ROBOT ROUNDUP! The Month Robots Learned to Kick! (September 2026)

This month, in San Francisco, a man stepped into a cage to fight a six-foot humanoid robot with glowing red eyes. He landed the first few punches. Then the robot hit him with a front kick, and he flew across the cage and into the plexiglass. So yes, the robots are learning to fight. But stick around, because that video is not quite what it looks like, and before the month was out, the state of California had something to say about it.

Welcome to Robot Roundup, our new monthly recap of everything robots got up to while you weren't watching. I'm Nora, and September was a big one. Robots fought humans, outran Usain Bolt, folded towels in thirty strangers' houses, and got stuck in a hotel parking lot. My robot would like me to point out that none of that was him. Let's go.

The fighter was TikToker Frankie LaPenna. The robot was a T800 from the Chinese company EngineAI, styled like a movie killer robot, and the whole show was a promo for REK, a company making a game where people pilot robots in fights. Which is the twist: a guy offstage was steering it with a headset. That robot had a person inside it. Just not physically.

And here's my favorite part. According to NBC, the company that ran the event says the human actually won two out of three bouts. Two out of three! But nobody shares the rounds you win. The internet only saw round three, and now the promoter says demand for more fights is, quote, insane. So, congratulations, humanity. We invented robot pro wrestling.

And then California called. On September twenty-third, the State Athletic Commission sent REK a cease-and-desist order over its September eighteenth event, which the letter calls an unsanctioned human versus humanoid robot cage fight. It was addressed to the company's founder, its CEO, and, I am not making this up, its Chief Robot Fighter. REK's CEO posted it online with the caption: we made it, boys.

The order itself is very specific: no boxing or MMA events in California involving any human without the commission's approval, and promoting one without a license is a misdemeanor. Notice what that means. The state isn't regulating the robot. It's regulating the human. Robot versus robot? Not their department, apparently. Robot versus you? That needs paperwork.

Even Tesla's AI chief, Ashok Elluswamy, weighed in on a viral robot fight video. His words: these robot moves are essentially remote controlled, and the robot rather blindly performs them while keeping its balance. Then he added that safety for physical robots makes safety for chatbots look like child's play. Elon Musk replied with a one hundred emoji, which in Musk world counts as a peer-reviewed paper.

Not every robot needs a puppeteer, though. Unitree showed its G1 robot sparring with a person all by itself, using a new model that predicts what you're about to do and plans its moves in real time. And in a shop in Russia, a man shoved a humanoid, and it kicked back at him. That clip went everywhere. Lesson of the month: do not push the merchandise.

If robot fights sound like a fad, the sports world disagrees. Shanghai hosted a steel-cage robot match in a league called the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend. Riyadh launched CyberHero, billed as the world's first global humanoid robot sports league, with eight cities planned. And a clip of a humanoid roundhouse-kicking its own developer made it all the way to prime-time cable news.

Now, the robot Olympics. Technically, the World Humanoid Robot Games wrapped up in Beijing at the end of August, with two thousand fifty-six robots from six hundred sixty-six teams. But September is when everybody found out what happened. A robot called Tiangong Ultra ran the hundred meters in eight point six four seconds. Usain Bolt's world best is nine point five eight.

It also won the four hundred meters, nearly five seconds faster than the human world best. So how did Usain Bolt take it? According to Reuters, he was unfazed, and more interested in the Manchester derby. Fair. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that nothing makes humans happier right now than watching robots fail, and the games delivered plenty of spectacular fails too.

Speaking of stamina: a Korean robot dog called RAIBO2 ran a full marathon, twenty-six point two miles, on a single battery charge. It finished in four hours, nineteen minutes and fifty-two seconds, a little faster than the average human runner. Its team then published the whole thing in the journal Nature, which is more paperwork than most marathon runners ever do.

Robots also tried show business. Unitree's dancing robots earned a Golden Buzzer from Sofia Vergara on America's Got Talent and danced all the way to the finale, where they lost to a sixteen-year-old rocker from Thailand. And at Vogue World in Milan, a show billed as a tribute to the human touch, a troupe of Unitree robots strutted out, totally unclothed, to L'Amour Toujours and begged the crowd to clap. The face Valentino's creative director made went viral.

Okay, robots at home, which is the part I actually want. Figure released a new brain for its humanoid, called Helix 2.5, then sent its robots into thirty Bay Area homes they had never seen, with zero training data from any of them. They tidied living rooms, folded towels and made beds. Thirty strangers' houses. I can't even get my robot to tidy his own charging corner.

In San Francisco, a startup called Tau Robotics will now rent you a humanoid to clean your home, for thirty dollars an hour. It vacuums, wipes the counters and takes out the trash, while humans keep an eye on it remotely. And iRobot showed off the Roomba Duo, a big robot vacuum that carries a tiny robot vacuum and lowers it under your sofa with an arm. A robot with a robot. It's only a prototype, though, so no price yet.

Humanoid price tags are getting less terrifying, too. Faraday Future announced robots from nine thousand nine hundred ninety dollars up to almost a hundred thirty-eight thousand. Agility's new Digit 5 is so polite that if you get too near, it can just squat down and sit. And in Tokyo, a company called GMO launched an ambulance for broken humanoids, with spare parts, tools and an engineer on board.

On to the robots you can ride. Tesla finally launched the Cybercab in Austin: two seats, no steering wheel, no pedals. Federal safety regulators opened an investigation within hours, because the rules still expect cars to have things like brake pedals. And Tesla's guidance for first responders says that in an emergency, the Cybercab can be quickly pushed out of the way. The car of the future: now with push-to-move.

One rider in Austin had a Cybercab pick him up at his hotel. Then it couldn't get out of the parking lot. One lane had construction, it never noticed the open lane right next to it, and it drove back and forth four times. Then it stopped, still in the parking lot, and announced that he had arrived. And technically, he had. At the hotel. Where he started.

Waymo, meanwhile, had a monster month. It opened public rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa on the first of September, then Las Vegas two weeks later, where more than a hundred thousand people had asked to ride. It started taking freeways in Austin, launched teen accounts in Nashville, and announced plans for Tokyo in twenty twenty-seven.

Of course, a big month comes with bloopers. In Phoenix, a Waymo got stumped by a muddy, flooded street after a storm. In Denver, one drove past the barricades and right into a farmers market. And a Financial Times reporter's Waymo pulled into a road that police had cleared for the presidential motorcade, because it couldn't follow the officers' directions.

But Waymo also had a hero moment. In San Francisco, one of its cars detected what Waymo called a violation of its terms of service involving a firearm, pulled over, and alerted emergency services. Police arrested two young riders carrying an illegal ghost gun. So the robotaxi did what every rideshare driver has dreamed of: it pulled over and called the cops on its passengers.

Across the ocean, Uber and a British company called Wayve launched London's first robotaxis. There's still a safety driver in every car, and according to The Times, those drivers are banned from speaking. So in London, the robot drives, the human babysits, and nobody talks. Honestly, that's just the Tube with better seats.

Delivery robots had a rough month on the sidewalks. In Chicago, a jogger filmed a whole pack of Coco delivery robots clumped together, clogging the sidewalk like a tour group. Coco blamed a deployment error that made several robots reroute at the same time, and added that being a good neighbor matters to them. In Los Angeles, a woman had to rescue a stuck Serve robot, and the internet loved her for it.

Up in the sky, Amazon's delivery drones are swarming a Dallas suburb called Richardson. Neighbors told the New York Times the drones fly as low as a hundred fifty feet and can be heard over the TV. Amazon compared the sound to a window fan on a low setting. One resident counted fifty-two drones over her house in one Friday, and said that was a slow day.

And one delivery robot simply deserves love. At St. Joseph's Children's Hospital in Tampa, a robot dog named Turbo Teddy now fetches delicate medicines, like chemotherapy drugs, for young patients. He's about three feet tall, he drives himself, and he is the best boy of the month. No notes.

Now, the money, because it is wild. The International Federation of Robotics says about seven thousand humanoid robots were sold worldwide in all of twenty twenty-five, despite billions in investment. And under their definition, legs are not required. Agility Robotics plans to go public at a two point five billion dollar valuation, after one point eight million dollars in sales last year. And drone company Zipline is reportedly raising money at a twenty billion dollar valuation.

Some of that hype is cooling off. Unitree's stock market debut ended up with about thirty billion dollars wiped off its value, and China is now slowing down its rush of humanoid IPOs. Over here, the US has banned new foreign-made robots that can roam around on their own, from robot vacuums to, it seems, lawn mowers, over national security worries. So the fanciest mowers at Berlin's big tech fair, the ones with arms, may never reach an American lawn.

Lightning round! In Warsaw, about thirty robots staged a protest outside a government ministry, demanding tougher rules for AI, and the minister actually came out to meet them. In Florida, researchers are using robot rabbits as bait to lure invasive pythons. And at an NHL practice rink, a driverless machine is now resurfacing the ice. The Zamboni's job is not safe.

Which brings us to our first ever Robot of the Month. The runners-up: Tiangong Ultra, for outrunning Usain Bolt, and the Waymo that turned in its own passengers. But the winner is the Cybercab in that hotel parking lot, for driving back and forth four times and then confidently declaring victory. Honestly? Relatable. That's September in robots. See you next month.