Humanoids scrub in: teleoperated robots perform surgery in a world first

Humanoid robots perform live surgery in a world first, NVIDIA and Hugging Face beef up LeRobot, and Agility Robotics takes a $2.5B pitch to Wall Street.

TOP NEWS

NVIDIA and Hugging Face are bringing new models and frameworks to LeRobot, the open-source library for training, running, and sharing robot datasets, models, and policies. It matters because LeRobot has quietly become the default on-ramp for open robot learning — and NVIDIA leaning in makes it harder for closed stacks to ignore. More here (The Robot Report).

Mitsubishi is joining the global humanoid race with plans to manufacture and deploy humanoid workers in 2027. Another Japanese industrial giant entering the field signals the humanoid pile-on is no longer confined to startups and Big Tech. More here (Automotive News).

After Iran destroyed roughly $1 billion worth of Reaper drones, the Pentagon is calling for cheap hunter-killer replacements. Expect a scramble among attritable-drone makers — losing nine-figure aircraft to cheap air defenses is exactly the math the drone industry has warned about. More here (Ars Technica).

Startup General Intuition is betting that millions of hours of video game data can train foundation models for physical AI, letting robots learn with minimal real-world data. It's the latest wager that robotics' 'ChatGPT moment' will come from clever data sources rather than fleets of teleoperated arms. More here (TechCrunch).

THE BIG STORY

Humanoid robots perform live surgery — a world first

Surgeons at UC San Diego have used teleoperated humanoid robots to perform live surgeries in a preclinical trial — a world first, with the in vivo feasibility study published in Nature.

The setup keeps humans firmly in the loop: surgeons remotely operated the humanoids rather than handing them autonomy. But it demonstrates that general-purpose, human-shaped hardware can execute real surgical procedures on living subjects, not just lab bench tasks.

That's a direct challenge to the paradigm defined by Intuitive's da Vinci system, which dominates robotic surgery with highly specialized, single-purpose machines. As The Robot Report frames it, versatile humanoids could be the next frontier — one platform, many procedures, without a custom machine per specialty.

It's early — this was a feasibility study, not a cleared medical device, and the road from preclinical trial to operating room runs through years of validation and regulators. Still, of all the humanoid use cases pitched this year, 'surgeon extender' just went from sci-fi to peer-reviewed.

Read the full story (UC San Diego Today)

MONEY

Agility Robotics is going public, pitching Wall Street on a $2.5 billion story that its warehouse humanoids are ready for real work — a test case for whether public markets will buy the humanoid thesis before the robots fully prove it. More here.

China's embodied AI players are rushing to IPO in what 36Kr calls the sector's 'first year of commercialization,' with each racing to be first to a public listing. More here.

DEMO OF THE DAY

Hyundai's Atlas humanoid (via Boston Dynamics) walked onto the pitch and performed at a 2026 World Cup halftime — a legged robot handling the world's biggest live stage, delivering the match ball in front of a global audience. Watch.

RESEARCH

ELEANOR is a large-scale soft robotic arm modeled directly on the African elephant's trunk, trading modularity for structural continuity to chase the dexterity that still eludes rigid manipulators. Paper.

EmbodiedGen V2 is a generative 3D world engine that automatically assembles simulation-ready training environments for robots — attacking the manual scene-building bottleneck that limits scalable closed-loop learning. Paper.

This paper builds memory directly into a vision-language-action model's latent space, tackling the Markovian blind spot that makes today's robot policies stumble on long, temporally dependent tasks. Paper.

QUICK HITS

— A Waymo robotaxi in San Mateo stopped, called 911, and waited for police after two teens staged a toy-gun drive-by from inside it.

— Guident CEO Harald Braun breaks down California's new AV mandates — tickets, geofences, and a 1-million-mile threshold — and what they mean for driverless operators.

— Mistral AI launched Robostral Navigate, a single-camera robot navigation model — the French AI lab's entry into embodied AI.

— LG Electronics has begun early production of 'Axium,' its humanoid robot joint, staking out a spot in the humanoid components supply chain.

— Pandaily contrasts Unitree and UBTECH as two divergent commercialization experiments in China's 2026 humanoid market.

— A North Carolina sheriff unveiled a Unitree G1 humanoid for hostage negotiations, a use case Futurism greets with appropriate skepticism.

— ENCY Software and Stäubli Robotics signed a global partnership to make industrial robot programming faster and more intuitive.