Automate 2026 breaks records: 50,000 registrants, 1,230 exhi

• The most recent week of humanoid‑robot news (July 13‑20, 2026) saw Hyundai move to acquire SoftBank’s remaining stake in Boston Dynamics, while China’s WAIC 2026 unveiled the AgiBot A3 Ultra full‑size humanoid, the X2 Edu education platform, the G2 Max industrial robot and the OmniHand 3 Ultra‑M hand, and Unitree displayed its 2.7‑metre transformable GD01; Unitree’s Shanghai STAR‑Market IPO remains unpriced as of July 20.
• At the same time, Hyundai’s Atlas robot completed a high‑visibility activation during the FIFA World Cup final, and Yaskawa and SoftBank demonstrated a vision‑language‑action system that enables a MOTOMAN NEXT robot to handle irregular wire‑harness packing.
• Chinese manufacturers continue to push thousands of humanoids into logistics and factories to collect training data, widening the deployment gap with the United States.
• A new robot‑fighting league launched by EngineAI is staging full‑size humanoids in a ring, and the industry’s commercial focus is shifting from hardware specs to AI intelligence, with U.S. players such as NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and OpenAI building an ecosystem of large‑language, vision‑language‑action and physical‑AI platforms.
• TrendForce’s July 20 analysis highlights this U.S.–China divergence, noting that China leads in volume (Unitree shipped over 5,500 units in 2025) while the U.S. leverages generative‑AI advances.

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