At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, Qiling did something many robot demos avoid: it let the machines run the shop by themselves.
Across a mock convenience store, coffee kiosk, dessert shop and hotel laundry, Qiling’s humanoid XMAN robots and specialised delivery and cleaning robots worked with zero teleoperation, a direct attempt to answer the question that haunts the humanoid business: can it actually do the job?
A world model under the hood
The autonomy comes from Qiling’s Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architecture fused with a world model. Four ideas hold it together: perception, decision and execution unified in one end-to-end model; a world model that pre-plays physics so the robot anticipates outcomes instead of trial-and-error; job-specific models (KEENON ProS) trained for baristas, retail pickers and laundry; and a data flywheel fed by real deployments.
In the Nova Coffee booth, an XMAN-R1 pulls shots as a ‘guest barista’. In the laundry mock-up, two humanoids fold clothes under one scheduler. At the candy station, a robot picks out the colour of M&M a visitor lands on. None of it needed a human at the controls.
‘Can it work’ is the whole point
Qiling founder and CEO Li Tong argues that whether a robot can work continuously and produce steadily is the essence of humanoid commercialisation, which is why he pushes ‘job-isation’: find tasks that can be broken into steps and measured, and make the robot reliable at that one job first.
The strategy pairs general humanoids with specialised robots. Delivery bot T10 and cleaning bot C40 handle efficient, repeatable work; humanoids take the complex, interactive tasks. According to an IDC report cited at the show, Qiling’s global shipment share leads the category, backed by more than 100,000 robots working daily in hotels, malls, restaurants and hospitals.
The demo was a statement as much as a product: embodied AI earns its keep only when it shows up and does the shift.
Translated and adapted from Leiphone (leiphone.com).
Source: https://www.leiphone.com/category/robot/KLjQSQjl9dI1Mzys.html