It's an exciting time in robotics, with a lot of progress in a short space of time: these machines are getting better and better at carrying out tasks, navigating around the world, and interacting with people, and making fewer and fewer glaring errors.
Across the past few days, we've had big updates from three of the biggest companies in robotics — Unitree, Tesla and Figure — so there's a lot to catch up on when it comes to where these robots are now. The good news is that they'll be tackling the major jobs first: tidying up after us.
Robots, upgraded by robots
The news from Unitree this week (via the South China Morning Post) is that it's developing an AI system that will enable its humanoid robots to effectively improve on their own, without any input from human engineers. This "self-evolving" feedback loop will lead to robots writing their own code and simulations, Unitree says.
"In the past, every robotics engineer had to write code and debug manually, which is relatively inefficient," Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said at an AI conference hosted by his company. "As AI models improve, we expect them to take on more of the planning and iteration, reducing the need for human intervention."
The project has been called Unitree Rehearsal, and while humans will still be involved in terms of providing feedback and assessing performance, the ultimate goal is to make the upgrade process as automated as possible, Wang says. That would in turn accelerate the development of algorithms controlling robots out in the real world.
With that acceleration, Wang says Unitree robots could be cleaning rooms as early as next year. Commenters over on Reddit have been less optimistic about the robot-controlling future looming into view, saying that the move represents "the beginning of The Matrix", where robots are running code that humans don't understand.
Optimus production underway
Over at Tesla, Elon Musk (via Interesting Engineering) says the Optimus robot production lines are now up and running in Fremont, California, after an electric vehicle factory was repurposed. According to Musk, production could be ramped up to some 20,000 robots per week by 2027, though that will require further engineering work.
The news was disclosed as part of the third-quarter 2026 update for Tesla shareholders, and the reports of progress will be encouraging for those who have invested in the company. At the same time, Musk acknowledged that engineers are still working on the robot's design to improve safety and reliability.
Then there's software support, which brings us back to the points Unitree's Wang Xingxing has been making. At the moment, Musk acknowledges, the Optimus robots struggle to complete varied tasks independently — requiring careful coordination between assessing environments, planning movements, and then carrying out those movements and the tasks they're associated with.
Tesla is still riding high on the buzz of its latest Roadster demo, in which the upcoming car performed several demos of flying through the air and accelerating at high speeds. It was impressive stuff, even if there have been multiple questions since about how realistic all of this is (and whether these features will ever appear on a road-ready vehicle).
The roadmap 'completely changed'
Finally, Figure CEO Brett Adcock has shared a recording of his company's latest all-hands meeting online, saying that the roadmap has "completely changed" over the last year. Work is progressing towards Figure's fourth-generation humanoid, while the production run of Figure 03 is now in four figures.
Some of the biggest changes will come in fingertip tracking, which is now down to millimeter-level precision, and gets these robots closer to humans in terms of dexterity. Figure is continuing to collect masses of data through an app called Index, which records human activities to train robots on how to do them — and some 37.5 million videos have now apparently been uploaded to the platform.
Durability upgrades are arriving as well. A Figure 03 bot recently walked for nine days straight on a treadmill at Figure headquarters, the latest evidence that stability is improving over time, and that these humanoids are better at working (or at least exercising) without any human input.
With more training data and constantly updated algorithms, the robots produced by Unitree, Tesla, and Figure are only going to get better — and this time next year, you might even be able to buy one to tidy up after you and do your laundry.