Robotics

Figure's 200-hour shift: Figure 03 humanoids sorted packages on Helix-02 with zero teleoperation in a livestream planned as an 8-hour shift; nothing broke, so they kept going for ~200 hours and roughly 249,560 packages, robots rotating onto charging docks like shift workers. Days later Figure signed its first retail deployment with Catalyst Brands (JCPenney's parent). Sources: Seoul Economic Daily, Figure × Catalyst

• NVIDIA standardized the research humanoid (on a Chinese robot): the open Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid pairs a Unitree H2 Plus chassis with Sharpa tactile hands and Jetson Thor compute, with Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford and UCSD as first adopters. NVIDIA also shipped Cosmos 3, an open world foundation model for physical AI. Much of the coverage fixated on the US chip champion standardizing frontier research on Chinese hardware. Sources: NVIDIA press release, Cosmos 3, CNBC
• Unitree's month: cleared its Shanghai STAR Market IPO hearing (first humanoid maker approved for A-shares, ~$620M at ~$6.2B), got a standing ovation on America's Got Talent with eight dancing G1s, and saw a G1 in a clown wig spin-kick a child at a martial-arts demo (the kid was reportedly fine). The full spectrum of humanoid-robot 2026, in one company, in one news cycle. Sources: SCMP (IPO), Global Times (AGT), Interesting Engineering (kick)
• Robotaxi roundup: Waymo's purpose-built Ojai started accepting riders in SF, LA and Phoenix while the existing fleet does 500,000+ paid rides a week, Waymo launched a $29.99/month Premier loyalty subscription (robotaxis have a frequent-flyer program now), and Tesla expanded unsupervised robotaxi to the whole Austin metro with, per fleet trackers, only ~20 cars serving 245 square miles. Sources: Waymo (Ojai), TechCrunch, Waymo (Premier), CleanTechnica, TechTimes