BEIJING: More than 30 screens cover one wall of a booth at the 2026 World Robot Conference (WRC). Not one shows a robot dancing. Each carries a live feed from a different Chinese city: a robot in traffic-police uniform at an intersection, another in a car dealership, another out on patrol. The robots on the screens are not at the show. They are at work.
The 2026 WRC opened on Wednesday at the Beijing Etrong International Exhibition & Convention Center in southeastern Beijing’s Yizhuang and runs through August 23. More than 300 companies are exhibiting, up 36 percent year-on-year, with over 2,000 exhibits and more than 150 products making their debut, according to co-host the Chinese Institute of Electronics. A zone for 49 centrally administered State-owned enterprises showing 12 application scenarios has been added for the first time, alongside a robot consumption street staffed by robot chefs.
It opened on the same day Unitree Robotics became the first humanoid robot maker to list on China’s A-share market. Its shares closed up 460.34 percent, valuing the Hangzhou company at more than 340 billion yuan ($50.42 million). Unitree shipped over 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, the most of any vendor worldwide.
“The most obvious change this year is that the whole industry has moved from simply showing off tricks toward industrial logic and real deployment,” Xiong Youjun, CEO of the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, told the Global Times at the venue. The sector is “on the eve of embodied AI’s ‘ChatGPT time,’” he said, with companies shifting their attention from technical specifications to systematic capability – research, supply chain, scenario engineering and after-sales service.
That shift is happening under a new constraint. In late July, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved to bar new foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots from the US market on national security grounds. The restriction will cost the country that imposed it, experts said. Shutting the door leaves the US with nothing to learn from and will not make itself stronger, said Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Zhongguancun Modern Information Consumer Application Industry Technology Alliance. “It may miss this wave.”
UBTech built no display set this year. “We moved the scenes we are actually deploying onto the show floor,” Jiao Jichao, vice president of UBTech, told the Global Times at the booth, adding that the robots run continuously rather than in timed demonstrations. They no longer hang from an overhead rail but stand up out of their own shipping crates.
An unmanned sorting system UBTech built with a listed logistics firm is running at that firm’s customer sites in South Korea and Australia, and manufacturers including Huawei and Foxconn began buying robots for their lines this year, Jiao said. –Agencies
