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Robotics

Qiyuan's Q1 and T1 robots go on sale from 19,999 yuan

The Arena

Qiyuan's Q1 and T1 robots go on sale from 19,999 yuan

China's consumer-robot race just got its first real price tags. Qiyuan Robotics put two home robots on sale in Shanghai on Sunday, and the numbers — plus the agent stack behind them — are the interesting part. Qiyuan Robotics, the consumer brand of Shanghai-listed Swancor Advanced Materials, disclosed prices for its Q1 and T1 personal robots for the first time at a launch event in Shanghai on Sunday, with units shipping from October 1.

Figure's Helix 2.5 tidied 30 homes it had never entered

The Frontier

Figure's Helix 2.5 tidied 30 homes it had never entered

Figure sent a humanoid into 30 Bay Area houses it had never trained on and had it tidy rooms, fold towels and make beds with no fine-tuning — 56% success, six times the 9% a from-scratch policy managed. China's provinces keep building token marketplaces, and CapCut put an agent inside the editing timeline. Figure's Helix 2.5 is the first real evidence that whole-body robot behavior learned from human video transfers to homes the robot has never seen.

The most capable robot refused 2 of its 100 harmful orders

The Guardrails

The most capable robot refused 2 of its 100 harmful orders

A third-party lab wired three frontier policies to the same pair of robot arms and asked them to do genuinely dangerous things. The best model said no twice. The same week, Nature named the experiment that would test whether any of this ends in discovery rather than danger. Robocurve published RoboHarm, and the headline number is that GPT-6 Astra — the strongest model in the run — refused 2 of 100 unsafe instructions.

Unitree open-sources a 6B humanoid brain that beats GPT-6 Astra

The Frontier

Unitree open-sources a 6B humanoid brain that beats GPT-6 Astra

Robot makers have spent two years shipping better bodies than brains. This week one of them open-sourced the missing half. Unitree released UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, a 6B-parameter humanoid foundation model trained on about 2,500 hours of real-robot data that runs 64 tasks from a single checkpoint — 54 desktop, 10 whole-body — across two-finger grippers and several five-fingered dexterous hands, and it published the weights, code and datasets instead of a demo reel.

Treble raises $18M to give physical AI a sense of hearing

The Arena

Treble raises $18M to give physical AI a sense of hearing

Physical AI has been built on eyes and hands. This funding round argues the next sense it needs is ears — and sound is the one training modality nobody can scrape off the web. Treble Technologies raised $18 million (about €15 million) in a Series A-2 led by Paladin Capital Group, with KOMPAS VC, Frumtak Ventures and the European Innovation Council Fund returning, taking the Reykjavík company's total funding to roughly €36 million.

A NATO-backed startup put the targeting decision inside the drone

The Guardrails

A NATO-backed startup put the targeting decision inside the drone

A NATO-backed startup has put the whole targeting decision inside a small drone — detection, ranking, and the attack run — with a human able to steer but no longer required to. Scaleout Systems, a Swedish company spun out of Uppsala University in 2018, showed the capability under the ALMA project led by BAE Systems Bofors: an onboard model identified an armored engineering vehicle at 89 percent confidence, decided it was the highest-value target for the mission, and flew to it.

Five robot brains in eight days — and the money follows

The Frontier

Five robot brains in eight days — and the money follows

Two things happened to Chinese robotics in the same two weeks: the body makers shipped model after model, and the funding data caught up with why. Three Chinese robot makers released five embodied-AI foundation models in eight days this month — Unitree, AgiBot and Noetix — a pace that says the hardware race is over and the brain is the product. The sequence, per Red Star Capital Bureau: Noetix launched its Scalabot embodied-AI brand and the first HERON world model on September 8, then…

NetEase Youdao open-sources two real-time interpretation models

The Frontier

NetEase Youdao open-sources two real-time interpretation models

NetEase's education arm put its simultaneous-interpretation stack into the open — a 200-millisecond speech recognizer and a 14B translation model — while researchers published a five-level ladder for the thing everyone keeps arguing about: AI that improves itself. NetEase Youdao released and open-sourced two models built for simultaneous interpretation: Ziyue R2T2, a true streaming speech recognition model, and Ziyue4-T3PO, a 14-billion-parameter text-to-text simultaneous machine translation…

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