VLA Models
Vision-language-action models that map camera and language input directly to robot motion — architectures, benchmarks, and real-world deployments.
Coverage (12 articles)
- Skild AI S1 Drives $100M Revenue Run Rate Ten Months In — Skild AI reached a $100 million annual recurring revenue run rate just ten months after its first commercial deployments of the S1 robotic foundation model. The
- NVIDIA SONIC Scales Humanoid Control Beyond Task-Specific Limits — NVIDIA researchers released SONIC, a single controller trained on over 100 million motion frames that lets humanoids handle diverse whole-body movements from VR
- Hugging Face LeRobot GR00T N1.7 Integration and Microduck Biped Launch — Hugging Face updated its LeRobot library in July 2026 to support NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7 VLA model for fine-tuning. In late August, its Pollen Robotics team opened
- NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.7 VLA Model Ships with Human Video Pretraining — NVIDIA has released the Isaac GR00T N1.7 VLA foundation model under Apache 2.0. The update adds pretraining on 32,000 hours of human video plus 8,000 hours of s
- Google DeepMind Launches Gemini Robotics ER 2 Embodied Reasoning Model — Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics ER 2 on July 30, 2026. The embodied reasoning model enables robots to handle real-time spatial reasoning, multi-step pl
- Pi0.7 and Helix: VLA Transformers Advance Zero-Shot Dexterous Manipulation — Physical Intelligence's π₀.7 (April 2026) and Figure AI's Helix (February 2025) represent state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, achieving open-w
- ThorArena Benchmark Exposes Force-Aware Gaps in Humanoid Controllers — ThorArena, a new benchmark from TU Munich, tests how humanoid robots handle physical contact by replaying real human forces in simulation. The results expose ma
- NVIDIA Isaac GR00T 1.7 VLA Powers End-to-End Humanoid Policy Training — NVIDIA Isaac GR00T 1.7 VLA and full humanoid development platform launch July 2026, enabling neural feedback loops, zero-shot generalization, and torque mapping
- Apptronik Robot Park Powers Apollo 3 Humanoid Data Factory — Apptronik's 90,000 sq ft Austin Robot Park, opened June 30 2026, deploys Apollo 2 fleets to generate real-world datasets for Gemini Robotics VLA models, acceler
- AI2 Robotics $735M Round Powers AlphaBot Wheeled Humanoid Toward 2026 IPO — Shenzhen's AI2 Robotics closed a $735M round at nearly $3B valuation for its AlphaBot wheeled humanoid with embodied AI, securing industrial orders like 1,000 u
- Skild AI's $1.4B Skild Brain: Omni-Bodied VLA Foundation Model — Skild AI closed a $1.4 billion Series C at over $14 billion valuation, led by SoftBank with NVIDIA's NVentures and Bezos Expeditions participating. The funding
- OpenVLA 7B Advances Zero-Shot VLA Control Over RT-2 — OpenVLA's 7B-parameter Transformer delivers superior zero-shot generalization on LIBERO benchmarks compared to RT-2-X while enabling high-frequency neural feedb
Related robot platforms
- XPeng IRON (Gen 2) — Xpeng · Humanoid
- Figure 03 — Figure AI · Humanoid