Global Humanoid Robots Showcase New Capabilities
Several international companies have demonstrated new advancements in humanoid robotics. China's Robotera L7 was shown in a video performing a complex, traditional sword dance, showcasing its balance and control. Separately, Shanghai-based Droid Up unveiled "Moya," a humanoid that can simulate human body temperature, a feature aimed at improving human-robot interaction. Meanwhile, U.S. startup HUUCH finalized an AI platform for full-body motion, initially for gaming but with applications in service robotics.
- China's Robotera L7 stands 1.71m tall, features 55 degrees of freedom, and can run at 4 m/s with a dual-arm payload capacity of 20 kg. Its onboard AI runs on a dual-processor architecture combining x86 and Nvidia Orin chips and uses the company's "ERA-42" vision-language-action model for control. - Robotera, the company behind the L7, was established in August 2023 and is the only humanoid robotics firm with an equity stake from Tsinghua University. The startup raised a nearly $70 million Series A funding round in July 2025 to scale production, with over half its orders coming from overseas clients. - Droid Up's Moya robot is designed for human interaction by maintaining a skin temperature between 32°C and 36°C (89.6-96.8 °F). Its internal skeleton, "Walker 3," is a successor to a model that won a bronze medal in a 2025 robot half-marathon, and the company is targeting applications in healthcare and education. - HUUCH's AI platform for full-body motion, which debuted at CES 2026, uses proprietary 3D skeletal tracking and posture-sensing technology that requires no wearable devices. The system is designed for a plug-and-play home gaming device, turning the user's body into the controller for on-screen characters. - Venture capital funding for humanoid robotics startups surged over 300% in 2025, reaching $6.1 billion across 139 deals. This influx of capital is accelerating the shift from lab prototypes to commercial deployments, with 2025 being dubbed the "year of mass production" for the sector. - A key technological driver for these new capabilities is agentic AI, which moves robots beyond pre-scripted routines to systems that can perceive, reason, and act autonomously to achieve goals. This allows robots to operate in unpredictable environments and adapt to new tasks without extensive reprogramming, a critical step for deployment in real-world settings like factories and warehouses. - Automakers including BMW and Mercedes-Benz are actively testing humanoids for lineside logistics tasks. Because humanoids can operate in environments designed for people, they can be integrated into existing manufacturing
