In a minimalist Tokyo lab, a woman lounges in a chair that could easily pass for something in a fancy spa. But she’s actually controlling a humanoid robot across the room with just the tiniest flexes of her muscles. The robot copies her every move, from lifting a box to wiping down a table to shaking someone’s hand. This is H2L’s Capsule Interface.
Amazon’s warehouses can now be described as a wild dance of robotic arms and zippy bots weaving through aisles, sorting packages with a precision that’s almost eerie. As of July 2025, the online retail giant has rolled out over a million robots across its global web of fulfillment centers, nearly neck-and-neck with its 1.56 million human workers.
In Beijing’s Yizhuang Development Zone, four teams of humanoid robots duked it out in the world’s first fully autonomous 3-on-3 soccer (football) showdown, hosted by the ROBO League. Tsinghua University’s THU Robotics squad stole the show, outscoring China Agricultural University’s Mountain Sea team 5-3 in a final that was nothing short of a tech breakthrough.
Photo credit: SCMP
Shanghai’s Zhangyuan neighborhood, a 140-year-old maze of tight alleys and Shikumen-style homes, just pulled off an engineering stunt for the ages. The Huayanli complex—7,500 tons of century-old buildings—was hoisted and shuffled across the city by 432 tiny robots, each small enough to fit in your hand, in a jaw-dropping technological dance.
Humanoid robots used to be the kind of thing you’d only see in big-budget projects, but now they’re showing up in garages and basements, thanks to the Berkeley Humanoid Lite. This open-source, 3D-printed installation from UC Berkeley’s engineering crew is as welcoming to newcomers as it is innovative, coming in at under $5,000 and ready to shake up how we interact with robotics.
Surveying a construction site used to mean long days of sweaty work, pounding stakes into the ground, and hoping your measurements didn’t go wonky. Then along comes CivDot, a nimble little robot from Civ Robotics that’s turning that old grind into something almost magical.
A robot dog that can pick up a ball and hurl it across a field sounds like something a Pixar movie, but researchers at ETH Zurich have turned this concept into reality. Their creation, a quadruped named ANYmal, doesn’t just walk or run—it manipulates objects with a precision that rivals human dexterity.
K-Scale Labs is quietly reshaping robotics’ future in an unassuming Palo Alto garage. Their goal? To roll out a fully open-source humanoid robot for just $999—a steal that beats most high-end smartphones. This is essentially Z-Bot, a developer-friendly platform built to bring embodied intelligence to everyone.
Humanoid robots have mostly been stuck with walking, grabbing, or at best, tripping through obstacle courses. But the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa smashed that limit with iRonCub3, the world’s first jet-powered humanoid robot to nail controlled flight.
