Unitree's most powerful robot dog yet

PLUS: Honor teases humanoid alongside robot phone

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Joey Liu, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
February 26, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Unitree is in a scaling mood: 20K humanoids this year, plus talk of autonomous humanoid “clusters.”

Now it’s launched a robot dog for the dirtiest work — promising 11 mph speed, 143-lb. payload capacity, and hours of runtime in harsh conditions. An industrial workhorse, sure. But also the kind of capability set that isn’t likely to stay confined to worksites.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Unitree robot dog runs 11 mph, hauls 143 lb.

  • Honor teases humanoid alongside robot phone

  • Audi brings robot hands to the assembly line

  • UK’s Wayve nabs $1.2B for $8B valuation

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UNITREE

Image source: Unitree

The Rundown: Chinese robotics powerhouse Unitree just unveiled the As2, a 40 lb. quadruped that it says can sprint at 17 km/h, haul up to 143 lb., and keep running for hours in conditions that would sideline lesser machines.

The details:

  • The As2 supports a continuous payload of 33 lb. for more than 2.5 hours and a maximum load of 143 lb., powered by a 648Wh, 15,000mAh lithium battery.

  • Unloaded, Unitree claims it can run for more than four hours and cover distances beyond 20 km on a single charge.

  • Ruggedization includes IP54 protection and an operating range from −20 to 50°C, plus the ability to climb 25cm stairs and handle 40-degree slopes.

  • Higher-end PRO and EDU variants add GPS, 4G, ISS 3.0 side-follow, LiDAR options, dual joint encoders, and optional NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX compute.

Why it matters: Unitree is pushing hard on payload, runtime, and ruggedness to win real deployments, and on paper, the As2 is a knockout. Boston Dynamics still sets a high bar for mobility and system polish, but competition is widening fast — and the next phase will be decided by who can ship at scale and keep robots running all day.

HONOR

Image source: Honor / YouTube

The Rundown: Honor, the Chinese smartphone maker spun out of Huawei, dropped a teaser video confirming it will use the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week to unveil not just its experimental Robot Phone but a full humanoid as well.

The details:

  • Specifics remain thin, but Honor says the robot is designed for domestic and retail environments, like household chores and in-store shopping assistance.

  • The humanoid looks to share the stage with Honor’s Robot Phone concept, first teased last October, the Magic V6 flagship, and other new devices.

  • Both launches fall under Honor’s “Alpha Plan,” a five-year, $10B AI investment strategy aimed at repositioning the company as a full-stack AI hardware player.

  • Honor claims first-mover status among major smartphone vendors entering robotics, as Chinese rivals also race to commercialize service robots.

Why it matters: Honor’s humanoid is a flashy, high-risk way to escape a flat smartphone market, riding the humanoid wave while rewriting its own identity before its IPO. Honor is one of the first smartphone companies to pivot to robotics, but the race is on: Xiaomi just open-sourced its robotics model, and Vivo has set up a robotics lab.

MIMIC ROBOTICS

Image source: Mimic Robotics

The Rundown: Audi teamed up with Zurich spin-out Mimic Robotics to bring AI-powered, video-trained robot hands onto its assembly lines, using “pixel-to-action” control to automate tricky manual jobs like installing flexible door seals.

The details:

  • The systems use a “pixel-to-action” foundation model that takes in raw visual data and directly outputs robot motions, avoiding hand-coded pipelines.

  • Mimic’s video-action engine, trained on pretrained video, claims 10x better sample efficiency than conventional vision-language-action approaches.

  • The robots pair 16-DoF hands with industrial arms, learning by imitation from motion data captured off human workers during normal shifts.

  • The Audi deal makes Mimic’s “Physical AI” a test case for using foundation-model robots on highly dexterous, high-uptime manual jobs in car assembly.

Why it matters: Rivals like BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai, Tesla, and others are betting on full-body humanoids to roam factories and handle a wide mix of logistics and assembly work. Audi’s Mimic tie-up instead doubles down on high-dexterity hands plus foundation models to crack fine-motor assembly that today still belongs to humans.

WAYVE

Image source: Wayve

The Rundown: London-based autonomous driving startup Wayve raised $1.2B in a Series D round — backed by Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, and three major automakers — as it prepares to launch commercial robotaxi trials in London later this year.

The details:

  • The round was backed by Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis, valuing Wayve at a staggering $8.6B.

  • Wayve develops an end‑to‑end “embodied AI” driving model that learns from real-world data from 500+ cities instead of relying on HD maps.

  • The company plans to launch commercial robotaxi pilots with Uber in London in 2026, with a plan to expand into more than 10 global markets.

  • Automaker partners aim to integrate Wayve’s software into consumer vehicles from around 2027, starting with L2+ driver assistance.

Why it matters: Wayve bets that autonomy scales through a map-free, hardware-agnostic software layer any automaker can drop into any vehicle — not through Waymo-style city-by-city buildouts. With Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, and three major OEMs all in the same round, the industry appears to agree this might work.

QUICK HITS

Alphabet is folding its former moonshot robotics software unit Intrinsic into Google to link its Flowstate robot-programming platform with Gemini, Cloud, and DeepMind.

Swiss brand On Running opened a fully robotized factory in South Korea, using 32 robots to make running shoes, and now plans similar plants in the U.S. and Europe.

DJI is suing the FCC to overturn its decision putting the firm on a national‑security “Covered List,” arguing the move unlawfully bans new DJI drones from the U.S. market.

Electric truck startup Harbinger bought autonomous driving startup Phantom AI to integrate its driver-assist software and license it through ZF Group.

Uber is launching its first European commercial drone delivery service in Ireland, partnering with local operator Manna to fly small orders to customers.

Waymo is expanding its robotaxi program by starting mapping and data collection in Chicago and Charlotte, aiming to add them to its growing list of U.S. cities.

South Korean physical AI startup RLWRLD raised $26M in a Seed 2 round to scale its robotics foundation models and expand industrial deployments globally.

Japan unveiled “Buddharoid,” an AI-powered humanoid monk built on a Unitree G1 robot and trained on Buddhist scriptures to offer spiritual advice.

China is testing ceiling-mounted robots that glide over parked EVs, drop a charger into the port, and turn any parking bay into an automatic charging spot.

Japanese researchers demonstrated what they call the world’s first autonomous robot controlled by an onboard quantum-inspired optimization computer.

COMMUNITY

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team