Photo: Unitree H2, on the WRC floor.
The World Robot Conference shut the doors on Sunday 23 August 2026 in Beijing’s Yizhuang / E-Town district. I was not on the floor. I read the closing copy, the state wires, and the people who walked the halls through Monday 24 August. The useful question is not how many humanoids posed for a phone. It is which ones moved, which of those motions were a new model, and which of those models you can actually buy.
The closing ceremony, as summarized by 36Kr on Monday 24 August, put 373 enterprises on the floor, more than 3,000 products, and 311 debut items. Attendance was given as 557,000 person-times. Mid-show copy from Xinhua and CGTN used the rounder “more than 300 exhibitors” and “roughly 300 debuts.” Those are different counts. Do not mash them. The official English theme was “Human-Robot Symbiosis, Production-Demand Convergence.” The venue was Beiren Etrong International Exhibition and Convention Center. Beijing’s own visitor guide, posted 19 August, put the expo on the first floors of Halls A and B plus the full areas of Halls C, D1 and D2, and it opened a “Robot Shopping Street” so the public could buy a meal from a machine after looking at one.
A first Procurement Day sat on Thursday 20 August. Forty-nine centrally administered state-owned enterprises brought twelve real scenarios — power, aerospace, mining, metallurgy — looking for robots that do a job, not a bow. Hall C held complete humanoids. Halls A and D were built as deployment rooms. Hall B was the unglamorous layer: joint modules, dexterous-hand sensors, and chip vendors including AMD, Infineon and Realtek. That layout is the show. It is also the argument. Walking is no longer rare enough to be the product.
What actually moved
CGTN, writing on 20 August from the opening, named the one new humanoid I will treat as a debut with a published size: Tiangong Omni, from the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center (X-Humanoid). One point three five metres, 39 kilograms. On the floor it climbed plum-blossom posts, went up stairs, crawled, and printed a document. Embodied Global’s 20 August wrap, citing Xinhua and People’s Daily, saw the same machine on five uneven posts plus a teleoperation challenge. The official WRC expo exhibit list also carries 天工 Omni. Gasgoo, on 21 August, said X-Humanoid used the same booth to announce a Mercedes-Benz partnership and to put a separate machine, Tiangong 3.0, in a dealership-specialist role. Treat that second name as a company announcement, not as a factory worker I can time.
Unitree’s booth was the loudest room, and not only because the company listed the same week. That listing is already on this site. This is the booth. On the afternoon of 19 August a G1 stood at a table-tennis table, stepped sideways, and returned a backhand. Staff told Robots Daily the robot tracks the incoming ball and chooses forehand, backhand, or a step-then-hit. Elsewhere, several G1s moved with As2, As2-W, A2 and A2-W quadrupeds and wheeled-legged machines under what Unitree called an in-house swarm controller. The G1 and the newer full-size H2 also did fighting motions. The GD01 manned mecha — about three metres upright, about 500 kilograms with a rider, first time at WRC — sat as a transforming showpiece. That is theater with a serial number. It is not a factory cycle.
UBTECH ran the opposite pitch. LavX, writing the morning of 24 August from the company’s WRC briefing, put Cruzr Y1 and Cruzr S2 on automotive sheet metal, pallets and logistics sorting. Xinhua’s 22 August dispatch said UBTECH’s zone loaded and unloaded automotive sheet-metal parts “with zero human oversight,” building on earlier car-plant trials. That is a wire sentence, not a published cycle time. 36Kr’s 20 August floor piece added a commercial-service Kuavo that narrated other stations, plus a no-code industrial pack called Taskor. The crowd magnet was the ultrabionic U1: a 33-axis facial tendon network, 19 active facial degrees of freedom, a dual-support four-link neck. Embodied Global heard a floor price of 168,000 yuan for individual buyers. UBTECH’s own 30 June / 1 July launch, on PR Newswire, had already set the U1 series from 119,800 yuan to 990,000 yuan, claimed more than 13,000 channel orders, and pointed first deliveries at 16 September. Channel orders are not paid households. Walker C1 is the new full-size service body for malls and halls. I will not pretend Walker S, Cruzr and U1 are the same robot.
Qianfan Robotics — EngineAI in most English catalogs — put a 1.73-metre T800 in an octagon and had it fight. Next to it, the 1.38-metre, 24-DoF PM01, which 36Kr called the first humanoid to complete a front somersault, patrolled the crowd and dodged locally. That is a motion-control demo. It is not a pick-and-place spec.
RobotEra (Starbot Era in the 36Kr English) split the problem the way a plant would. The 171-centimetre, 55-DoF L7 copied a teleoperator’s swing, turn and bend. The M7 kept the upper body and a five-finger hand and replaced the legs with a column. Staff said that column is already sorting and scanning in more than ten SF Express and China Post centres. I have the staff sentence. I do not have the uptime.
Galbot launched a small humanoid it called Gal · Starzai on the afternoon of 19 August and spent the rest of the stand on clothes folding, item storage, and a retail cell. Spirit AI / Qianxun put Moz1 on a living-room tidy: see the room, split the job, show the plan, then put the bowl in the dishwasher. Moz2 shook hands and took photos. Staff said Moz1 has been plugging batteries at CATL. Again: a claim, not a published station log.
The household corridor in Hall C was the honest part of the week. KrASIA’s 36Kr translation, still on the site on 24 August, named Spirit AI, RobotEra, Astribot, Morphi Robot, Haier Robotics, Yunji, Fourier Intelligence, Futuring Robot, X Square Robot, Galbot and GigaAI. They built living rooms and laundry rooms. Tasks often took ten to fifteen minutes. Some machines could not run continuously because the battery or the computer got in the way. On the afternoon of 20 August the network around those demos sagged and some of them simply stopped. Fourier’s people told 36Kr that homes are small, messy, and legally awkward, and that another two to five years may pass before the hardware catches the brochure. That is the most useful sentence I read all week.
A few cells looked closer to work. Galaxea AI showed a robot-run micro-fulfillment setup aimed at JD.com. The interesting clip was a bag: the robot opened a deformable pouch and packed it, about two and a half minutes a bag, sometimes with a human hand in the shot. Staff said about 100 orders in eight hours and more than 10,000 SKUs. Keenon described a hotel laundry in which a delivery base hauled dirty linen to a humanoid that loaded machines and folded, then the base took the stack back to the room — a proof of concept with a hotel chain, not a roll-out. Aimoga, Chery’s robotics shop, put traffic-management machines in police-style kit and said about 100 units are already in ten cities, including Wuhu, Changzhou and Suzhou. They read plates. They do not write tickets. Sunseed talked food: nearly 10,000 airline meals a day, plus a Beijing retailer boxing pork belly. Yaskawa Shougang’s MOTOMAN NEXT did cable assembly and palletizing. Xiaolu Robotics globally debuted three cooking robots on the consumer street. Xinhua saw a logistics sorter at more than 1,000 items an hour and a pair of dexterous hands folding a carton. Xiaomi showed a humanoid. Xinhua did not name the model, and I will not invent one.
The official expo exhibit list, still live on worldrobotconference.com, also named LimX Luna (Shenzhen LimX Dynamics, 160 centimetres, 27 degrees of freedom), MagicBot X1 (Magic Atom, 31 DoF, a claimed 400 N·m peak joint, dual hot-swap batteries), Vbot (a home-task biped from Vita Dynamics), Galbot’s Kengo (1.4 metres, a claimed 130-plus N·m single joint), and Kepler’s Kylin heavy quadruped. CGTN photographed a four-metre hydraulic-electric giant and an air-hockey opponent and named neither. I will not name them either. Agibot, for the record, did not take a booth. 36Kr said so on 20 August. AgiBot A2 is a real platform. It was not this show.
New model, booth demo, or a robot you can buy
Three hundred and eleven debuts is an organizer’s count. It is not 311 shipping SKUs. Tiangong Omni is a new body with a published height and mass. Walker C1 is a new UBTECH service shell. Starzai is a 19 August launch. MagicBot X1, LimX Luna, Vbot and Kengo sit on the official exhibit cards as 2026 machines. U1 is not a WRC surprise; it launched on 30 June. GD01 is not new this month; it is new to this hall. G1 table tennis is an old platform doing a new trick. T800 in a cage is a dynamic demo of a fighter the company has been touring. M7 on a column is the one industrial form that looks like a buyer might sign for it, if the SF / China Post sentence survives a plant walk.
Buyable, on Monday 24 August, is a short list. Unitree will sell you a G1. The public page still reads about 23 joint motors on the base machine, 90 N·m at the knee, roughly 2 kilograms on the arm, 1,320 millimetres, about 35 kilograms with battery. That is a developer and lab machine. It is not a housekeeper. The H2 stood in a fighting stance at the same booth; Unitree’s public H2 sheet is still thinner than G1, which is why I will not recite a payload I cannot source from the manufacturer this week. UBTECH will take your money for a U1 if the channel order turns into a shipment after 16 September. Cruzr Y1, Cruzr S2 and Walker C1 are quote-and-integrate industrial and commercial bodies. Tiangong Omni is being sold as an open platform — Gasgoo says it rides the Huisi Kaiwu stack and is meant for secondary development — which is a lab and OEM sale, not a consumer one. The Global Robot Application Exploration Plan, launched at the conference, will give mass-produced humanoids, quadrupeds and dexterous hands to selected teams for free trials. That is a seed program. It is not a price list.
Everything else I watched through other people’s cameras was theater with a purpose. Boxing and ping-pong prove a closed loop from camera to ankle. A living-room tidy that takes fifteen minutes and dies when the hall Wi-Fi sags is a research demo. A bag that needs a human once per few cycles is a cell that is not yet a hire. A 4-metre giant with no name on the wire is a photograph.
Joints, heat, and the numbers nobody taped to the stand
I keep coming back to the same missing page. Almost no booth published a continuous-torque curve, a thermal map, or a shift-length duty cycle. MagicBot X1’s official card claims 400 N·m peak and 7×24 hours on hot-swap packs. Peak is not continuous. Hot-swap is how you hide a thermal problem from a visitor who stays eight minutes. Kengo’s card claims more than 130 N·m in one joint and “fall ten times and still work.” That is a reliability slogan, not a Weibull plot. Tiangong Omni’s 39 kilograms is the most useful new mass I saw, because a light machine is easier to catch when it misses a stair, and harder to use as a 15-kilogram tote mule. CGTN did not give Omni a payload. I will not invent one.
UBTECH said Thinker-VLA improved industrial inference 176 percent, cut storage 60 percent, and dropped the edge GPU memory need from 64 GB to 32 GB. The company did not publish the benchmark, the board, or the task mix. Jiao Jichao, UBTECH’s research vice president, told 36Kr the industry still lacks real interactive data and has no consensus on what to label. That is the adult sentence. Xu Shichao at Sunseed described the practical fix already creeping onto food lines: a big model for the rare decision, a small model for the fast repeat, because invoking the large model on every cut cooks the computer and misses the takt. Zhang Xiaoming at Coowa said more than 10,000 of that company’s robots are already out, generating tens of petabytes, and that the model improves while the fleet works. Those are company numbers. They are at least about hours, not about a backflip.
A humanoid that has to hold a sheet-metal blank off-axis for a full shift dies of heat and backlash, not of a missing world-model slide. Dual encoders, crossed-roller bearings, and a winding that can dump heat at the knee are still the parts that decide whether Tuesday looks like Monday. Most of the WRC floor did not show those parts. Hall B at least admitted they exist.
If a factory cell is real, the boring layer around it matters as much as the biped. Part presentation, lift-and-locate, the fixture that keeps a tote at a known height so a 2-kilogram arm can pretend it is a 10-kilogram arm — that is where electric linear actuators actually earn a place. FIRGELLI builds that kind of actuator. Nobody in Yizhuang put one inside a Unitree knee, and I will not pretend they did.
What the week was worth
China’s own Humanoid Robot Industry Development Report, released at the conference, said Chinese humanoid shipments passed 40,000 in the first half of 2026, about 97 percent of the world. Xinhua, citing California’s Smart Analytics Global, put the global first-half total near 19,100 and the Chinese share over 97 percent. Those two global denominators do not match. The 97 percent rhyme is what the organizers wanted you to remember. Use it as a direction, not as a bill of lading. MIIT’s Xin Guobin said robot firms above designated size took in more than 300 billion yuan in 2025; Embodied Global added 165.5 billion yuan for the first half of 2026, up 24.5 percent. That is the industrial-robot bag, not a humanoid ASP.
Zhang Feng, speaking at the close, said the machines have moved from talent shows to express sorting, noodle cooking and commodity packaging. He is half right. The halls were full of rooms that looked like work. A few of those rooms — a tote cell, a food line, a traffic cone with a badge — already have serial numbers in the field. The bipeds that boxed, danced, climbed posts and folded a shirt for a camera are better than they were a year ago. They are still, on the evidence of this week, booth athletes. A lab can buy a G1 tomorrow. A home cannot buy a reliable housekeeper. A plant can buy a quote for Cruzr or M7 and then spend a year on fixtures, safety and heat. That is the show that closed on 23 August. The 2027 conference is already dated 18 August. I would like, next year, to see a torque table taped under the ping-pong paddle.