The Briefing · Archive
All humanoid supply-chain news curated by the humanoid.guide desk — components, suppliers, manufacturing and policy, with sources linked on every story.
← Back to the reportImage © Humanoid Guide — Schaeffler has opened its 7,500 m² Taicang Humanoid Lighthouse, where six humanoid robots work on a joint module assembly line while the site also produces robot components and trains robots for factory tasks, humanoid.guide reports. Schaeffler positions it as a platform for Chinese robotics firms to test humanoid deployment in a real factory.
Agility Robotics has picked Cambridge, UK-based Nyobolt for the Digit 5 battery, which Agility says delivers 90 minutes of runtime and recharges in nine minutes, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio versus 2:1 on Digit 4. Agility says early access starts in the first half of 2027, according to The Robot Report.
Image © Boston Dynamics — Boston Dynamics has unveiled a four-fingered Atlas hand with 13 degrees of freedom, directly driven by a single actuator type and lined with dense tactile sensors on fingertips and palm. The company says it dropped the pinkie because the extra dexterity was not worth the added complexity, and designed the modular hand for low-cost mass manufacturing.
Image © Agility Robotics — Agility Robotics has signed a memorandum of understanding that widens its relationship with Philadelphia's FORT Robotics from component supply to joint hardware development, compliance work and deployment support for Digit 5. According to Agility, the pair are building a three-part safety architecture: a safety pendant, on-robot communications and an “Offboard Safety Bridge” linking the robot to off-robot systems.
Image © AGILINK — AGILINK says it has now shipped more than 15,000 dexterous robot hands, and marked the milestone by having its 21-DoF OmniHand 3 Ultra learn Suzhou silk embroidery from master craftswoman Fu Xianghong. According to the company, the hand handled thread separation, needle threading, fabric stretching and stitching on silk.
Image © Sharpa — Sharpa used IROS in Pittsburgh to unveil its W02 dexterous hand — 21 active degrees of freedom in under 750 grams, with fingertip force sensing from 5 mN to 30 N — alongside the AE01 exoskeleton data glove, which tracks 22 joints and gives 256 levels of vibration feedback per fingertip. The two sit beside the D01 robot, wrapped in electronic skin with 0.2 N force resolution, which Sharpa calls the first integrated tactile-sensing robot built for dexterous manipulation; prices were not disclosed.
Embedded-vision maker e-con Systems will debut NetraVis, an active-stereo 3D depth camera with dual global-shutter sensors, a synchronised RGB sensor and an onboard IMU, at VISION 2026 in Stuttgart on 6–8 October. The company claims depth deviation of 1% or less across its range and lists humanoid robots alongside AMRs, ASRS and pick-and-place systems as target platforms.
Image © Humanoid Guide — IDTechEx research puts actuators at more than 50% of a typical humanoid's mass, with industrial models averaging 78 kg and some wheeled designs topping 100 kg, humanoid.guide reports. The firm flags precision manufacturing of planetary roller screws and gears, plus load-bearing hip and knee joints, as key engineering constraints for designs that are 80% aimed at industrial work.
Image © Cognex — Machine-vision maker Cognex has agreed to acquire RealSense, whose depth cameras guide robot arms, mobile robots, quadrupeds and humanoids, for about $500 million in cash, according to Cognex. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, with RealSense's facial authentication line set to be spun out as a separate company.
Image © Humanoid Guide — The five-fingered Dex5-S runs a backdrivable electric motor at each joint with dual encoders feeding back position, speed, torque and temperature, and connects over Ethernet, USB and RS-485 with a hookup for a palm camera, according to the company. humanoid.guide scores the aluminum-alloy hand 6 out of 10 — capable and mature, tuned for dexterity rather than raw grip — and lists it in production at $6,500 with an optional Pro version for more demanding work.
A single humanoid can carry 3.5–4 kg of neodymium magnets — potentially more than an entire EV skateboard chassis — plus data-laden memory and volatile batteries, argues Robert Belt, a consultant working with recycler Re-Teck, in The Robot Report. He wants “design for recycling” built in now, before the first big wave of 10,000-part machines reaches end of life.
Tesla has tested tendon-driven hands while Figure abandoned its first tendon design, and humanoid.guide's survey of the debate argues that useful dexterity hinges on how much motion stays controllable once fingers meet real objects — a hand can carry 15 moving joints yet only five motors. Bowden tubes preserve cable length through a moving wrist at the cost of friction, wear and control complexity, while approaches now range from Daxo's 120 tendons to Tacta's fluid transmission and Allonic's braided structure.
Image © D-Robotics — The Chinese chipmaker behind the Sunrise robot processors and RDK developer kits has closed a $400 million Series C, with investors including a global internet company it did not name, and will put the money into a broader chip lineup and a software platform spanning the robot development chain. According to D-Robotics, Sunrise shipments have passed 8 million units, and the new S600 has been adopted by more than 20 customers within six months.
Image © Humanoid Guide — Daxo Robotics' five-fingered prototype swaps rigid joints for flexible materials, spreading 120 individual actuators through an ultra-redundant tendon-driven design aimed at precise, adaptable handling rather than high-force work. The 0.75 kg hand has been through more than 100,000 actuation cycles in testing, according to the company, with a limited release planned for fall 2026.
Image © Humanoid Guide — China's Xynova lists Prima 1, a five-fingered, direct-drive research hand with more than 300 force-sensing taxels spread across its fingertips, palm and back. The 0.65 kg hand posts 15 N of fingertip force, 0.5 N force-control accuracy and 0.5 mm repeatability, and is in production for controlled, repeatable contact tasks, according to the company.
Image © Humanoid Guide — Shanghai's AGILINK has filled out a three-variant dexterous-hand lineup: the $4,000 OmniHand 3 pitched at volume deployment across humanoids, cobots and mobile manipulators, a $3,200 OmniHand 3 Lite for half-scale platforms, and a dexterity-led Ultra T that moves its tendon actuation behind the wrist. All three are five-fingered and listed as in production, according to the company.
Image © Humanoid Guide — The US firm's $22,000 research-grade hand couples tendon-driven fingers with skin-like tactile sensing, and pairs with ProGlove, a wearable that captures human hand-motion data for robot training. Proception lists the hand as in production, built for manipulation teams that need grasp adaptation, serviceability and impact tolerance, according to the company.
Image © Humanoid Guide — Engineering firm Munro & Associates spent a 38-minute Munro Live episode inside Unitree's G1, finding two-stage planetary actuators geared at roughly 15:1 — easily back-drivable, unlike strain-wave drives at 100:1 and up — plus copper heat pipes on high-duty joints like the knees and twin centrifugal fans in the hips. Billet-machined structural parts point to design flexibility rather than a final manufacturing architecture, according to the teardown.
Writing in The Robot Report, two UltraSense Systems executives argue that tactile sensing belongs beneath a robot's surface rather than mounted on it, claiming ultrasound through an elastomer layer delivers 500 µm spatial resolution and millinewton-level force and shear readings without the wear that erodes surface electronics. The San Jose firm says the same platform has already shipped more than 4 million units in automotive applications.
Day two of the Humanoid Robots Summit went inside the machine: Novanta announced an EU/US actuator safety standard for mid-2028 designed to hold torque through a failure rather than just stop, three firms pitched rival fingertip sensors, and Johnson Electric's Yvan Bourqui put 80% of a humanoid's final cost at the design stage. From the main panel, Unitree's Lyn Wang called the AI model – not factory capacity – the brake on mass production.
Motors, power electronics and sensing — not smarter models — determine what a humanoid can actually do, argues Allegro MicroSystems' Andreas Friedrich in The Robot Report: a humanoid juggles 30-plus degrees of freedom against six or seven for a typical industrial robot, and every gram of electronics adds to the energy needed to move it. He makes the case for 48-volt architectures, which he says cut current draw by a factor of four and wiring losses by a factor of 16 versus 12 volts, and for designing sensing, motor control, power and thermal management as one integrated system.
A MassRobotics survey of 14 member companies found 43% calling the FCC's July restrictions on foreign-made robots beneficial and an equal share calling them detrimental, with sentiment tracking each firm's manufacturing footprint, according to The Robot Report. Motors, sensors, power supplies and robot arms still come largely from East Asia, respondents said, and vetted onshoring supply networks topped their list of requested support.
Image © Lyte — The Sunnyvale firm — founded by ex-Apple and PrimeSense engineers behind Face ID and Kinect — builds custom silicon, multimodal sensors and spatial software that let robots sense position and motion directly rather than piecing them together in software. The Maverick Silicon-led Series C values Lyte at $1.6 billion post-money, with the cash earmarked to scale production of its LyteVision sensing stack, according to the company.
Image © Humanoid Guide — South Korea's TPC Robotics has introduced seven in-house actuator models for humanoids: three rotary units for neck, elbow and hip joints, three linear units for higher-load areas such as the calves and thighs, and a finger-joint module for manipulation hardware. Sales will target humanoid makers in Korea and overseas, according to the report humanoid.guide cites, building on a May technology-transfer and joint-production deal with China's HCBOT.
Image © HIGEN RNM — The Korean motion-control firm's Human-Friendly Actuator Platform spans six standardized units from 60 to 348 Nm, pairing an AFPM motor with a 3K compound planetary gearbox for 30% less volume, 30% more torque density and backdriving torque below 1 Nm, according to the company. CEO Jae Hak Kim's pitch is that AI is making robot brains smarter while intelligence still meets the physical world at the joint – the full platform gets its showcase at CES 2027.
Allient has added 25 mm and 38 mm sizes to its ElectroFlux line of frameless torque motors, aimed at advanced robotics and other space-constrained precision motion designs, according to the company. PCB termination on the stator trims the motor's footprint and lets builders integrate the units directly into their own products.
Image © Schaeffler — Schaeffler has finished validating its formed strain wave gearboxes — key parts of the actuators that make up around half a humanoid's manufacturing cost, according to the company — and plans a mass-production rollout to robot makers from 2027, starting in Germany. Forming the parts instead of machining them cuts manufacturing costs by more than 25% and material use by more than 75%, says the firm, which has supplied over 2 million such gearboxes in the past decade, mostly in automotive.
Image © Humanoid Guide — The Tokyo firm's human-scale robotic arm packs 14 degrees of freedom and lifts 15 kg on a 30 kg frame, with quasi-direct-drive motors and a 1 kHz CAN FD control bus, according to the company. Enactic publishes the CAD files, firmware, control code and simulation tools, pitching the arm at teleoperated sorting and assembly work.
Unless key components and final assembly move to North America, the US risks a rerun of the drone market's slide into Chinese dependence, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Thomas Black argues. He counts Mexico in on cost grounds — Jabil already builds Apptronik's humanoids there — and points to Standard Bots' pledge to build American robots on a domestically sourced supply chain.
South Korea's Unichem, a leather supplier to the car industry since 1976, is paying about $6 million for Brooklyn-based Loomia, whose flexible electronic layers bond circuits to cloth and leather and give robot hands soft pressure sensing. The new owner is aiming squarely at humanoid skin: first engineering samples are due in January 2027, with Tesla, OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, 1X and Meta named as target customers, according to The Robot Report.
Researchers at CUHK-Shenzhen and Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology built a pneumatic hand that pinches, rotates, hooks and grasps with a coiled spring, a constraining shell and just two air inputs. Writing in Advanced Science, they say it out-rotates a human hand nearly fourfold and grasps objects up to 13 times larger than comparable systems can.
Image © Humanoid Guide — A new guide from the ROBO Global Robotics and Automation Index sorts the humanoid bill of materials into three systems — a sensor-and-compute brain, a body of rotary and linear actuators with precision gearing, and an energy layer where battery weight remains the core constraint. Its takeaway for suppliers: progress leans as much on the ecosystems behind AI chips, sensors and advanced materials as on the robot makers themselves.
Image © Humanoid Guide — The five-finger hand pairs brushless direct-drive motors with fingertip force sensing and plugs into MuJoCo, Isaac Sim and ROS 2 workflows, according to WUJI Tech, with teleoperation through the Wuji Glove, Apple Vision Pro or RealSense tracking. In production at $16,000, it is pitched as a developer-friendly platform for simulation, control and AI training workflows.
GAM Enterprises has acquired the IP and manufacturing rights to the PSC servo gearbox from Schaeffler Ultra Precision Drives, standing up GAM-Melior GmbH in Hameln, Germany to build the line; terms were not disclosed. CEO Craig Van den Avont claims the gearing, already at the core of GAM's flagship GPL units, outperforms rival servo gearboxes in high-precision motion control.
Image © Humanoid Guide — The five-fingered hand weighs just 1.1 kg yet lifts up to 25 kg, with fingertip sensors reading pressure, texture and temperature and back-drivable joint motors that yield when pushed, according to Robotera. Already in production for research, teleoperation and imitation-learning work, it scores 7/10 in humanoid.guide's hands directory.
Motion-control manufacturer Stabilus and drive-tech specialist Synapticon have formed a strategic partnership to jointly develop and build integrated actuators for humanoid robots, covering joints from the head and wrists down to the hips and knees. Small-series production starts at Stabilus plants in Europe in 2027, with large-scale output planned in North America from 2028 to sit close to major humanoid makers, according to the companies.
The Shenzhen lidar maker unveiled E2, a fully solid-state digital lidar built on its in-house SPAD-SoC that fits up to a 180-degree field of view behind just two exposed optical windows, aimed at humanoids, quadrupeds, drones and mowers, according to RoboSense. Two companion chipsets — Phoenix for long-range precision and Peacock for image-grade wide-angle 3D perception — debut alongside it, with the company counting AgiBot, Pudu Robotics and Geek+ among robotics partners already on its lidars.
Image © TDK — The Japanese and Korean component giants have formed a strategic partnership to co-develop sensing modules for humanoids and physical AI — pairing TDK's InvenSense inertial sensors, position sensors and microphones with LG Innotek's optical and ultra-precision module design, according to the companies. Multi-sensing, says LG Innotek CEO Moon Hyuksoo, is set to become a key capability in robotics.
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Italian partner universities built a fingertip whose synthetic skin shifts color as it deforms, letting an embedded camera map contact pressure and surface topology at 100-micrometer resolution with zero computational latency, according to the team. The mechanochromic design could give robot hands quantitative touch without packing electronics into the fingertip, though durability in real-world use is still unproven.
Image © Tacta Systems — Palo Alto's Tacta Systems unveiled TactaBot, pairing a 15-joint Tacta Hand driven by fluidic tendon actuation with a sensor-laden skill-capture glove and an AI engine trained on recorded human technique, according to the company. Tactile sensors smaller than a grain of sand read pressures from 250 to 700,000 pascals at 400 samples a second, with first deployments in electronics manufacturing slated for early 2027.
The US dominates the intelligence stack through Nvidia, Google DeepMind and OpenAI, while China's localized servo motors, reducers and batteries give it the edge in manufacturing scale, according to TrendForce's new component supply chain influence index — which cites AgiBot going from 5,000 to 10,000 units built in just three months as proof of that scaling speed.
Chinese rare-earth magnet exports to the US averaged 479 tons a month in the first half of 2026, about 20% below the pre-restriction norm, according to US customs data — a squeeze that lands squarely on the permanent-magnet motors inside EVs, factory automation and humanoid actuators. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer calls Beijing's compliance "not perfect."
The Swiss startup's five-fingered M1 pairs a 25 kg power grasp with tactile sensing fine enough to feel 50 grams, according to mimic — built in-house in Switzerland as part of a full-stack platform that includes a data-collection wearable. humanoid.guide's hands directory scores it 7/10.
Image © Renesas — The chipmaker is structuring its humanoid strategy into brain-and-motion, sensing, actuation and power management — betting suppliers will buy platforms rather than parts in a market it expects, according to Renesas, to double every year through 2030.
Image © Agility Robotics — CEO Peggy Johnson urges Washington to close the gap on internationally sourced parts — citing McKinsey data that China holds roughly 90% of permanent-magnet motor capacity — in Agility's recommendations for a U.S. humanoid strategy.
The Incheon-based end-effector specialist — whose five-fingered DG-5F-S weighs under 1 kg and comes in at about 60% of its predecessor's cost, according to the company — exports to 19 countries and is preparing to list next year.