Samsung formalizes humanoid robotics division
Samsung Electronics officially launched its Robotics eXperience (RX) Business Promotion Office on July 21, 2026, consolidating years of scattered robotics work into a single CEO-controlled unit and identifying humanoid robots as its next major business. Samsung Research had already published "Shallow-π," a Vision-Language-Action model that makes 17 decisions per second, achieving a 95% success rate on ultra-precision water hose insertion tasks in field testing while coordinating 22 degrees of freedom across dual robot arms and hands in 40 milliseconds.
The company will establish its primary R&D hub at its Umyeon-dong campus in Seoul and build a "Robot Data Factory" at its Gumi facility in North Gyeongsang Province, where robots will perform material transport, assembly, and production tasks on actual production lines, feeding execution data back into VLA model training. The RX division inherits Rainbow Robotics as a consolidated subsidiary after Samsung raised its stake to approximately 35% by the end of 2024, providing the RB-Y1 humanoid platform as a hardware base. Samsung's shares rose 6.76% on the Seoul exchange on launch day, outpacing the benchmark Kospi index's roughly 4% gain.
AMD supplies compute to Foundation's defense and industrial humanoids
AMD announced on July 23, 2026 that it will supply the compute for humanoid robots built by Foundation, a San Francisco startup whose backers include Eric Trump and which has won Pentagon contracts to develop humanoids for the US military. Foundation's Phantom machines have been tested in Ukraine, and the company describes heavy industry and the battlefield as the same market. The robots will run on AMD's Ryzen AI Embedded X100 Series processors introduced in January, with AMD's FPGA chips inherited from the Xilinx acquisition coordinating 23 degrees of freedom and folding in high-frequency tactile feedback, according to Foundation's Andrea Esposito.
Foundation says its first-generation Phantom MK-1 robots helped build more than 24,000 cars in 2025 and now run five days a week inside customer deployments, a level of uptime few humanoid makers can yet claim. The next model, the Phantom MK-2, has been engineered around AMD silicon from the start. Foundation plans to open a factory in October capable of building 5,000 robots a year, with a second site planned for early next year designed for 50,000. AMD Senior Vice President Salil Raje said advanced humanoid robots require tightly coordinated compute across perception, reasoning, and real-time control. The company claims its chip delivers 2.5 times faster inference and 3 times faster training than Nvidia's, though it has not published the benchmarks. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
UK's Humanoid raises $152M as Bosch and Schaeffler commit to wheeled units
London-based Humanoid announced a $152 million Series A at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation on July 21, 2026, calling itself Europe's first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn. The round was led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and Aglaé Ventures, the investment vehicle of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault's family. The raise brings total funding to $270 million.
Both investors are also anchor customers and manufacturers. Schaeffler signed a binding phased deployment and supply agreement with Humanoid on May 13, 2026 targeting a four-digit number of wheeled units across its global facilities by 2032, with initial deployment from December 2026 through June 2027 at two German sites — Herzogenaurach for box handling and Schweinfurt for a six-month validation phase approaching full production scale. Schaeffler is also Humanoid's preferred actuator supplier, covering more than 50% of joint demand for wheeled platforms through 2031. Through its subsidiary Robert Bosch Robotics GmbH, Bosch has committed to serve as Humanoid's contract manufacturing partner for the HMND 01 platform with capacity earmarked for up to 100,000 units over five years, following a completed proof-of-concept at a Bosch intralogistics facility in Bühl, Germany, where HMND 01 robots autonomously transferred boxes from a conveyor to a trolley across five different box sizes.
Tesla targets Optimus production in Fremont
On its earnings call this week, Elon Musk said Tesla would begin producing its third-generation Optimus robot "soon" in Fremont in the San Francisco Bay Area. Musk offered few details about Optimus and tempered expectations for how quickly production would increase. Tesla has yet to demonstrate that the robot can navigate the physical world or perform useful work autonomously at scale, much less that it can be manufactured by the millions. Musk has predicted Optimus could become "the biggest product ever," with humanoids working in factories, doing household chores, and eventually building more robots, using the plural "Optimi." Tesla is competing in an increasingly crowded humanoid market that includes Agility Robotics, which plans to go public.
Italian startup Generative Bionics debuts Gene.01 with full-body tactile skin
Generative Bionics, a Genoa-based deep-tech company spun out of Italy's Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, debuted Gene.01 at AMD Advancing AI 2026 on July 22-23 at San Francisco's Moscone Center. The robot's distinguishing feature is a full-body distributed tactile skin that simultaneously measures touch, proximity, force, and temperature across the entire body surface, allowing it to begin adjusting behavior the moment a person enters its sensory field rather than waiting for contact. CEO Daniele Pucci said the combined proximity and touch sensing is "not a matter of sensing, it's a matter of safety."
The underlying methodology was validated in a peer-reviewed paper published on July 13, 2026 in Nature Machine Intelligence by Carlotta Sartore, Daniele Pucci, and colleagues. Generative Bionics closed an $81 million seed round led by CDP Venture Capital — the Italian state's venture investment arm — with participation from AMD Ventures, Duferco, Eni Next, RoboIT, and Tether; AMD is also a technical collaborator on edge-based processing and future data center plans. The company is open-sourcing the robot's complete digital twin via PyPI, conda-forge, and the official ROS build farm. The first concrete deployment target is Fincantieri, one of the world's largest shipbuilders headquartered in Trieste, where the Gene.01 variant is being configured for shipyard welding operations.
Snake robots assist Venezuela earthquake rescue
Snake robots developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Biorobotics Lab searched for trapped survivors in collapsed buildings after two earthquakes struck Venezuela on June 24, 2026, killing more than 5,000 people and injuring 16,740. Howie Choset and his team deployed three modular 4-foot-long snakebots in the hard-hit city of La Guaira from June 30 to July 3 alongside international rescue teams from Jordan, Colombia, and other countries. Operators directed the robots using a video game controller and a tethered control case laptop, while software algorithms allowed the snakebot to autonomously coordinate body segments when traveling between points.
The deployment followed earlier search and rescue use of the snake robots at a September 19, 2017 Mexico City earthquake site, where the team helped search a collapsed apartment building. The Venezuela trip was organized rapidly after a contact with Choset was re-established via social media; the researchers replaced head-mounted cameras on several robots, packed extra batteries, and flew to Miami within 24 hours before arranging a private jet to Venezuela, with US Marines greeting the team on landing on June 30. In one site, after a Jordanian rescue team with a dog had concluded no survivors were present and a Colombian team's infrared cameras indicated the possible presence of a survivor, a snakebot was inserted into a small hole but did not locate anyone in 15 to 20 feet of travel.
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