DePAI Digest: April 2025

April brought more real-world progress across the robotics stack. Robots moved through city streets, powered up industrial sites, and continued the switch from controlled environments to public deployment. Open-source hardware took a step forward, and so did AI integration in commercial systems.

Here’s what moved the ecosystem forward this month:

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1. Humanoid Robots Participate in Beijing Half-Marathon

On April 19, Beijing hosted the inaugural Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon, where 21 robots competed alongside 12,000 human runners.

Tiangong Ultra, developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, completed the 21.1 km course in two hours and forty minutes, guided by a human running ahead with a tracking device.

It wasn’t fast, but it was a public demonstration of real-world locomotion at scale.

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2. Clone Robotics Unveils Protoclone Android

Protoclone is a musculoskeletal android built around synthetic muscle fibers and a bone-like frame.

It’s designed to move like a human, with over 1,000 fluid-driven actuators and a wide range of motion. Though still in early testing, it points toward a new class of biomimetic machines.

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3. Unitree Robotics Opens Factory in Hangzhou

Unitree Robotics has opened a 10,000-square-metre manufacturing facility near its headquarters in Hangzhou, China. The plant, just 15 minutes from Unitree HQ, is designed to support expansion over the next 3 to 5 years as demand for humanoids grows.

With over 500 employees and a focus on in-house component development, Unitree is now scaling fast to meet China’s booming interest in human-shaped machines.

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4. Boston Dynamics’ Spot Reactivates Nuclear Crane

Boston Dynamics’ Spot was used to reactivate a power crane at Scotland’s Dounreay nuclear site—an area unsafe for human workers.

Using a simple pole attachment, Spot pressed a control switch that had been inaccessible for over a year. It’s a real-world use case for remote robotics in high-risk infrastructure.
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5. Samsung Pairs Ballie with Google Gemini

Samsung’s home robot Ballie is being upgraded with Gemini, Google’s multimodal AI platform. This brings real-time conversational understanding, visual perception, and personalized interaction into a domestic form factor.

The rollout begins this summer, starting in the U.S. and Korea.
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6. Pudu Robotics Introduces FlashBot Arm

Pudu Robotics released FlashBot Arm, a semi-humanoid service robot equipped with dual robotic arms and real-time perception capabilities.

Designed for environments like hotels and hospitals, it can autonomously navigate and perform deliveries across multiple floors.

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7. Hugging Face Acquires Pollen Robotics

Hugging Face is now in the hardware game. The company acquired Pollen Robotics, makers of Reachy 2, a modular humanoid designed for research labs and AI development.

Priced at $70K and running on Hugging Face’s LeRobot stack, Reachy 2 signals a push to make embodied AI more open, more programmable, and more widely available.

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