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
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A robot’s understanding of the world usually begins with vision. But whether a grasp is stable, a plug is seated, or a p
At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, Qiling did something many robot demos avoid: it let the machines run the shop by themselves.
For years the debate over LiDAR was simple: believers called it essential safety redundancy, sceptics led by Tesla calle