OpenClaw is bringing its three-day Claw Hack hackathon and ClawCon conference to Shenzhen on December 4–6, 2026, following its Shanghai event. Claw Hack spans software and hardware tracks, with M5Stack, Seeed Studio's reBot Arm B601 and Pamir hardware, and applications close November 25. ClawCon runs December 6 with talks on open-source AI, open-weight models and running agents locally and in the cloud.
Robust AI, co-founded by MIT Professor Emeritus Rodney Brooks, has built a mobile robot called Carter that is designed to complement human workers in warehouses and factories rather than replace them. Carter features a force-sensitive handlebar, an AI-powered vision system, and holonomic wheels, so workers can push, pull, or redirect it with one hand or by gesture. The robots are currently deployed in logistics warehouses and on factory floors, helping with picking, stocking, and moving items.
Nine early-stage South Korean deep tech startups pitched at DETO 2026 in Seoul for a place in Disrupt 2027's Startup Battlefield 200, with all nine targeting U.S. expansion. Voinosis won with AI that analyzes speech patterns to screen brain health, claiming 88% accuracy in a 146-participant clinical study. The others span fintech, energy, semiconductors, and AI, including Ternell's T-SRAM memory and Testbank's Solve app.
Preferred Networks' AUTiv automated mouse tail-vein injection system received the Japan Machinery Federation Chairman's Prize at the 12th Robot Award. The system uses 4K stereo cameras and deep learning to locate the roughly 0.3mm tail vein and performs automated puncture and dosing, reducing needle-stick accidents and animal stress. About 20 units have been delivered in Japan, with additional manufacturing confirmed.
NVIDIA is helping advance Korea's physical AI ecosystem, with Samsung, Kakao Mobility and LG Electronics applying accelerated computing, AI and simulation to semiconductor manufacturing, autonomous vehicles and robotics. Samsung's sMOL platform ran selected quantum chemical calculations up to 5x faster with NVIDIA cuEST, and one AI homogenization case cut simulation time from about 18 hours on a 32-core CPU to 41 seconds. Kakao Mobility plans a level 4 autonomous driving system on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor, while LG demonstrated NVIDIA Isaac GR00T-powered manipulation with its CLOiD robot in a real manufacturing environment.
MIT Technology Review tested Tau Robotics' humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco, where robots are remotely piloted by humans rather than fully autonomous. The robots collect training data for future autonomous models, with pricing at $60 per weekly cleaning with two robots or $100 for a one-time visit. The robot cleaned a kitchen and toilet but struggled with stairs and repeatedly stalled during the first visit.
CXMT reported Q3 net profit of RMB54.4 billion and revenue of RMB118.71 billion, up 613.2% year on year, while Reuters says it has sent HBM3E samples to domestic chip designers with limited production planned within two months despite yields of just 20–30%. Unitree's first post-listing results showed Q3 revenue up 69.9% to RMB665 million as research spending rose roughly 250%. Moonshot launched Kimi K3.1 Pro with a one-million-token context window, then apologized for rate limits and restored a quarter of subscribers' monthly allowance.
Markov Robotics is training a world model for zero-shot general-purpose robot dexterity, using fewer than ten hours of robot data where comparable results typically need thousands of hours. The company runs nearly all its compute on Modal, from preprocessing hundreds of terabytes of video to 2–10 concurrent training runs and remote inference via Modal Tunnels at roughly 20 milliseconds round-trip latency. Preprocessing that could take a full day completes in twenty to thirty minutes, with fan-out to upwards of 500 GPUs at once.
Physical Intelligence (Pi) runs its Visual-Language-Action robot models on Modal, adding only ~10-15ms of network overhead. Pi worked with Modal to build a QUIC-based portal over UDP with automatic NAT traversal, replacing TCP Tunnels to avoid request-response stalls in the robot control loop. Checkpoints stored in Modal Volumes load in under 30 seconds, and region-pinned deployments keep inference close to robots.