Top 10 robotics stories of July 2026

This month, large funding rounds, new approaches to robot training, and new robot models drew our readers’ attention. Not to mention, a large change in U.S. policy when it comes to importing robotics dominated headlines in the last week of July 2026.

Here are the 10 most popular articles on The Robot Report in the past month. Subscribe to The Robot Report Newsletter and listen to The Robot Report Podcast to stay up to date on the latest robotics developments.

AI² Robotics has raised about $735 million in a fresh financing round that pushed its valuation past 50 billion RMB, or about $2.8 billion U.S. The funding positions the Shenzhen-based company among the leaders of China’s fast-moving physical AI sector. Read more .

The challenge for today’s robots is no longer limited to automating a task. It is adapting to ever-changing environments — and that variability remains one of the hardest problems. This distinction matters more and more as the industry moves from programmed automation toward physical AI. Read more.

Robotic manipulation is making progress with artificial intelligence. London-based Humanoid, which also raised Series A funding in July 2026, introduced KinetIQ Ascend, its reinforcement learning approach designed to reach 99.9% manipulation reliability at human speed and beyond. Read more.

Advanced Micro Devices is making a full-stack play for robotics with its new Ryzen AI Embedded X100 series and Kria AI Robotics platform. AMD promised deterministic real-time control, unified CPU–GPU–NPU memory, and an open, non–vendor-locked software stack that it claimed can outperform NVIDIA Orin and Thor on system-level robotics workloads. Read more .

Physical AI and the promise of general-purpose robotics have drawn more investment from tech leaders. Walden Robotics emerged from stealth with $300 million in funding. The company said it is building and deploying robots that continuously learn and improve while performing real work. Read more .

Apptronik made two major announcements in July 2026. First, the company launched Apollo 2, its updated humanoid robot. Second, it opened its newly expanded Robot Park, its flagship data collection and training facility for humanoid robots in Austin, Texas. Read more .

While robotics developers have used artificial intelligence for years, the past few years have seen a fundamental shift in how the technologies work together. Rather than rely solely on deterministic programming for things like navigation and object recognition, robots are increasingly able to perceive, comprehend, decide, and act with AI. Read more .