When 110 humanoids hit the dance floor

PLUS: Figure locks in its 'iPhone 1 of humanoids'

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
October 26, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. We’ve seen Chinese-made robots pull off martial arts. Now they’re hitting the dance floor… and not one, but 110 at once.

AgiBot’s humanoids just showed off a synchronized dance routine with flips, jumps, and formation changes, giving another glimpse of where China’s humanoid push is headed: robots working as coordinated fleets.

Also: Figure locks in its “iPhone 1 of humanoids,” and tiny Microduck robots steal the show at GTC Berlin.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • AgiBot makes 110 humanoids dance in sync

  • Figure locks in its ‘iPhone 1 of humanoids’

  • Tiny Microduck robots waddle into the spotlight

  • Unitree founder: Humanoids’ ‘aha’ moment by 2028

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AGIBOT

Image source: Eren Chen on X

The Rundown: Chinese robotics firm AgiBot just had 110 of its full-size Expedition A3 humanoids dance in sync in Jinan, reportedly earning a Guinness World Records title and showcasing a fleet-control system that it says will power future deployments.

The details:

  • The humanoids performed for almost six minutes, showing off jumps, flips, wave patterns, and formations spelling out countdown numbers.

  • AgiBot said all robots were production units, with its LinkBots control system and ultra-wideband positioning keeping them coordinated to the centimeter.

  • AgiBot’s title is for most humanoid robots dancing at once, a separate category from the overall record of 1,372 small bots set in 2018.

  • The display lands as China scales up, with 40K+ humanoids produced in H1 2026 across 400+ models, and annual output expected to hit 100K.

Why it matters: The performance is less about dance and more about AgiBot showing how it can keep a large fleet of humanoids working as one on a complex task. The next test would be how the machines hold up around people in the real world, as the company moves to deploy the A3 in public services, tourism, research, and education.

FIGURE

Image source: Figure

The Rundown: Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock just shared the company’s latest all-hands meeting (kicked off by Arnold Schwarzenegger), revealing that its next-gen Figure 04 is in “full design lock” and teasing a new AI model for the humanoid he calls “baby AGI.”

The details:

  • Adcock called Figure 04 “the iPhone 1 of humanoids,” with parts already shipping and a hand that nears human-level dexterity and has more actuators than the rest of the robot.

  • To train it, Figure’s Index app is pulling in 81 minutes of human video per second, totaling 37.5M uploads, with the company spending ~$8.1M on data in one week.

  • Adcock said Figure will spend more on data in the next 12 months than most robotics firms have raised, backed by $2B+ in cash and a $3.5B compute deal.

  • All of it feeds Helix 3.0, the “baby AGI” model, trained on more data and compute than any Figure model yet, with an even larger version due in weeks but no benchmarks shared.

Why it matters: Figure is still keeping Figure 04 under wraps, blurring it out of the public video, but its playbook is clear and very similar to what we’ve seen with OpenAI and Anthropic — raise big money with massive deals and pour all of it into data, compute, and hardware, betting that scale will make it stand out from the crowd.

NVIDIA

Image source: Nvidia

The Rundown: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showed off Microduck, a $399 robot duck from Hugging Face’s Pollen Robotics, at GTC Berlin, and the clip of the waddling robots went viral, pushing total preorders past 20K two months after its debut.

The details:

  • The 10-inch bots sat, “napped,” tumbled, and attempted somersaults on Huang’s commands, with a few missing cues and one wandering off before getting up.

  • Each Microduck packs 15 motors, a camera, and a depth sensor, and can waddle, roller-skate on wheels, and pick up light objects with its beak.

  • Owners can teach it new tricks with simulation learning and share them with others, though Pollen open-sourced only the software, not the hardware designs.

  • Deliveries are expected by Christmas in North America and Europe, in four colors: Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky.

Why it matters: While Figure and 1X race to build full-size humanoids, Nvidia-owned Hugging Face is taking a different path into homes, with small, cute, hackable robots. At $399, Microduck is priced like a gadget, not a luxury, and the viral demo from Jensen Huang is the best marketing a holiday product could ask for.

UNITREE

Image source: Unitree

The Rundown: Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said humanoids’ “aha” moment could come as soon as 2028, a stark reversal from his view just two months ago that it could take up to a decade before robots were ready for mass deployment, Bloomberg reported.

The details:

  • Wang described the “aha” moment as robots handling 80% of verbally assigned tasks in a home or factory, admitting a robot still can’t reliably clean a room today.

  • He credited AI progress for the reversal, saying GPT-6-powered Unitree robots can now play Go, and that frontier models are starting to improve themselves.

  • The company is working with third-party model providers to power its robots, which are mostly used in research, while continuing to develop its own models.

  • It’s also building a self-improvement system, “Unitree Rehearsal,” and expanding capacity from tens of thousands of robots a year to potentially tens of millions to prepare for the expected intelligence breakthrough.

Why it matters: When the founder of China’s biggest humanoid maker cuts his own timeline from a decade to two years, it shows how quickly AI is reshaping expectations for robots. With humanoids still mostly a research product, the next two years will show whether this is a real inflection point or just the optimism of a CEO whose company just went public.

QUICK HITS

IDC estimated that the FCC’s restrictions on Chinese-made robots (announced in July) could cut America’s humanoid robotics revenue by 58%, or more than $6B.

Enact Intelligence emerged from stealth with backing from AI pioneers Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch to build robots that learn a sense of force via their own actuators.

NEURA Robotics unveiled its 20% lighter 4NE1 Gen 4 humanoid as it opened a $19M robotics training center with TUM in Munich to train robots for industrial tasks.

Maxinsights, which collects real-world data for robot training, announced $30M seed funding and a new MaxGlove to capture grip force and touch data that cameras miss.

Ex-OpenAI executive Kevin Weil launched Warp Sciences, a startup building drug discovery labs that run 24/7, with AI designing experiments and robots executing them.

Unitree Robotics’ newly launched H2-X humanoid lost part of its leg after a failed side flip during a kung fu demo in China, drawing mixed reactions over its design and safety.

Faraday Future’s $89K humanoid was seen walking, singing, and dancing in a New York park as its CTO remotely controlled it to improve its ability to interact with humans.

Baidu and Lyft began testing Apollo Go robotaxis on London streets, targeting the launch of a fully driverless commercial robotaxi service in 2027.

Schaeffler opened a 7,500-square-meter factory in China where six humanoids assemble components for other humanoids.

A Chinese robotics team unveiled a rideable robot combining wheels and robotic legs that can carry up to 75 kg, reach 15 km/h, and even climb steps and navigate obstacles.

ETH Zurich researchers taught Unitree’s G1 humanoid to climb ladders, vault obstacles, crawl, and recover from failures using just 13.2 minutes of motion data.

That's it for today!

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See you soon,

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