IntBot bets the future of humanoids on social intelligence, not kung fu - The Robot Report
At GTC 2026, CEO Lei Yang announced that the company‘s IntEng “general social intelligence engine” now supports multiple humanoid and service robots from different hardware vendors.
Key takeaways
The most recent headlines show humanoid robots moving from laboratory prototypes to commercial deployments across several sectors. On March 18, 2026, Agibot demonstrated large‑scale reliability by staging a fully robot‑led live show, highlighting coordinated performance of dozens of units and confirming that more than 5,000 humanoids had been delivered worldwide by the end of 2025, signaling a shift toward repeatable, scalable supply. At the same time, IntBot announced that its general social‑intelligence engine now powers the Nilo concierge robot, which is operating 24 hours a day in three U.S. hotel chains and can handle multilingual guest interactions, underscoring a focus on hardware‑agnostic, socially aware services. In the consumer market, the San‑Francisco‑based startup Sunday secured a $165 million Series B round that values the company at $1.15 billion as it prepares to launch the household robot Memo for chores such as laundry and table clearing. Meanwhile, automakers continue to test humanoids in factories: BMW is trialling the Hexagon‑developed Aeon robot at its Leipzig plant, and Mercedes‑Benz is investing in Apptronik’s Apollo platform for parts‑moving and inspection tasks. Academic analysis published on March 13 notes that despite advances in vision‑language‑action models and compliant actuation, humanoids still struggle with fine‑motor manipulation of small objects, indicating that technical challenges remain even as commercial use expands.
At GTC 2026, CEO Lei Yang announced that the company‘s IntEng “general social intelligence engine” now supports multiple humanoid and service robots from different hardware vendors. He said this marked a significant step toward hardware-agnostic deployment of socially intelligent robots in real-world environments.
This full-length view of the IntBot humanoid shows its feet, although the robot was stationary and secured to stand for its shift at the GTC26 help desk. | Credit: The Robot Report Today, that stack powers Nilo, a full-body humanoid that works 24/7 as a multilingual concierge in hotel lobbies from New York to Las Vegas, blending on-device perception and body-language generation with cloud LLMs for deeper queries.
“Right now, we already have three hotels across the U.S.,” said Yang. “[We’re at] The Nap York in New York City, and a second one is called Otonomous in Las Vegas, and the third one is a Marriott Hotel in Tulsa, Okla. And all of these three robots operate 24/7, basically. They work alongside their human staff members, but IntBot offers add-on functions to augment what the human staff, concierge, or [other] people can do.” Home News Technologies
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