Nov 6, 2025 3 min read Daily Rundown

🤖 XPeng Launches “IRON”

Plus: First SGS-Certified Exosuit, Retail Automation Robot

Good Morning, Roboticists!

From humanoid factories to certified exosuits and retail robots, the physical AI wave is accelerating from concept to commerce.

NEW LAUNCH

XPeng Shows Off Its Humanoid Iron

📌 What’s happening: At its 2025 AI Tech Day in Guangzhou, XPeng unveiled IRON, a next-gen humanoid robot built with 60 + actuators, solid-state batteries, and a proprietary “Turing” AI stack. The system combines XPeng’s in-house vision-language-action models (VLT, VLA, VLM) and draws heavily from its EV supply chain for sensors, compute, and manufacturing. XPeng says mass production could begin in April 2026, targeting factory, retail, and home-assistant roles.

🧠 How this hits reality: It’s a bold pivot: a carmaker betting its drivetrain, chip, and battery expertise can translate into legged autonomy. But “mass production” is a press-release term, not an operational milestone. Human-safe locomotion, joint durability, and energy density remain unsolved. IRON is a branding triumph and a mechanical experiment, not yet a workforce substitute. The real test will be whether XPeng can make a humanoid survive a factory floor, not a stage demo.

🤖 Key takeaway: Robots are the new concept cars — impressive on stage, fragile in traffic.

EXOSKELETON

Hypershell Becomes the First SGS-Certified Outdoor Exosuit

📌 What’s happening: SGS, the global leader in certification, has issued its first-ever Premium Performance Mark for an outdoor powered exoskeleton, awarding it to Hypershell’s X Series. The system combines robotics, ergonomics, and an AI-driven assistive engine, cutting oxygen use by up to 39% and heart rate by 43% in field tests. The certification, co-developed with China’s National Institute of Standardization, sets a new benchmark for evaluating wearable exoskeletons, a market previously running on hype and unverified claims.

🧠 How this hits reality: This isn’t just a fitness toy getting a badge; it’s the first step toward ISO-grade standards for consumer exosuits. With third-party validation now in play, the “Iron Man belt” startups will have to back performance claims with data, not slow-mo trail videos. For defense, logistics, and outdoor labor markets, the Hypershell-SGS partnership signals the industrialization of wearable augmentation.

🤖 Key takeaway: Exoskeletons just got audited; and the future of “wearable robotics” finally has a performance spec.

RETAIL

NomadGo and Richtech Join Forces to Build a Full-Stack Retail Automation Robot

📌 What’s happening: NomadGo — whose Inventory AI already powers real-time visibility across 11,000 Starbucks stores — is partnering with Richtech Robotics, the Nevada-based developer behind some of the most widely deployed service robots in hospitality and retail. Together, they’re integrating NomadGo’s 3D spatial intelligence with Richtech’s dual-arm mobile robot Dex to create a full-stack retail automation robot. The robot is designed to handle the entire inventory loop, from shelf scanning to restocking without human oversight.

🧠 How this hits reality: This collaboration fuses two proven stacks, NomadGo’s software that “sees” every SKU, and Richtech’s hardware that can physically act on that data. The result could mark the first end-to-end “physical AI” system in retail, a robot that not only counts products but orders, verifies, and replaces them in real time. If successful, it could make inventory managers as obsolete as cashiers before them.

🤖 Key takeaway: When vision AI meets dexterous robotics, the store stops reporting inventory; it becomes the inventory.

QUICK HITS

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed U-Arm, an open-source system that can control 95% of robotic arms for around $50.
Generalist AI unveiled GEN-0, a robot foundation model trained on 270,000 hours of real-world data, claiming the first scaling laws and intelligence threshold for robotics.
Rivian launched Mind Robotics, a new industrial AI and robotics spinoff backed by $115 million to advance intelligent manufacturing and automation.
Deloitte says the “physical AI” era has begun, with intelligent robots reshaping industries and human-machine collaboration.
Schaeffler and Neura Robotics partner to develop humanoid components and build a Physical AI ecosystem to drive industrialization.

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