The Belt 
China’s humanoid-robot pipeline is moving from prototype to volume faster than the headline numbers suggest. At a State Council Information Office briefing on 19 October, Wei Wei, director of the science and technology department at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said the country had more than 400 whole-machine humanoid-robot products in the … Read more
A rope-driven AI robotics company in Shenzhen has crossed the 10 billion yuan valuation line on the back of paid, thousand-unit orders rather than demo reels. On 13 October, Astribot said it had closed its Series B round, completing three financing rounds in 90 days with cumulative proceeds above 1 billion yuan and a valuation … Read more
In 1934 the Red 25th Army marched into Shiyan, in Hubei, and seeded a revolutionary base. In the 1960s builders trekked into those mountains to found the Second Auto Works, opening Hubei’s auto industry. More than fifty years on, that industry tops one trillion yuan, yet its weakest link was always the parts it could … Read more
On 22 August, inside Beijing’s National Speed Skating Hall, the Ice Ribbon, the opening of the second World Humanoid Robot Games cut to a real tennis court. A humanoid stood at the baseline, and against serves topping 50 km/h it judged the landing, moved, turned and swung, the ball clipping the net tape and dropping … Read more
A founder from the first cohort of Tsinghua University’s Institute for AI Industry Research has launched his own embodied-AI company, and a top Chinese venture firm is leading the round. Benshu AI’s action-native embodied model concept. (Source: Leiphone) Li Jianxiong, the first doctoral graduate of Tsinghua AIR, founded Benshu AI, with 5Yuan Capital, formerly Matrix … Read more
The first six national standards for humanoid robots have been published, drafted and co-drafted by Shenzhen’s UBTECH, a milestone the city is framing as proof its robotics cluster can set the rules, not just build the machines. The six standards cover general technical requirements, environment perception, and a simulation test platform specification, among others, meant … Read more
Training a robot after it leaves the factory has long meant surrounding it with real hardware. A team at Peking University, working with QiYuan Robotics, says it has found a way to break that dependence. A QiYuan humanoid robot in demonstration. (Source: Leiphone) The result, called HIL-UMI, adds a model brain on top of the … Read more
Shenzhen is turning the last hundred metres of campus delivery into a fully automated chain. Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen and SF Express have opened a smart parcel centre that links intelligent sorting, unmanned shuttles and door-to-door robot delivery, described as the country’s first full-chain smart campus logistics scenario. A sorting robotic arm grabs each … Read more
Inside a palm-sized module sits a chip rated at 560 TOPS, integrating large-model inference, multimodal perception and real-time motion control. That is the flagship Sunrise S600 from Digua Robotics, and it is the computing core the company wants every robot to grow from. “We do not build robots, but we want all robots to grow … Read more
UBTECH says its self-developed unified multimodal world model, Thinker-WM, has taken first place across three embodied world-model benchmarks, a result the company frames as a step toward robots that can predict and plan, not just react. UBTECH’s Thinker-WM unified multimodal world model. (Source: Gasgoo) On the WorldOlympiad benchmark the model scored 0.740 overall and led … Read more