Physical AI and Humanoid Robots (snapshot 2026-10-02)
Physical AI means AI models that perceive and act in the physical world, usually vision-language-action (VLA) models driving robot bodies. The status below is taken from each company’s own site on 2026-09-30 and re-read on 2026-10-02 (Figure, Agility, Boston Dynamics, Apptronik, DeepMind confirmed); Tesla and Unitree rows come from Wikipedia (secondary); company claims are vendor statements, not independent confirmation.
Hardware players
| Company | Status per own site | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Figure AI | Figure 03 introduced 2025-10-09; Series C over 39B post-money (Sept 2025); Helix VLA at “Helix 2.5” (2026-09-17, zero-shot generalization across 30 homes claimed); F.02 decommissioned 2026-09-30; “Index” physical-data initiative (Aug 2026) | BMW deployment mentioned; partners Brookfield, Catalyst Brands, Nscale |
| Agility Robotics | Digit 5 launched Sept 2026; Digit has 65,000 hours of production experience; customers listed: Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, Mercado Libre, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada | Board named for planned public-company status (2026-09-29); Investor Day 2026-10-06; built in Salem, Oregon |
| Boston Dynamics | Electric Atlas “product version” launched; Hyundai field testing; select early adopters first | Specs: 1.9 m, 90 kg, 56 DoF, 4 h swappable battery, 50 kg peak payload, IP67 |
| 1X | NEO in development and deployment; Hayward, California factory (Apr 2026); 25-DoF tendon-driven hands (Jul 2026); World Model Lab (Jun 2026) | Shipping dates not on the page checked (unverified) |
| Apptronik | Apollo humanoid (bipedal and wheeled options) for manufacturing, warehouse and retail; listed as a Gemini Robotics partner; CNBC Disruptor 50 (2026, per its site) | Partners named on its site: Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, GXO, Mercedes-Benz, Jabil; funding and shipment numbers not checked |
| Tesla Optimus | Per Wikipedia (secondary): V2.3 shown in London and Berlin in Dec 2025; Gen 3 “to be unveiled closer to production start” (Q1 2026 earnings call, 2026-04-22); Fremont line planned for 1M robots/year (Tesla statement as relayed by Wikipedia); tesla.com blocked (403) | Production claims are Tesla statements |
| Unitree | Per Wikipedia (secondary): G1; H1, H2, R1 lineup (own site confirms H2, H1/H1-2, G1, R1, no prices listed); a STAR Market (Shanghai) IPO in Aug 2026 is reported by Wikipedia (details not verified) | See unitree company note; IPO figures are unverified against the exchange |
| K-Scale Labs | Reportedly shut down around Nov 2025 (per the vault audit; not independently verified) | See kscale-dot-dev |
Model and platform layer
- NVIDIA Isaac GR00T: open reference platform for humanoids (datasets, foundation model, Omniverse and Cosmos simulation, Jetson Thor runtime). See Nvidia and nvidia-jetson-nano.
- Google DeepMind Gemini Robotics 2 (VLA), Gemini Robotics ER 2 (embodied reasoning, trying in Google AI Studio) and On-Device 2; hardware partners Agile Robots, Apptronik and Boston Dynamics; trusted-tester waitlist. See Google and deepmind-research-lab.
- Physical Intelligence (pi models): its site returned HTTP 429 on 2026-09-30, 2026-10-02 and 2026-10-05; not verified, so no claims are made here.
Open items
- Physical Intelligence, Skild, Tesla production status and Unitree IPO details are unverified (blocked pages, secondary sources only).
- Related robotics notes: kscale-dot-dev, neo-home, noetix-bumi, robotics; company notes figure-ai, tesla, unitree.
Caveats
Deployment counts, valuations and “zero-shot” results are company-reported. Independent benchmarks for humanoid capability were not consulted.
Sources
- https://www.figure.ai/news (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://www.agilityrobotics.com/ (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://bostondynamics.com/products/atlas/ (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://www.1x.tech/discover (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac/gr00t (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/ (accessed 2026-09-30)
- KB-AI-AUDIT-2026-09 Appendix A (K-Scale)
- https://apptronik.com/, https://www.unitree.com/ (accessed 2026-10-02)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_(robot) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitree_Robotics (secondary, accessed 2026-10-02)
- Figure, Agility, Boston Dynamics and DeepMind pages re-read 2026-10-02