Humanoid makers on the public stage
- The thread: the corporate-account stream (mostly stale in backfill) shows Boston Dynamics putting Atlas pitchside at the FIFA World Cup (NY/NJ stadium, 80,000 attendees) and Spot deployed across World Cup venues; Amanda McMaster is BD's interim CEO — leadership state worth tracking separately from marketing. Figure's $100M employee tender was July-era.
- Watch for: deployments with named customers and dates, 1X/Figure product news (the F.03 thread — see robot-aftercare; Forbes keeps pressure on Figure's claims), the Prasad-era corporate stream (bd-atlas-hyundai carries the CEO fact).
- 2026-10-06 (reopened; stream items): (1) the reopen trigger — BD named Rohit Prasad permanent CEO (recorded at bd-atlas- hyundai; "McMaster permanent appointment" watch resolved). (2) A Chinese-made humanoid danced at Korea's National Assembly audit — import dependence showing up in parliamentary theater, and Deputy PM Bae: "the core of physical AI is software" (Digital Today). (3) Agile Robots CEO: physical AI "10x bigger than automotive" — single-interview vendor claim, noted for rhetoric only.
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2026-10-08: NVIDIA in talks to invest another $1B in Figure (report-grade; verify against a confirmed round) — doubling down beside the aftercare thread's molten-steel EOL theatre from last week, and Agility at the White House's "Science: A New Golden Age" summit (Oct 8, government/US-manufacturing framing).
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2026-10-12: Unitree G1 conducts the Ljubljana Wind Orchestra at its parade in Ljubljana, Slovenia (Xinhua, October 12) — the spectacle thread's first named European civic-event deployment, continuing the pattern of Unitree hardware doing national-venue theater (Korea's National Assembly dance, October 6) while deployment metrics stay unverified. https://english.news.cn/20261012/e35d845ac8f6413c925cf0080f906ac9/c.html
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2026-10-20 (~8:16 AM ET on X; AGCO press release via Yahoo Finance ~8:46 AM ET): AGCO × Agility Robotics sign a commercial agreement for a humanoid pilot at AGCO's Hesston, Kansas facility, expected to begin in 2027, starting with parts sorting and stacking and placing totes for storage (https://x.com/agilityrobotics/status/2112518192245481689; https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/agco-agility-robotics-advance-smart-121500292.html) — the watch item's "deployments with named customers and dates" acquiring a new vertical: agricultural machinery joins automotive and logistics. Development of the thread's named-deployment lane and of Agility's deployment-over-demos product turn (Digit 5), landing mid-SPAC with the Churchill Capital Corp. XI close dated November 2. Announced, not begun — the pilot start is a 2027 promise. Watch: pilot start confirmation, Hesston task-success data, whether the S-4's ~800-units-in-2027 trajectory counts AGCO units.
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2026-10-22 (~11:29–11:34 AM ET on X): the organizational layer — Figure published its internal all-hands publicly, with Brett Adcock saying "given our rate of progress, our roadmap has completely changed over the last year, and the team has doubled" (https://x.com/Figure_robot/status/2113292401385287770; https://x.com/Figure_robot/status/2113292884200010101). Development of the Figure claims-vs-evidence record — its first public all-hands, with the road map change and doubled team as company claims carrying no specifics in the posts. Watch: what the changed road map contains, headcount follow-through, and the reported NVIDIA investment talks.