The Amazing Robot Innovations At The Goodwood Future Lab
The Mirokaï are intended for hospitals, nursing homes, airports and other human-centered environments. They can carry items, navigate autonomously, communicate in multiple languages and use animated expressions to signal what they are doing.
Key takeaways
- The most recent wave of humanoid‑robot news centers on rapid commercial scaling and breakthrough technology.
- In late July 2026 the UK‑based company Humanoid announced a $152 million Series A round that pushed its post‑money valuation to $1.35 billion, making it Europe’s first pure‑play humanoid‑robotics unicorn; the funding will fuel a next‑generation wheel‑based platform, a beta rollout to logistics and manufacturing customers in Q4 2026, and the start of mass manufacturing, while its proprietary AI brain KinetIQ moves toward a general‑purpose industrial robot.
- Across the Atlantic, Agility Robotics opened a 60,000‑square‑foot “robot school” in Fremont, California, to expand its Digit biped’s capabilities and deliberately avoid the industry’s talent‑bidding wars, reinforcing its focus on sustained, real‑world work in manufacturing and distribution.
- Meanwhile, Generative Bionics unveiled the Gene.01 humanoid at AMD’s Advancing AI conference, a six‑month development that combines full‑body tactile sensing with physics‑native AI for more nuanced physical interaction, supported by a recent €70 million funding round for production scaling.
- At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, AGIBOT introduced the A3 Ultra, a 1.74 m, 60 kg full‑size humanoid equipped with 51 active degrees of freedom, 5 kg payload per arm, eight‑hour battery life, and a multimodal perception suite that includes lidar, RGB‑D and UWB positioning, positioning it for long‑duration service environments.
The Mirokaï are intended for hospitals, nursing homes, airports and other human-centered environments. They can carry items, navigate autonomously, communicate in multiple languages and use animated expressions to signal what they are doing. Their wheeled bases also provide stability and energy efficiency.
Their early applications show how personality can create practical value. A Mirokaï has worked as a concierge at Lyon–Saint Exupéry Airport. Another has engaged elderly people experiencing cognitive decline through conversation, music and games. At the Montpellier Cancer Institute, a Mirokaï has accompanied children into radiotherapy rooms, where human companions cannot remain during treatment. At Goodwood, OLO brought together an impressive collection of machines. The Unitree G1 is a compact humanoid built for agile movement and dexterous manipulation. The DEEP Robotics LYNX M20 combines wheels and legs, allowing it to roll across suitable ground and tackle more difficult terrain. Fiction Lab’s Leo Rover combines mobility, autonomy and sensing technologies to explore places that may be inaccessible or dangerous for humans.
Watching each machine move was impressive. Seeing different types coordinate their actions was far more revealing. Its robotics exhibits ranged from humanoids that could walk, run and manipulate objects to quadrupeds and mobile rovers built for difficult terrain. Some could dance, do Kung Fu or play hide-and-seek. One robotic arm was even programmed to play Jenga, a game capable of exposing the shaky hands of many humans.
The demonstrations were entertaining, but they carried a serious message. Robots are becoming more capable, approachable and easier to put to work.
Teaching Everyone To Speak Robot
Sheffield-based OLO Robotics, chaired by Raspberry Pi co-founder Liz Upton, has developed a cloud platform that lets people program robots through a web browser using plain English.
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