Elon Musk's daughter stars in an ad where she torments a robot modelled on Optimus. Vivian Wilson, 22, is the face of Desigual's fall campaign, "Born to Disobey." Over the course of the film she uses the robot as a golf tee, walks it on a leash, and tries to teach it to pronounce the brand name. It malfunctions and starts banging its head against a wall. Her closing line: "Some things aren't meant to be fixed." The brand never said the robot was a reference to her father. It didn't have to.

A century ago this job was done by a woman with a tube and a handful of dried peas. In 1930s London, Mary Ann Smith got up at three every morning and walked the East End, shooting peas at her clients' windows. Sixpence a week. She wouldn't leave a house until she was sure the person was actually awake — that was the whole value of the service. The trade was called knocker-upping, and it survived into the 1960s. Cheap alarm clocks killed it. A hundred years later, she's back. Three servos, a bracket in the headliner, a 40 cm reach. AI or real prototype?

A robot dog will replace your pet in 5–10 years. The Hengbot Sirius was at IFA this month. One kilogram. Fourteen degrees of freedom on proprietary joints. Over a thousand motions. A 5 TOPS chip running locally with a cloud model behind it. Voice, gestures, a touchscreen in its head. $1,299. A Shenzhen startup pulled $912,768 out of Kickstarter from 1,150 people who had never seen one move in person. First generation. That's the demand signal. The company isn't advertising movement — movement is solved. It advertises a personality that shifts depending on how you treat it, and memories that accumulate over months of living together. That's not a robotics claim. That's an emotional one, and it ships with a version number, which means it improves every year. Meanwhile the animal costs two thousand a year, needs walking at 6am in January, wrecks your travel plans — and one day you say goodbye. You won't switch. That was never how this works. The next generation grows up in apartments that ban animals, with a cheaper version on the shelf that talks back, and never experiences the choice as a loss.

A single ant can carry a leaf. A colony can build a bridge out of its own bodies. Researchers at Hanyang University just built the mechanical version of that. Their robots are cubes 600 micrometers across — smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. No motor. No battery. No onboard computer. Just ferromagnetic particles inside, steered by a rotating magnetic field from outside. Alone, one of them can do almost nothing. Together, they self-assemble into chains, squeeze through gaps narrower than themselves, ferry cargo across the surface of a liquid, and drag objects 350 times their own weight. Nobody programmed a leader. There isn't one. The behavior is the swarm. Where this goes: drugs delivered to one specific spot instead of the whole body. Surgery with no incision. Machines that build things too small for human hands. Cleanup crews for water we've already ruined. We keep imagining the future of robotics as something enormous and humanoid. It might just be a cloud of dust that knows what it's doing. Yang et al., Device (2024)

Three hours. Every two weeks. That's what a manicure actually costs. Not the money. The Saturdays. Her husband is a machinist. One night he added it up: seventy-eight hours a year of his wife sitting still in someone else's chair. He couldn't unsee it. So he built her a way out. Fourteen months. Seven prototypes. One scratched her. One painted her knuckle. A garage that never got above freezing all winter. The version that worked has a scanner. It reads the curve of each nail before it moves. Ninety seconds a hand, and she never has to book anything again. She looked at it and said, "Fourteen months for ninety seconds?" Yes. That's the whole job. Fourteen months of someone's life so that ninety seconds of yours is free. That's what every single thing you use today is. Somebody's absurd amount of time, converted into a small amount of yours.

$75,000 ROBOT VS $300 ROBOT. The price difference is absolutely ridiculous. One is serious robotics hardware. The other costs less than some phones. And somehow this is still a fight. Who are you betting on?

ROBOTS IN HUMAN FORM AT BEIJING’S 2ND WORLD HUMANOID ROBOT GAMES. Real bipedal robots raced each other, pushed their balance to the limit, and spectacularly crashed near the finish. Then generative AI gave them realistic human bodies. The movements and crashes are still based on the real robots — but seeing the same mechanical behavior in human form makes the whole thing look completely different. Now you really notice how non-human the movement is.

What if robots could make Hajj easier for elderly pilgrims? They could help elderly pilgrims move through crowded areas, carry supplies, provide Zamzam water and dates, offer cooling, and assist people with limited mobility. This AI-generated vision imagines a future Makkah where humanoid robots assist people during Hajj and Umrah. Not every robot needs to replace a worker. Some could simply make one of the most important journeys in a person’s life a little easier. Would you want to see technology like this at Hajj?

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A WEEKEND PROJECT. Two weeks later, he had built a real R.E.P.O. robot. 3D-printed body. Custom electronics. Moving parts. And even a microphone so it can react to sounds around it in real time. This is exactly how “I’ll build something quick” turns into an obsession.

LOSING A HAND CAN CHANGE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. GETTING ONE BACK SHOULDN’T REQUIRE BEING RICH. Aadeel Akhtar built PSYONIC around that problem. Its bionic Ability Hand can be controlled through muscle signals and even provides touch feedback. It costs around $1,800 to manufacture. The selling price: $15,500. And demand was already higher than they could handle. At the time of his Shark Tank pitch, more than 100 patients were already using the hand, while PSYONIC could produce only around 100 units a year. So Aadeel asked for $1M to scale production from hundreds to eventually thousands. Three Sharks backed him. Because for someone trying to regain basic independence, this isn’t just expensive robotics. It can mean getting part of their life back.

YOUR NEXT MOSQUITO MIGHT NOT BE A MOSQUITO. China has demonstrated an insect-sized military microdrone designed for reconnaissance and special missions. Small enough to disappear into the environment. Quiet enough to make surveillance a completely different problem. We spent years worrying about drones in the sky. Now we might have to worry about the ones sitting on the wall.

NATO’S NEW SCOUT IS A COCKROACH. IT’S A LIVING COCKROACH WITH AN AI BACKPACK. German startup SWARM Biotactics is turning real insects into bio-robotic military scouts. The backpack adds sensors, secure communications and electronic control, allowing them to crawl through tunnels, rubble and places conventional robots struggle to reach. The company says its swarms have already been field-tested with NATO customers, including Germany’s Bundeswehr. What happens to privacy when surveillance can crawl under your door?

CHINESE ROBOT TRIED TO ROB AN AMERICAN GRANDMA 🇺🇸🇨🇳 Huge mistake. Three seconds later, it was on the ground. Grandma walked away with her bag. America remains undefeated.

THIS ROBOT FISH EATS MICROPLASTICS. NOW IMAGINE 10,000 OF THEM. Meet Gillbert — a salmon-sized robot fish developed at the University of Surrey. As it swims, water enters through its mouth. A fine mesh inside its gills traps microplastics while the water passes back out. The design is open source and free to download. One robot obviously won’t clean an ocean. But thousands of versions moving through rivers, lakes and coastlines? At that scale, this could become more than just a cool experiment. Do you think something like this could actually help our planet?

THESE ROBOTS ARE BASICALLY HELIUM BALLOONS WITH LEGS. They’re buoyant bipedal robots — helium-filled bodies with articulated robotic legs that let them float and move through a space. They can respond to people through movement, light and sound, turning something that looks almost ridiculous into a surprisingly expressive machine. And that’s where it gets interesting. Imagine versions of these at concerts, museums, theme parks or festivals — floating through crowds, reacting to people and becoming part robot, part interactive character. Probably one of the strangest approaches to robotics I’ve seen lately. Where would you actually want to see something like this?

THIS IS ONE OF GALIKA’S EARLIEST TESTS. Galika is an experimental humanoid project exploring what happens when AI is given a human-like face, vision, a voice, and eventually something resembling a personality. At this point, they had only just gotten her cognitive model running. The voice module wasn’t even active yet. So the developer starts with the most basic question: “Can you see me?” He tests whether Galika can understand what’s in front of her and respond to simple questions about it. What makes this footage interesting is what happened later. Galika eventually went from answering questions about the world around her to analyzing humans, reacting to people talking about her online, and asking questions about herself. Here, she’s learning to understand the human in front of her. Later, she starts trying to understand herself. Follow @EvaXTech for more humanoid robots, demos, and breakthroughs.

Project Hail Mary introduced us to Rocky. Jeanette Müller basically built a real-world version of him. It’s a five-legged machine, fully 3D-printed and powered by 15 servos with an ESP32 at its core. Interestingly, Rocky didn’t start out as Rocky at all. Jeanette originally built a generic pentapod, then noticed the resemblance — and once you see it, it’s hard to see anything else. Custom inverse kinematics keep all five legs coordinated, while the walking gait is still being refined. The next step is adding sensors so Rocky can begin responding to the world around him. Now imagine where projects like this could be five years from today. After watching this, I’m definitely rewatching Project Hail Mary. For me, it’s still the best movie of 2026. What did you think?

A ROBOT THAT CAN FEEL YOUR TOUCH ISN’T SCI-FI ANYMORE. Scientists at the University of Tokyo developed an electronic skin that’s incredibly thin, flexible and able to stretch more than twice its original length. But the interesting part isn’t how thin it is. It can sense things like pressure and temperature. Put something like this across a humanoid robot and suddenly its body becomes part of how it understands the world. It could know when you touch its arm. When it’s gripping something too hard. When a surface is hot. Or when something makes contact with it without being directly in front of a camera. We’ve spent years trying to give robots better brains. Giving them a sense of touch might be just as important.

SOMEONE ACTUALLY BUILT WALL-E. And they didn’t just make him look like the character. Even the little facial movements are there, giving him the same personality that made WALL-E feel so alive in the movie. In the original story, his job was pretty simple: stay behind on an abandoned Earth and clean up the mess humanity left behind. Looking at the state of the planet today, we might actually need him sooner than expected. Maybe one WALL-E isn’t enough.

CHINA IS ALREADY TESTING HUMANOID ROBOTS FOR POLICE WORK. They’re being trained for security, emergency response and situations where sending humans first could be dangerous. For years, humanoid robots were mostly shown dancing, boxing or working in factories. Now we’re starting to see what happens when they move into public safety. China is clearly pushing this technology fast. The question is whether America eventually follows with its own robot police. And more importantly: would you actually trust one patrolling your city?