The narrative that battery makers only earn thin margins is over. At the 2026 Greater Bay Area auto show, only two power-battery makers, CALB and Gotion High-tech, took independent stages, and in the first four months of the year their installed volumes differed by just 0.14 GWh, a 0.08 per cent gap in share, slotting … Read more
For a decade the cleaning-robot story happened on the floor. Sweeping, mopping, self-emptying, auto water refills, each feature layered on, each price war driving the category toward saturation. Now Chinese makers are looking up, from the plane to the facade, and the window-cleaning robot is having its moment. Cui Haishun, who runs the window-robot business … Read more
Xiaomi has released and open-sourced Xiaomi-Robotics-U0, which it calls the first unified generative model for embodied AI, and the bottleneck it targets is the one everyone agrees on but few have solved: robot training data. Language models drank from the internet; robots have no equivalent “physical-world internet.” Useful data, vision, action and state together, mostly … Read more
The shift at WAIC 2026 was not in any single product but in the script. Past editions debated what humanoid robots were even for. This year the answer was stacked on the booths: humanoids moving totes in warehouses around the clock, picking among 3,000 pharmacy SKUs, putting a Coke in the fridge and a dirty … Read more
Sudo, a robotics startup barely a year old and already carrying a valuation around 20 billion yuan, used its WAIC debut to argue that the path to general-purpose physical intelligence is not more isolated demos but accumulating atomic skills. On the booth, more than ten capabilities ran at once, grasping unseen objects, two-hand cloth wrapping, … Read more
At WAIC 2026, a booth drawing some of the biggest crowds belonged to Force Machine, a startup that assembled a 3.5-metre-long model of the Great Wall from nearly 82,000 tiny Lego bricks, using four desktop arms and two wheeled Apex robots working for 15 hours straight. The smallest components were under a centimetre wide; the … Read more
Shenzhen-based Opticalix has launched a vision-perception suite built specifically for embodied AI, betting that the bottleneck for robots leaving the lab is no longer brains but eyes. The package centres on AI-driven binocular stereo vision and two modules, Libra 1000 and Libra 3000, that the company says stabilise depth recovery in exactly the scenes where … Read more
While Tesla and Figure race to build the better body, Google placed a different bet: own the brain, and let everyone els
At WAIC 2026, the world model was everywhere, and Kunlun Wanwei arrived with a claim that China, not just Google, now se
Meta’s acquisition of Virtue AI is easy to read as another Silicon Valley talent grab. Look closer and it is a signal ab