GXO Targets Up to 1,000 Apollo Robots, Pending Warehouse Trials ↗
An intent agreement ties expansion to successful trials.
Humanoid robots
400 Lifelike Humanoid Robots Are Headed to Chinese Car Dealerships in UBTech's First Big Order for Its Human-Faced Robots ↗
Chinese robotics company UBTech said Nov. 11 that Yongda Automobiles, a listed luxury-car dealer group, will buy 400 of its U1 Pro lifelike humanoid robots for delivery this year. It's the first large order UBTech has disclosed for its human-faced line. At the 169,800-yuan (about $23,800) retail price, that's roughly 68 million yuan (about $9.5 million). The robots are meant for showroom experiences, sales promotion and customer service; how much they'll actually do remains to be seen.
A humanoid robot tries out on a Mercedes assembly line: Google's new robot 'brain' sorts parts at a 96% success rate in a pilot ↗
Factory robots are great at repeating one motion but usually need reprogramming for anything new. On November 10, Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2.5, a robot 'brain' it says helps machines learn more kinds of tasks, faster. In a pilot with Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz, an Apollo 2 humanoid sorted parts on live car production lines in Hungary and Germany at a reported 96% success rate. That is a proof of concept, not a full rollout of humanoids, and all performance and safety figures come from DeepMind's own tests.