Monday, 5 October 2026
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Prox Industries Engineer Team Takes Second At Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge

A single industrial engineer entering an academic challenge and taking second out of 34 teams shows how quickly the humanoid manipulation stack is moving from lab demos to a skills contest that a commercial team can enter and place in.

Reporting from 1 source: ASCII.jp.

Prox Industries Engineer Team Takes Second At Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge

Prox Industries engineer Noguchi was part of Team RAMEN, which placed second out of 34 teams in the Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge at IROS 2026. Teams used the Unitree G1 humanoid to autonomously assemble the IKEA children's table UTTER, handling part recognition, attaching four legs, and completing the build. IROS 2026 ran September 27 to October 1 in Pittsburgh. Prox plans to feed the results into its humanoid and Physical AI development.

Team RAMEN, which included Prox Industries engineer Noguchi, finished second among 34 teams worldwide. The task was not a demo reel: teams had to make the Unitree G1 recognise parts, place the tabletop, drive in four legs, and finish the children's table UTTER with scoring tied to work time and whether a human had to step in.

Organizers included people from Google DeepMind, Unitree, Lightwheel, Frodobots, and the Singapore Institute of Technology. The technical stack involved 3D spatial recognition, bimanual coordination, contact-heavy manipulation, motion control against positional drift, and Sim2Real transfer. Prox says it will put what the team learned back into its own humanoid and Physical AI work.

Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.

Prox Industries Noguchi

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