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Figure published "F.02 Decommission" on Sept 30: retired Figure 02 humanoids — the generation behind the first BMW deployment and the birth of Helix — were shipped to a foundry in Imatra, Finland, and melted in a 75-ton electric arc furnace. Figure says the robots ran a jump policy trained in San Jose and simulation, executing autonomously at a site the team had never visited, through six melts with ~20-minute windows each, despite heat and electromagnetic fields killing camera equipment. Figure says teardown would have delayed F.04 and auctioning risked IP leakage. Recovered metal is being machined into limited-edition artifacts. Schwarzenegger appears in the film; the autonomy claims are Figure's own.
Why it matters: Beyond the spectacle, it is a real sim-to-real transfer datapoint under extreme conditions — and a marker that Figure's fleet has fully rolled to F.03, with F.04 next.
Sources: figure.ai interestingengineering.com
Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics announced an expanded strategic partnership on Oct 1, combining Digit 5's onboard safety architecture (safe human detection, safety cues, safe motion control) with FORT's offboard communication infrastructure. The framework covers joint hardware development, solutions engineering, regulatory compliance and deployment support as Digit 5 — unveiled Sept 15 as Agility's first "cooperatively safe" humanoid (DroidHunt, Sept 16) — scales into warehouses, manufacturing and logistics. Digit predecessors have logged 65,000+ operating hours at Schaeffler, GXO and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. Both companies are pursuing Nasdaq listings via SPAC combinations (Churchill XI and Newbury Street II respectively).
Why it matters: Cooperative safety is the gating item for cage-free humanoid work near people; pairing onboard and offboard safety layers gives enterprise customers and regulators a certifiable stack to evaluate.
Sources: prnewswire.com
Tags: agility-robotics safety us confirmed
Shanghai-based Sudo Technology (苏度科技) completed a new round of more than RMB 1B (~USD 140M), announced Sept 30 and led by Shanghai Guotou's SSG pilot fund, Guotai Haitong and Futeng Capital, with Daohe, Dongfeng Asset, SDIC and others joining and Xiaomi among returning backers. The company was founded in May 2025 by Su Hao — a core contributor to ImageNet and lead author of ShapeNet/PointNet — and CEO Han Zheng; prior investors include CATL, Alibaba, Tencent, Ant and IDG, with valuation reported above USD 2B. Its Sudo R1 dual-arm wheeled robot follows a simulation-first route — no real-robot task data or teleop demos — claiming near-100% zero-shot success on key tasks and >99.5% grasp success in a battery-assembly co-development with CATL.
Why it matters: Shanghai state capital taking the lead seat signals local governments keep backing full-stack embodied AI through the correction; CATL's line is the replication test to watch.
Sources: finance.sina.com.cn iyiou.com
Eni and Generative Bionics signed a memorandum of understanding on Sept 30 to explore industrial applications of the GENE.01 humanoid — inspection, teleoperation, remote assistance and support in complex environments. The agreement extends to components and materials: Eni's chemicals unit Versalis and its Finproject subsidiary will work on a lighter, stronger foot/footwear system, with options to industrialize Generative Bionics' sensor-equipped footwear. Eni will also evaluate providing high-performance computing for Physical AI model training and use of its industrial sites for future production, assembly and testing, plus battery lifecycle cooperation. Eni Next invested in the startup's ~EUR 70M (~USD 81M) round in December 2025.
Why it matters: Europe's humanoid push is coalescing around incumbent industrial champions supplying materials, compute and test environments — a different scaling path from the US and China plays.
Sources: eni.com reuters.com
Singapore's Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) launched the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre (H2RC) on Oct 1, the day after the government pledged humanoid deployments with Home Team officers by 2028 (DroidHunt, Sept 30). H2RC will train and evaluate humanoids for public-safety use cases and act as a sandbox connecting Home Team departments, industry and academia. ST Engineering signed an MoU at the launch covering joint R&D, platform integration and cybersecurity; Mistral AI, Field AI and General Robotics are named partners developing capabilities for Home Team scenarios such as hazmat response, prisons and forensics.
Why it matters: The pledge got an institutional home within 24 hours — a dedicated evaluation centre with named industry partners makes Singapore the most concrete government humanoid-adoption program to date.
Sources: htx.gov.sg
Micron used its latest earnings call to size humanoid robots as a memory market: each unit could require more than 200 GB of DRAM and multiple terabytes of NAND storage, with several physical-AI customers already sampling next-generation products, and physical AI potentially becoming a "significant driver" of memory and storage demand by the end of the decade. At the high end of 2030 humanoid shipment forecasts (250,000–1.2M units cited), that would imply hundreds of millions of GB of incremental DRAM demand.
Why it matters: Memory joins actuators and batteries as a humanoid BOM line item with a named hyperscale supplier quantifying per-unit content — a demand signal for the whole edge-compute supply chain.
Sources: wccftech.com
Tags: micron components us reported
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