five billion dollar valuation as it leans on Google to accelerate its humanoid robot push.
Beijing Institute of Technology researchers developed an animal-inspired multilayer navigation system that lets robots navigate autonomously without GPS.
Saddle Creek deployed Robust.AI’s Carter robots in its North Carolina warehouse to automate tote delivery and streamline order fulfillment.
Wuffy launched a lifelike AI robot puppy offering touch, voice and adaptive interaction with no maintenance needed.
Lucid Bots launched Lavo AI, a fully autonomous pressure-washing robot that navigates complex sites and performs cleaning without human labor.

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