WHAT'S NEXT
1 Honor's long-teased Robot Phone finally launched, with a built-in motorized gimbal that tracks subjects and shoots cinematic footage on its own.
After turning heads at MWC, Cannes, and the Shanghai Film Festival earlier this year, Honor's Robot Phone is officially here. The device packs a motorized gimbal that tracks subjects and executes cinematic shots autonomously, reacts to its surroundings, and Honor says it can also hold real conversations with you. Pre-orders opened in China on August 12, with sales beginning August 18. See the transformative design in action.
2 Uber sold its entire stake in Serve Robotics without warning, and the delivery robot company found out through a public filing.
Uber has divested its full stake in Serve Robotics, the delivery robot company that spun out of Postmates after Uber's $2.65 billion acquisition in 2020. Serve learned about the exit only when Uber filed regulatory disclosures, a real surprise after five years of partnership. The split reflects diverging views on how to scale autonomous delivery fleets. Learning your largest backer has quietly walked away through a public filing, rather than a conversation, says something about where that relationship actually stood before the paperwork made it official.
3 US robotics engineers are reportedly hand-carrying robot parts back from Shenzhen in their luggage to keep up with development speed.
With humanoid robot development moving faster than domestic supply chains can support, US engineers are making personal shopping trips to Shenzhen and carrying components home themselves, according to a report by The Information. If accurate, it highlights a real tension: Washington banned new Chinese robot imports last month, and yet America's robotics industry still appears to depend heavily on Chinese hardware at the component level, ban or no ban.
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ROBOTS IN ACTION
Three places robots are doing unexpected work this week
Cleanup crew. Matic's home robot vacuum has launched Cues, a new update bringing voice and gesture control to the device. Point at a spill, say "clean here," and the robot locates it using its five onboard cameras and cleans it autonomously. The update is free for existing owners, though the robot's price is expected to climb from $1,245 to $1,495 on September 9. See how it works.
Super service. Wonder, the New York food hall chain, is rebuilding its restaurant operations, deploying robots capable of making 500 bowls of food an hour and tripling kitchen output without adding staff. The company is also running an AI program that lets anyone build their own restaurant menu for $10 a month. Backed by a fresh $650 million at a $9 billion valuation, Wonder is eyeing a public market debut next year.
Space bots. Chinese scientists have proposed using quadruped robots as workers at the country's International Lunar Research Station, due for completion in 2035. The robots would patrol the station, collect rock samples, mine minerals, regulate air and temperature, and even provide emotional support to astronauts. China plans to launch a mission later this month to extract water ice at the lunar South Pole.
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INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT
Five moves shaping the robotics landscape
Cybercab gets satellite hardware. Tesla has unveiled its first Cybercab with an integrated Starlink antenna, hinting at satellite connectivity for its future robotaxi fleet.
BYD enters humanoids mid-slump. BYD has unveiled Xiao Di, a 1.6-meter humanoid robot, at showrooms in Shenzhen and Shanghai, timed against four straight months of falling domestic car sales.
India's training-data workforce. Bloomberg reports that thousands of Indian workers are being paid to film manual tasks as AI training data, potentially helping robots learn to automate the very jobs those workers currently hold.
Atoms builds out its C-suite. Travis Kalanick's robotics startup Atoms has hired former Uber finance chief Gautam Gupta as CFO, weeks after raising $1.7B, as Kalanick keeps rebuilding his old Uber circle around robotics.
Digit works the floor without a cage. Agility claims its Digit V5 humanoid can work alongside humans without safety fencing, pushing factory robots closer to genuine production-floor deployment.
ROBO REELS
A single robot arm in China just outsorted three humanoid robots combined.
Shenzhen-based X Square Robot livestreamed its WALL-B system sorting 1,816 parcels per hour at 98% accuracy, feeding packages from a chaotic unloading pile onto a live sorting belt. For context, Figure AI's three humanoids ran for 200 hours and processed roughly 1,250 parcels per hour combined, meaning one specialized arm outperformed three general-purpose humanoids working together. It is a genuinely useful reminder that the most capable form factor for a specific task is not always the one that looks most impressive on stage. See how the two robots stack up against each other.