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On Jul 28, 2026 the FCC added foreign-produced 'advanced robotic devices' (humanoid and four-legged robots) and connected power inverters to its Covered List, barring them from FCC equipment authorization and effectively banning new imports on national-security grounds (surveillance/remote-commandeering risk). The action is aimed at Chinese makers (Unitree named on the Pentagon list) which accounted for ~85% of 2025 deployments, and is widely read as protecting US developers — Figure AI, Tesla Optimus, Agility Robotics, Apptronik — while they scale. China signalled possible rare-earth countermeasures.

Hyundai Motor Group confirmed on 16 July 2026 that its shareholders are pursuing acquisition of SoftBank's entire remaining stake in Boston Dynamics after SoftBank exercised a contractual put option, a step that would make the robotics maker a wholly owned Hyundai subsidiary. Press reports put the consideration at about USD 325 million for roughly 9.65 to 10 percent; Hyundai's own statement discloses no figure and says the contemplated transaction remains subject to approvals, settlement procedures and share-allocation decisions among the relevant parties.

Boston Dynamics published a technical blog authored by Alberto Rodriguez, Director of Robot Behavior for Atlas, with research engineers Shane Rozen-Levy and Vinay Kamidi, explaining for the first time how Atlas learned to lift and carry unfamiliar objects without prior knowledge of their mass or centre of gravity. Training used GPU-parallel reinforcement-learning simulation across varied weights, friction and grip conditions; the published demonstration uses a 50-lb mini-fridge while internal testing exceeded 110 lb - above the training range - with the behaviour transferring to hardware without retraining (zero-shot sim-to-real).

Amazon Web Services and Nvidia announced a major expansion of their strategic collaboration, planning to deploy 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs across AWS's global infrastructure. The expansion deepens the two companies' work across AI factories, CPUs, networking, open models, data processing and robotics, bringing Nvidia Vera CPUs, advanced networking, Nemotron open models and physical AI technologies to AWS.

Boston Dynamics' Atlas performed football-inspired goal celebrations and delivered the ceremonial match ball to the referee at halftime of Brazil's round-of-16 match against Norway. Hyundai Motor Group described it as the first time its robotics had been integrated into a live match environment.

Collaborative Robotics announced the second-generation Proxie mobile robot, adding autotasking — autonomous identification of which work to perform — along with two-armed mobile manipulation and greater payload capacity. The company positioned it as production-tested physical AI for real operations rather than a research platform.

At GTC Taipei NVIDIA announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, its first open humanoid reference design. It pairs a Unitree H2 chassis standing nearly six feet and weighing 150 pounds with 31 degrees of freedom, dual Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands adding 22 degrees of freedom for 75 in total, and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor T5000 onboard compute delivering 2,070 FP4 teraflops with a 14-core Arm CPU and 128GB of unified memory. Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center and UC San Diego's Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory will use the design, with availability from Unitree Robotics in late 2026.

At a JPMorgan-hosted investor session in Boston, Hyundai Motor Group disclosed for the first time a specific internal fleet figure for Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid: more than 25,000 units across Hyundai and Kia manufacturing plants, absorbing roughly 83% of the 30,000-unit annual production capacity the group targets by 2028. Counterweights recorded: first deployment is not until 2028 at Metaplant America in Savannah (Kia Georgia 2029), external customers only from 2027, and the Hyundai branch of the Korean Metal Workers' Union has stated Atlas may not enter any Hyundai factory without a labor-management agreement.