Boston Dynamics Unveils New Atlas; X Square Robot Raises 1 Billion Yuan; Mobileye Acquires Humanoid Robotics Firm for $900 Million | Tech Weekly Roundup
1. Boston Dynamics Releases New Atlas Robot
On January 6, at CES 2026, Boston Dynamics officially unveiled the new humanoid robot Atlas, primarily designed for industrial applications.
The overall appearance of Atlas does not feature extensive anthropomorphic design. Specific parameters include a height of 1.9 meters, a weight of 90 kilograms, and a load capacity of up to 50 kilograms. Equipped with four-fingered dexterous hands, it has 56 degrees of freedom across its body. Regarding battery life, Atlas offers a续航 (endurance) of 4 hours and supports autonomous battery swapping.
Another key highlight of the Atlas robot is its fully rotating joints. Thanks to these joints, its head, waist, and legs can complete turning actions within 0.5 seconds.
In terms of mass production plans, officials revealed at the launch event that Hyundai Motor Company, as the controlling shareholder of Boston Dynamics, will establish a dedicated robot manufacturing plant with an annual production target of 30,000 units.
2. X Square Robot Completes 1 Billion Yuan Financing Round
On January 12, X Square Robot announced that it had recently completed a 1 billion RMB A++ financing round. This round of financing was jointly invested by top-tier investment institutions including ByteDance, Sequoia China, Beijing Information Industry Development Fund, Shenzhen Capital Group (SCGC), Nanshan Strategic Emerging Industries Investment, and Xicheng Venture Capital, as well as diversified local platforms.
X Square Robot was founded in December 2023. Its founder and CEO, Wang Qian, graduated from Tsinghua University.
In terms of models, X Square's self-developed WALL-A model has achieved embodied multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning. WALL-A utilizes world model mechanisms for spatiotemporal state prediction, collaborates with visual causal reasoning to understand environmental feedback, and internalizes physical common sense from data through a learnable memory mechanism.
In terms of hardware, last August, X Square launched the wheeled bimanual humanoid robot "Quanta X2," which features up to 62 degrees of freedom across its entire body.
In industrial applications, it is reported that X Square has gradually entered sectors such as industrial manufacturing, logistics, and elderly care.
3. Zhiyuan Releases Online Post-Training System SOP
On January 6, the Zhiyuan Embodied AI Research Center proposed an online post-training system named SOP (Scalable Online Post-training), designed for real-world deployment. SOP is a universal framework that allows plug-and-play use of any post-training algorithm, with the core objective of enabling robots to achieve distributed, continuous online learning in the real world.
This framework integrates online learning, a distributed architecture, and multi-task generalist capabilities. A robot swarm can continuously evolve in real-world environments, with individual experiences reusable across the group. By having multiple robots execute tasks in parallel and transmit data to the cloud for centralized online updates, model parameters are then immediately fed back. This framework transforms "scale" into "intelligence".
SOP reconstructs VLA post-training from an "offline, single-machine, sequential" mode into a low-latency closed-loop system characterized as "online, cluster-based, and parallel." While multiple robots deployed with the same policy model execute tasks in real-world scenarios and continuously collect data, the cloud performs online updates and rapidly synchronizes new strategies back to all devices.
When multiple robots run in parallel, scale brings not just an increase in data volume, but a shift in distribution. Data from different environments, tasks, and failure modes are transmitted to the cloud. Updated model parameters are synchronized back to all robots within minutes, achieving consistent evolution across the cluster.
4. Mobileye Acquires Robotics Company Mentee Robotics for $900 Million
On January 7, at CES, autonomous driving company Mobileye announced it would acquire robotics company Mentee Robotics for $900 million (approximately RMB 6.285 billion).
Under the agreement, Mobileye will acquire Mentee Robotics for approximately $612 million in cash and up to 26.2 million shares of common stock. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2026.
Public records indicate that Mentee is a humanoid robot company founded by Mobileye co-founders Amnon Shashua and Shai Shalev-Schwartz, among others, in late 2021.
The acquisition is also expected to accelerate Mentee's commercialization process. The first customer-site proof-of-concept deployments are scheduled to begin in 2026, aiming for fully autonomous robot operation without remote control. Large-scale mass production and commercial deployment are planned to be completed by 2028.