This Week in Humanoid Robotics
Funding, deployments, and capability signals across the last 7 days.
Editor’s Choice: Beijing humanoid half marathon
I think robot sports will be big. Fighting especially, but also other forms of machine spectacle. More importantly, activities like this gives teams a reason to push harder in public, not just drop another polished demo.
On that topic, Beijing is set to host a humanoid half marathon on April 19. The 21.1 km course in E-Town puts robots into a real outdoor setting, which should expose how they actually perform over distance.
Unitree is one of the teams preparing for the race, and this week said its H1 had reached 10 m/s in sprint testing. That is not the only 10 m/s-level claim to surface this year. MirrorMe said in February that its Bolt humanoid had also hit that mark, though in a controlled lab setting.
source: Unitree robotics
Chinese capital wants anything humanoid
TARS Robotics raised $455 million in a Pre-A round led by GL Ventures, HSG, and Meituan. Over the past few months, the company has been building across hardware, data, and models, with releases including its WIYH multimodal dataset, AWE 3.0, and demos around fine bimanual industrial work. The size of the round shows how aggressively capital is moving into humanoids and the stack around them.
Booster Robotics followed with a new round of nearly RMB 1 billion. Unlike some of the newer funding stories in the category, Booster paired the raise with operating numbers: first-quarter shipments up 500% year over year, January–February signed orders up more than 800%, and operating cash flow positive since December.
Source: Booster robotics
Elsewhere this week
Figure introduced Vulcan, a new control policy for Figure 03 focused on fault tolerance rather than another clean demo. The key claim is that the robot can lose up to three lower-body actuators or joints and still stay upright and keep moving.
Introducing Vulcan - a new Al robot controller
— Brett Adcock (@adcock_brett) April 16, 2026
This is an important safety feature that allows F.03 to lose up to 3 actuators in the lower body and still hobble around without falling
Check it out pic.twitter.com/g8YpYfWajw
AgiBot said its G2 humanoids are now running on Longcheer’s mass-production line for consumer electronics precision manufacturing. They say the system was integrated in four months and is already delivering stable, continuous operation against production targets.
UBTECH is deploying their Walker S2 into ROSSMANN’s logistics center in Burgwedel with Terra Robotics, framing it as a live European retail logistics pilot. The pilot is described as a year-long test focused on repetitive and ergonomically difficult warehouse tasks, and it is being positioned as one of Europe’s first larger-scale humanoid logistics deployments.