This year at WAIC, the embodied-AI booths shared one unexpected keyword: touch. Two years ago tactile sensing barely registered; now, from sensor vendors to whole-robot companies, “touch” is on every placard, with some declaring it more important than vision. The race is not just over sensors but over the models, data and even the chips … 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
At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, Qiling did something many robot demos avoid: it let the machines run the shop by themselves.
At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, China’s embodied-AI zone was full of robots making coffee, taking photos and dancing. Sudo Tech’s booth drew crowds for the opposite reason: its robots quietly did unglamorous things — grasping objects, wrapping items in cloth with two hands, inserting parts into matching holes — with conspicuous stability, success rates and … Read more
At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, Shenzhen-based service robot leader Keenon (擎朗智能) unveiled something more ambitious than a product demo: an “embodied community” spanning four real-world service scenarios, all running on humanoid robots with zero human teleoperation. What ‘Zero Teleoperation’ Actually Means The industry default for robot showcases is still remote piloting — a human operator … Read more