That's a wrap on an amazing 17-day journey across China. I didn't do this alone. My friend @dolylupec came along for the whole ride. She's got a background in AI and robotics investing, and I'm grateful she chronicled the tours on her account and pitched in on my channel. @XRoboHub is one of the most resourceful people I know. He understands the humanoid space well and helped us schedule most of the important visits, then came along too. And a shout-out to @Robo_Tuo, who encouraged me to do this trip and supported us all along. It was my first time in China, and the trip was packed so tight with tours, we didn’t get to do much touristy stuff. Can't complain. It was a hell of a ride. 4 cities on the mainland. 18 humanoid makers. Warm, welcoming people everywhere. We had the privilege of chatting with founders, senior engineers, researchers, and marketing and strategy leads, a lot of whom said yes on very short notice. Grateful for that. The energy is extraordinary. It's the trifecta: engineering talent, a deep supply chain, and breakneck adoption of new tech. There's intense competition, but underneath it, a real spirit of sharing and collaboration. I've got a series of tour videos lined up, dropping over the coming days. And something tells me this won't be my last trip. Robotics and embodied AI are just getting started. The next ten years are going to reshape how we think about physical work. We ended on the Great Wall, a 2,000 year old marvel of engineering, after two weeks staring at the next one. The robots are coming. I just went to meet them first.

Robots playing soccer fully autonomously at RoboCup 2026 in Incheon, South Korea.

The hand is where the mind meets the world.

X-Humanoid unveiled TG-VLA, which it calls the world's first whole-body VLA framework for full-size humanoid robots. The goal: move humanoids past "mobile dual-arm systems" to human-like, whole-body coordinated operation. Built on three technologies: - HEX: an open-source full-size humanoid VLA that learns across embodiments and coordinates the whole body. Claimed SOTA on real-world whole-body manipulation - HAF-VLA: hierarchical action flow that decomposes whole-body motion into subtasks. Best or joint-best on 6 benchmarks - DSRL-DCT: online RL for high-DoF humanoids in a compressed latent space. 100% success on mobile manipulation HEX is open-source.

Chinese makers have scaled to thousands of affordable humanoid units, but it's worth noting those are humanoid bodies. Half-decent 5-finger hands with human-like DoF still run $25k to $50k each, and maintenance is quite high. A robot that ships with a well-integrated, reliable hands hasn't achieved scalability yet. Body and hand are out of sync on reliability and performance. The real long-term challenge of humanoids as a product is still the hands. And rapidly iterating on the design while ramping up production is like building the plane while flying it. Elon is being realistic here. The prototypes and products will keep evolving for the next few years. Just cranking out robot bodies won't deliver useful general-purpose robots. It'll take a lot more engineering iterations, in lockstep with rapidly evolving the production processes. Yes, there's a middle ground of shipping robots with grippers instead of hands. But Tesla is apparently aiming for the ultimate prize: the most general-purpose form that we know works.

Which robot would you want in your home?

Awesome having @TheHumanoidHub visit our headquarter at LimX Dynamics in Shenzhen. From live demos of Oli and TRON to chatting with our Head of R&D, Paul Li, we discussed our approach to humanoids and the fundamental engineering challenges of bringing them into the real world. It was a great conversation on where humanoids are today and what's next. There's plenty to be excited about, while more to learn through iteration and real-world deployment. Thanks for the visit. Enjoy the full tour below 👇 #humanoid #EmbodiedAI #robotics #LimXDynamics x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/…

Weave Robotics has opened pre-orders for Isaac 1, a home robot built from the ground up in San Francisco. - A wheeled humanoid with a collapsible torso that extends to 5'9" then folds away when idle - Weave built its own actuators and safety systems Current chores: - Laundry pickup and folding - Tidying the rooms - 8 hours of battery, 2 hours to recharge Chores are done autonomously, but tele-operation assistance is available when needed to complete the tasks. Price: $8k upfront or $449/month subscription Deliveries begin for California residents in fall of 2026.

The OneRobotics tour was so much fun. The Shenzhen-based company makes cleaning and companion robots for the home, plus a surprisingly fun tennis-playing robot. Their newest is robot Onero, an affordable humanoid, and they build the embodied AI models for all the robots. The company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2025. Thank you @OneRoboticsTech for the tour.

Great connections, inspiring sharing, and insightful exchanges. Thank you so much @TheHumanoidHub for taking the time to visit us. We look forward to and warmly welcome anyone interested in PaXini, robotics, or embodied AI to visit us! We’re always ready to share our latest tech and robotics vision with you all.

Optimus inherits the industrial machine that was forged through Tesla's hardest ramps.

Everything Lars Moravy, Tesla's VP of Engineering, said about Optimus in the latest interview on Herbert's channel: On the transition of Fremont's Model S/X lines to Optimus: - Space has been cleared out - Our first line has landed (in Fremont) from our automation groups in the Midwest and Germany, and we've started to install it - Machines are going through the last stages of FAT (field acceptance testing) - The first line is quite modular, so bring-up can be quick - A line takes 2-3 days to install and a week to get going - After proving out the first sub-line, we have 40 more to go - Sub-lines are for different components like actuators, torso, battery, limbs, etc. - Multiple factors go into 'make-vs-buy' decisions: does a supplier know how to do it, do we keep the IP in-house, is the investment significant, is the risk of change high Do car manufacturing strengths pass to Optimus? - Tesla has learned the hard parts of scaling from cars and batteries: parts flow in/out of the factory building, multiple levels of supply chain, multi-sourcing, crisis management - Optimus benefits from that foundation. The lines are designed by the same experienced people who have learned the importance of precision and repeatability, and OEE and uptime - The BOM cost of a car is more than a robot (Optimus) - Tesla has the trifecta: scale manufacturing, electric motor design, and real-world AI - Optimus is more like a car than a consumer electronics device, because of its high functional safety and multi-axis dimensions The humanoid form factor: - The form has to feel like it belongs in our space - It's important to start with C-3PO (a humanoid from), then we'll see expansion into other forms like R2-D2

Humanoid perceptive loco-manipulation reaching new heights