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Talk about grabbing attention. This week's Robotics Special opens with 30 machines picketing a government ministry, then moves to two new humanoids you can actually order, and a fight over who owns the robot brain.

1  Thirty robots marched on Warsaw to demand AI rules. Around 30 humanoid and dog-like robots waved flags outside Poland's digital affairs ministry on September 7 while loudspeakers played slogans like "Don't wait, regulate." The organizer, a group called Democratism, is run by Grzegorz Kulis, who also heads a robotics company and a recruitment agency, so the machines warning about job losses were built by the industry doing the replacing. Digital minister Krzysztof Gawkowski came out to meet them and called uncontrolled AI models inside ever-improving humanoids a major problem. Read the AFP report, or see why one robot answered the press questions itself.

2  Agility unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid built to work next to people instead of behind a fence. The new model lifts 50 pounds (40% more than Digit 4), charges in nine minutes, runs for 90, and is rated for more than 20 hours of work per day across charge cycles. The bigger claim is safety: it detects nearby people, signals what it plans to do, and hands control to an independent safety controller when someone gets too close. Early access is slated for the first half of 2027, with the EU and UK on the roadmap, and Agility says the specs are still preliminary. Read Agility's announcement, check the spec sheet, or watch it work the floor.

3  Unitree's G1+ puts a moving head and stronger motors on a $15,000 humanoid. The upgrade adds two neck joints, more than doubles peak torque at the shoulder and waist, and lifts a three-kilogram arm load, all for $1,500 more than the current G1. Battery life stays at about two hours, so this is a research and demo machine, not a warehouse worker. Still, a humanoid that looks you in the eye now costs less than a used Camry. See the full G1+ specs, or watch the launch video.

Bonus reads:  UBTECH opened a 14,000-square-meter plant in Liuzhou designed to build a humanoid every 10 minutes. Take the factory tour, plus a team of Apple Special Projects veterans raised $100M for Maven Robotics, a wheeled two-armed robot that stacks mixed pallets. Meet Maven.

The paintbrush. Thijs, a 20-year-old roboticist at OpenAI, gave GPT-6 Astra an off-the-shelf arm, a brush, and a camera, then asked it to paint the Golden Gate Bridge. Nobody scripted the joint movements; the model worked out how to drive the arm and corrected its strokes by looking at the canvas across four attempts. Sam Altman asked for the finished painting and got it. See the arm at work.

The hot take. Zeeshan Zia, a principal scientist at Amazon Alexa, watched the clip and posted that the OpenAI of robotics will be OpenAI itself, not the specialist labs. That stings for Physical Intelligence and Skild AI, which have raised hundreds of millions to build dedicated robot brains. Altman has already said OpenAI will "definitely" build its own humanoid.

The open flood. Meanwhile the two biggest humanoid makers by volume are giving the software away. Unitree began releasing weights for UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, its model that combines visual understanding with whole-body control, and a day later AGIBOT open-sourced GE-Act 2.0, trained on 30,000 hours of manipulation data. When the companies with the most robots in the field hand out the brain for free, the brain stops being the thing you can charge for.

The 10% problem. The same third-party benchmark that scored Astra at 95% on basic pick-and-place trials watched it collapse to 10% on sub-millimeter puzzle insertions. Clone Robotics CEO Dhanush Radhakrishnan put the counter-argument bluntly: frontier models have a half-life of six months, and the returns will go to whoever owns the best hardware and the customer data flowing through it. Skild AI's answer to both camps was a number, $100M in annual recurring revenue across 60-plus customers after 10 months, along with a swipe at rivals who ship cherry-picked demos.

The reframe. If reasoning is heading toward commodity pricing, the scarce parts of this industry are actuators, tactile hands, batteries, and factories that turn out a unit every 10 minutes. That is also why the Warsaw protest landed: regulators cannot see a model, but they can see 30 bodies in the street. Watch the hardware announcements, not the benchmark charts, to know who is winning.

Figure steps out. Brett Adcock posted a short clip of a Figure robot climbing out of a vehicle, a callback to the company's earlier parcel-delivery footage. No delivery service was announced, which did not stop the speculation. Watch the clip.

Robot combat, no joystick. Unitree showed two humanoids sparring with nobody at the controls, driven by its UnifoLM-X2 world model. It is the most convincing autonomous fight footage yet, and a reminder that these things learn fast. See the bout.

Meet Kyle. A stealth startup in Munich revealed a walking prototype named Kyle and promised a full unveiling in early 2027. Europe's humanoid scene is quieter than China's or America's, but seven European companies have already signed deployment deals in the thousands of units. Read the prototype reveal, or see who is buying European.

Elder-care companion. Tuya's Doova is a small AI companion robot pitched at seniors and doubling as a smart-home hub, and it topped Humanoids Daily's most-read list this week. The market wants a helper before it wants a humanoid. Take a look at Doova.

The precision test. The full RoboCurve benchmark behind the Astra numbers is worth a skim: 95% on coarse grabbing, 10% on fine insertion, with far fewer reasoning tokens than rival models. Bookmark it for the next time someone says robots are solved. See the results.

Find the robot-proof parts of your job in 60 seconds

Thirty robots protesting about jobs is a good excuse to check your own. This prompt works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and turns a plain description of your week into a task-by-task exposure map, with separate scores for physical automation and AI software. You get three tasks to hand off this month, three worth protecting, and one skill to build before the year ends, which beats guessing.

COPY AND PASTE THIS PROMPT

Customize it: Swap [YOUR JOB TITLE AND A THREE-SENTENCE DESCRIPTION] with something like "Shopify store owner who handles product listings, customer emails, and ad campaigns," "HR manager at a 200-person company," or "freelance video editor for YouTube channels." For sharper results, paste in last week's calendar or to-do list instead of a description, and add "Assume I have a budget of $50 a month for tools" so the recommendations stay realistic.