Humanoid robots can now handle monkey bars. Researchers at ETH Zürich’s Robotic Systems Lab showed an EngineAI PM-01 leaping onto a sparse overhead ladder, swinging hand over hand from one thin rung to the next, and dropping cleanly to the floor in a single unbroken sequence. The work, titled Learning Agile Perceptive Traversal of Sparse 3D Structures for Humanoids, treats the playground classic as a hard test of seeing thin, hanging geometry and then moving the whole body with split-second accuracy.

Steven Gong and his University of Waterloo engineering classmates needed a capstone that actually finished a chore companies have chased for years. Folding laundry looks simple until cloth bunches, sleeves hide, and every shirt arrives in a different mess. Their answer was a pair of follower arms that copied two leader arms driven by human hands, a pile of recorded demonstrations, and a single night of training.

Finished on a new Guangzhou line, XPENG’s Iron stood up and walked away on its own. No remote pilot. No stage crew. Just a completed humanoid leaving the factory floor the way a car leaves a paint booth, only this one used two legs. The company called the September 7 moment the first time an advanced general-purpose humanoid had been built on automated production lines and then departed under its own power.

Jackery first parked a wheeled solar generator on a CES floor in 2024 and called it Solar Mars Bot. Two years of work later, the same rover is back in public, this time at IFA Berlin 2026, still billed as a future product that can hunt sunlight, charge itself, then roll over to you with a few kilowatt-hours in tow.