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
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
In a park in May 2022, a boundary-free robotic mower prototype ran back and forth on the lawn. It ran well. Qin Ling, who had just joined the team, took the mower as his first project. The team formed in late 2021, core members in place by early 2022, and in about five months built … Read more
Estun has topped China’s industrial-robot shipment rankings again, and this time crossed a threshold no domestic brand had reached: more than 10,000 robots delivered in a single quarter. According to MIR DATABANK, in the first half of 2026 Estun again led all brands in China’s industrial-robot shipments. In the second quarter it became the first … Read more
At WAIC on 17 July, Weiyi showed up with a range of industrial embodied-AI robots, and the pitch was that these machines are already in volume production, running in top-tier factories for over a year. No lab demos. The financials make the case. Per the prospectus, revenue rose from 221 million yuan in 2022 to … Read more
The humanoid-robot sector has entered its capital-realisation phase. AgiBot has confirmed it has launched the process for a Hong Kong listing, and it timed the announcement to land on the very day the exchange’s new listing rules took effect. The message was not a surprise. Rumours of an IPO have circulated for half a year. … Read more
Industrial embodied intelligence just cleared a practical hurdle. Topstar, a Dongguan-based smart-manufacturing equipment maker, has built a complete industrial data-iteration loop with Wuwen Zhike, a physical-AI data-platform company — letting embodied robots iterate quickly, reuse standardized components and deploy at batch scale. Wuwen Zhike was among the first in the sector to ship a physical-AI … Read more
Hikvision’s 2026 interim report, released this week, offered a clean read on where China’s robotics segment is heading. The surveillance giant posted group revenue of 46.82 billion yuan, up 11.97 percent year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 7.90 billion yuan, up 39.57 percent, and gross margin climbing to 49.97 percent. The … Read more
On July 28, the US Federal Communications Commission updated its “Covered List,” adding foreign-made advanced robotics — humanoids and quadrupeds — and grid-tied power inverters. The stated rationale was familiar: supply-chain vulnerabilities, cyber risk, threats to critical infrastructure. Officially the rule names “foreign-made” equipment. But Reuters, the BBC and Politico all put China in the … Read more
Another robotics company has knocked on the door of the Hong Kong stock exchange. Standard Robots, a Shenzhen-based maker of industrial autonomous mobile robots, has submitted a prospectus for a main-board listing. If it gets through, it would become Hong Kong’s first “industrial embodied-AI” listing. By the numbers, the company is no minnow. According to … Read more