Creators of Chinese humanoid robots intend to make them functional in practice

The World Robot Conference opens in China and will continue until Sunday. More than 300 companies, mainly Chinese, will participate, displaying more than 2,000 exhibits and launching more than 150 products to the market.

Image source: unitree.com

The event comes amid a surge in investor interest in humanoid robots, which could become a new source of industrial growth for China and an arena for technological competition with the United States. Unitree, China’s best-known maker of humanoid robots, has seen its share price rise more than sevenfold since its listing, with retail investor demand outstripping supply 8,000 times. Startup Lumos Robotics and Chery’s automotive robotics unit announced plans to go public.

Madison Huang, a senior Nvidia executive and the daughter of the company’s CEO, attended the event. She oversees marketing for the robotics platform and the Nvidia Omniverse platform, systems that will help robots sense and act in the real world. Representatives of RealSense, an American company that produces machine vision systems for robots, talked about partnerships with Chinese companies.

Leju shows how a humanoid robot can move and load boxes. At the Robotera booth, a humanoid robot sorts packages on a wheeled tripod—more than a hundred of these machines are already in use at the China Postal Service’s 15 warehouses. DexForce shows how robots on an assembly line pack phones into boxes. Since this year, DexForce robots have been used in the factories of Huawei and Apple touch screen supplier Lens Technology. Lumos Robotics uses robots to automate the assembly of core modules in its own factories; they will soon be included in the final assembly.

X Square Robot focuses on robots for home use, and in the foreseeable future, the company intends to complete the pilot program and begin the transition to commercial use. RealSense believes that the most successful companies will be those that can apply robots to their own production environments; China’s advantage lies in speed, with the robot development cycle shortened from three or four years to six to eight months.