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A computer-generated Digit 5 from Agility’s company overview video. Image: Agility.
Agility is now a public company, and its first day on Nasdaq fell in the middle of a broad selloff in AI stocks. AGLT opened at $11.26, dropped as low as $8.40 and closed around $11.50, on a day the Nasdaq lost more than 5%.
Two of the autumn’s biggest model releases landed on Monday. NVIDIA unveiled GR00T 2 at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Austin, and Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.2 with a robot-control score more than double GPT-6 Astra’s. Boston Dynamics also put Atlas on wheels, Figure’s headquarters filled up with Figure 03s, and Apple’s HALO paper was our most-read article of the week.
IN THIS EDITION
Agility on Nasdaq: the debut, the $465M and what investors are buying.
Robot models: NVIDIA’s GR00T 2 at CoRL and Anthropic’s Fable 5.2.
Most read: Apple’s HALO trains a G1 on simulated motion.
Also: Atlas on wheels, Unitree’s hand-built robots, Schaeffler’s job cuts, new open-source robots and a lot of Figure 03s.
LEAD STORY
Agility’s merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI closed on November 4, and its shares began trading on Nasdaq as AGLT on November 5. It is the first pure-play humanoid company listed in the US. UBTech has traded in Hong Kong since 2023, and Unitree listed in Shanghai in August.
The Nasdaq fell more than 5% that day, with the heaviest losses in AI stocks: NVIDIA ended down about 9% and AMD about 17%, according to The Robot Report. Several reports linked the selloff to the midterm election results and to worries about AI data-center spending. AGLT opened at $11.26, above the $10 SPAC price, traded as low as $8.40 and closed around $11.50.
The deal raised about $465 million in gross capital, below the more than $600 million projected in June, and $100 million of that had already reached Agility before closing. Public investors are buying a company with $1.78 million in 2025 sales, a $138.1 million net loss, and a Digit 5 order worth more than $300 million that releases robots in tranches as each task is proven. CEO Peggy Johnson also said Agility plans to license its patents and sell its Arc fleet software for other companies’ robots.
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CORL 2026
CoRL, the main academic conference for robot learning, runs November 9–12 in Austin, Texas. We couldn’t make the trip this year, so we’re covering it remotely. NVIDIA used the first day to unveil the next generation of its robot foundation model.
A Unitree G1 running GR00T 2 Turbo cleans up a spill. Image: NVIDIA.
Jim Fan, NVIDIA’s director of robotics, presented GR00T 2 in a Day 1 talk. It is a 2-billion-parameter world action model built on NVIDIA Cosmos: it predicts the next few video frames together with the robot’s next actions, then executes the actions it has just imagined.
NVIDIA reports 71% average success across 50 tasks from one demonstration each, and 95% from five, after a 30-minute fine-tune on a single RTX 5090. Much of the talk covered skills learned without robot teleoperation: a toy truck assembled using only data from a person wearing UMI grippers, and a G1 that served popcorn in 48 of 48 trials after training on simulated trajectories.
Weights for GR00T 2 and the lighter, on-robot Turbo version are due in December; NVIDIA has not yet published the license terms. 100,000 hours of egocentric human video, the SimFoundry real-to-sim pipeline and hardware designs for NVIDIA’s capture devices are available now. Also from Austin: Skild AI open-sourced Steel, a GPU physics solver for NVIDIA’s Newton engine that it measured at up to 13 times the speed of PhysX on mixed-task batches.
Fan opened the talk with GPT-6 Astra, whose release on 3 September he said sent roboticists through “five stages of grief.” His argument is that a frontier model makes a good low-level skill model more valuable, not less, and the demos showed how. Astra marked up camera images to tell GR00T 2 what to pick up and corrected its actions mid-task. Together they completed 292 of 300 toy assemblies, against 71 to 84 per toy for GR00T 2 alone. “Neither Astra nor GR00T can do this alone, and you need both,” Fan said.
FRONTIER MODELS
The frontier model Fan built his demos around already has a stronger rival. The same day, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.2 and reported 64.9% on RoboDojo Sim, a 42-task benchmark in which a model controls a simulated two-arm robot from camera images. In Anthropic’s own runs, Astra scored 29.8%, less than half that, and Gemini 4 Argon 34.2%.
On RoboDojo’s public leaderboard, only Qoo Tech’s Q0-Preview agent scores above 64.9%, and the best ranked robot policy sits at 42.59. Fable 5.2 is not on the leaderboard and was tested on Anthropic’s own harness, so that comparison is approximate. The launch video shows robots running Fable 5.2 solving a puzzle cube and unscrewing a bottle cap, without published trial counts. Anthropic also hasn’t said whether Fable 5.2 drove the arms directly or worked through lower-level skill models, as Astra did in NVIDIA’s setup.
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MOST READ THIS WEEK
HALO running on a Unitree G1 in real homes. Screenshot: HALO project page.
Apple researchers led by Siyuan Hu, with Vladlen Koltun as senior author, trained a stock Unitree G1 to walk to objects, sit on chairs, crawl under tables and push boxes in rooms it had never seen. The motion data was generated in simulation: about 300 hours of human-like movement placed in 1,000 procedurally built rooms and rendered in Isaac Sim, with no teleoperation.
The robot succeeded in 91% of 360 real-world trials across six environments, with every model running on board: a Mac mini on the robot’s back and the G1’s own Jetson. Chained tasks were harder, at 70% on average, and none of the six skills involves grasping.
DEMO TO WATCH
Atlas on scooter wheels. Image: Boston Dynamics.
Controls engineer Xiaoyu “Andy” Wu’s team bolted scooter rims to Atlas’s ankle actuators, with one custom adapter as the only new part, and adapted the existing whole-body RL controller to roll, drift and spin-jump. A 360-degree jump tracked from human motion capture worked on the first try on hardware.
Boston Dynamics calls it a motor stress test, not a product. Rolling keeps the leg actuators near their torque and speed limits for long stretches, which walking does only in short bursts, and the company says the lessons are already going into the legged Atlas.
FACTORIES & SUPPLY CHAIN
Unitree’s robots are still mostly built by hand. Investor Josef Chen toured the Hangzhou factory and saw one or two automated actuator lines among rows of manual winding stations. Unitree’s filings put its machinery at about $1.7 million on the books at the end of 2025, roughly $50 for each robot it made that year.
Schaeffler cuts 3,460 jobs in Europe. The supplier is closing five sites, mostly in combustion-engine parts, and names humanoid robotics and defense as the growth areas meant to absorb some of the reduction. Its humanoid order intake stood at about €400 million in October.
Atlas runs on 70 Samsung SDI cells. The Elec reports a pack of about 1.3 kWh built from 2170 cylindrical cells, with LG Energy Solution also selected as a supplier.
PrimeBOT builds its 10,000th personal robot, 14 days after its 5,000th, and puts daily capacity at 240 units. It has not disclosed how many it has sold or delivered.
HD Hyundai Robotics shows a dual-arm robot running its own foundation model, starting on kitting lines. In Seoul the same week, Skild AI CEO Deepak Pathak invited Korean motor and actuator makers to partner with Skild.
KIST’s KAPEX uses more than 90% Korean-made core components, according to Seoul Economic Daily, with LG companies and Robostar assigned the platform, AI, batteries and mass production.
NEW ROBOTS & RESEARCH
Embodied AI unveils AIR at Humanoid Europe. The EPFL spin-off’s wheeled, two-armed robot starts each job under remote control and, the company says, takes the task over within about a month. It reports a 95% average success rate in paid pilots with two unnamed manufacturers.
Robbyant open-sources LingBot-Touch. One tactile encoder reads magnetic, visuotactile and piezoresistive sensors. Across 26 real-robot tasks, it raised four existing policies’ success rates by 14 to 25 points. Robbyant paid us for a separate sponsored thread on X; this article was produced independently.
CMU’s Pixel is a wheeled, two-armed research robot built for under $15,000 and designed together with its human demonstration tools. Its companion paper reports 87% average task progress across five tasks.
NYU’s MABEL puts a 56-DOF mobile robot with two dexterous hands on an $8,056 open-source parts list, teleoperated end to end with an Apple Vision Pro.
RoboColosseum offers 10,000 free evaluation hours on more than 100 real robots, including Unitree G1s. Researchers send a policy and the team runs it on hardware.
XPENG’s GroundingPI, a 4-billion-parameter model for locating objects and their parts, let simulated humanoid policies trained on 50% of the demonstrations beat comparison models trained on 75%.
University of Tokyo researchers 3D-print muscles, tendons and ligaments from a single flexible plastic for a life-size robot leg. It steps with an external support carrying part of its weight.
GRIDS, INSURANCE & EVENTS
NEURA, E.ON and enviaM team up on grid robots. Skills for inspections and substation monitoring will be trained at TUM RoboGym, with first field experience at grid operator MITNETZ STROM in 2027.
UK home insurance now covers humanoids. Tokio Marine HCC and broker Adrian Flux cover theft, damage and liability for domestic robots, with premiums quoted individually.
RobotWorld 2026 opened near Seoul with 402 exhibitors from 17 countries and a new humanoid pavilion.
MACHINA Summit moves to the Palais des Congrès for 7–8 July 2027, with Agility co-founder Jonathan Hurst and Skild AI co-founder Abhinav Gupta among the first speakers.
AND FINALLY…
Figure 03s on the lawn at Figure’s headquarters. Screenshot: Brett Adcock / X.
Brett Adcock, Figure’s founder and CEO, posted two walk-through videos showing dozens of Figure 03 humanoids on the lawn, in the main hall and standing beside employees getting coffee. In the spring he said he wanted more robots than people at the roughly 500-person company. Judging by the clips, Figure is close.
Almost none of the robots are doing a task, and Figure has not said how many of its robots do paid work. We asked Adcock whether anyone counts them back inside at the end of the day, and we are still waiting for the headcount.
This edition of Humanoids Daily was presented by RoboStrategy.
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