Xiaomi's Humanoid Just Worked a Full Factory Shift
China blocks a $5.4 billion robot deal, a US humanoid goes on sale for $7,999, and a French logistics giant sets a six-month warehouse clock.
The Big Number
A fully American-made humanoid robot is now on sale for $7,999, a figure that undercuts most research humanoids shipping today.
Welcome back to your Robot Briefing
Xiaomi says one of its humanoid robots just worked a full eight-hour shift sorting parts at its electric-car plant, the longest factory run the company has shown in public. It did the work on its own, Xiaomi says, catching and fixing its own mistakes along the way.
Also in this issue: China blocked SoftBank's $5.4 billion move on ABB's robotics arm, an American startup put a humanoid on sale for $7,999, and a French logistics giant set a six-month clock on its first warehouse humanoid in Germany.
The 60-Second Read
Xiaomi's humanoid covered a full day's output at one EV-factory station, though the company withheld the numbers that would prove it.
China's state planner blocked SoftBank's $5.4 billion purchase of ABB's robotics unit on national-security grounds.
StarBot's Spark, a US-made developer humanoid, is on sale for $7,999, with the first 100 units at $5,999.
ID Logistics will put a humanoid on a working German warehouse floor within six months.
News
Xiaomi Runs a Humanoid for a Full Eight-Hour Factory Shift
Image source: Xiaomi
Snapshot: Xiaomi ran a full-size humanoid through a complete eight-hour shift at its electric-car plant, sorting center-console side covers at a single workstation.
Breakdown:
The robot pulled covers from bins and placed them on storage racks to meet a full day's output at that station, and Xiaomi said it detected and corrected its own errors and coordinated with the line's control system.
It is Xiaomi's third public factory milestone this year, after a March trial in Beijing where a humanoid "intern" installed self-tapping nuts at a 90.2 percent success rate against the station's 76-second cycle.
Xiaomi showed the run at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen on November 3, the same week it said its open-source Xiaomi-Robotics-1 model, trained on 100,000 hours of real-world data, had begun trials in staff apartments.
CEO Lei Jun said last December that Xiaomi plans to deploy humanoids in large numbers across its factories within five years.
Takeaway: Xiaomi published no cycle time, no intervention count and no success rate for the eight-hour run, and the clip it posted carried a 100x speed label in the corner. The March trial in Beijing came with all three figures. This one did not.
News
China Blocks SoftBank's $5.4 Billion Grab for ABB's Robot Arm
Snapshot: China's state planner blocked SoftBank's $5.4 billion takeover of ABB's robotics division, prohibiting the acquisition of the Swiss group's robot operations in China.
Breakdown:
SoftBank agreed in October 2025 to buy the unit, one of the world's big industrial-robot businesses, as the centerpiece of founder Masayoshi Son's push into physical AI.
An office under China's National Development and Reform Commission, which screens foreign deals for national-security risk, prohibited the transaction, with people familiar citing worries about sensitive data moving to the US and SoftBank's ties to OpenAI.
The block is the second major foreign deal China has stopped in 2026, after it forced Meta to unwind a more than $2 billion purchase of AI startup Manus.
SoftBank shares closed down 6.8 percent on the day the block was reported, and ABB said it and SoftBank remain in close dialogue and are working on the transaction.
Takeaway: ABB is based in Zurich, but a large share of its robotics manufacturing sits in China, which is what handed Beijing a veto over a deal between a Japanese buyer and a Swiss seller that SoftBank had expected to close.
⏱️ The Compliance Clock
75 days
until the EU Machinery Regulation becomes mandatory (Jan 20, 2027)
As humanoids start sorting parts on European factory and warehouse floors, the rulebook for putting them there is the EU Machinery Regulation (2023/1230), which replaces the decades-old Machinery Directive and becomes mandatory for new machines placed on the EU market. It folds in risk from software, AI behaviour and the loss of a fixed safety fence, the exact things a mobile humanoid introduces. An operator piloting one on an EU floor, as ID Logistics plans to in Germany, needs the conformity file ready before the robot works its first real shift.
Snapshot: StarBot began taking orders for Spark, a 90-centimeter, 22-joint humanoid built entirely in the US and priced at $7,999.
Breakdown:
The Santa Barbara company is pitching Spark at families, schools and developers as an open-development platform rather than a production worker, with a 35-pound frame, a runtime of up to three hours and a roughly 40-minute charge.
The first 100 confirmed orders get an introductory price of $5,999, and a $200 deposit holds a place in line, with taxes, shipping and final configuration quoted separately.
Spark sits below StarBot's $9,999 Astra research humanoid and its wheeled Nova service robot, which the company says has served more than 20,000 restaurant customers.
StarBot calls Spark the first US-made developer humanoid in its class, a claim that leans on the Made in USA label as much as on the price.
Takeaway: A three-foot teaching robot is a different machine from the humanoids now sorting parts on factory lines, and the $200 reservation only holds a place in a queue that opened on October 18. The pitch is the price and the American build: $7,999 for a platform StarBot aims at homes, classrooms and developers.
News
ID Logistics Sets a Six-Month Clock on a German Warehouse Humanoid
Snapshot: ID Logistics partnered with German integrator Terra Robotics to put a humanoid robot on a working warehouse floor in Germany within six months.
Breakdown:
The two companies spent about a year jointly programming two Unitree G1 robots, named IDA and Heinz and kept at separate German sites, teaching them to tell cardboard boxes from shipping bags and sort each with five-fingered hands.
They will first list four or five candidate jobs such as picking, packing and sorting, pick one for the pilot, then let Terra choose the robot from a portfolio that spans Unitree and UBTech models.
ID Logistics runs 450 sites in 20 countries with about 55,000 employees and reported 3.7 billion euros in revenue for 2025, including 17 sites in Germany.
Robin Otto, who heads ID Logistics in Germany, said warehouses will need different robots for different tasks and that no single machine will handle every job, which is why the company chose an integrator over a single maker.
Takeaway: ID Logistics still trails GXO, which has run Agility's Digit at a Georgia warehouse since June 2024 and just signed for two more US buildings.
▶ Operator's Playbook
If you are pricing a sub-$100,000 or even sub-$10,000 humanoid this quarter, ask the seller for the robot's rated duty cycle and mean time between failures on a production task it has actually logged, the measured cycle time, and how often a person had to step in during its longest published run. A teaching platform like a Unitree G1 or a $7,999 Spark can look identical to a line-ready robot in a sped-up clip and come apart on a real eight-hour shift, and those three numbers are what tell the two apart on paper.
Other Top Robot Stories
GGII , a Chinese market-research firm, forecasts that at least 15 percent of China's 150-plus humanoid makers will go bankrupt or be absorbed within three years, the industry's first real shakeout after years of crowded investment and cooling enthusiasm.
Pilatus Aircraftis testing Hexagon's AEON humanoid in its production hangars in Switzerland, giving the robot an early job inspecting aircraft parts for the plane maker.
Daedongunveiled a 300 billion won plan, about US$220 million, to build a 21-hectare agricultural robot hub in South Korea's Saemangeum with Hyundai Motor Group, where robots would harvest, spray and haul crops.
Syncereraised $11 million in pre-seed funding led by a16z Speedrun for Lume, a home robot built into a floor lamp that folds laundry and picks up new chores through software updates.
Pudu Roboticsunveiled a One Brain, Multiple Embodiments strategy in Amsterdam, putting six product lines from service delivery to a new home lawn robot on one shared AI stack.
Serve Roboticslaunched Physical AI Services, selling the connectivity and data tools behind its sidewalk delivery fleet to other robot makers, with construction-robot startup Bedrock Robotics as a first customer.
Compliance toolkit
The EU Machinery Regulation applies from January 20, 2027.
The Robot Safety Documentation Toolkit gives your team all seven compliance documents, ready to fill in.
ID Logistics and Terra Robotics each keep one Unitree G1, named IDA and Heinz, in two different German towns, and program them on the same sorting task so a change tested on one turns up on the other without anyone shipping a robot across the country.
