By Eduardo Baptista and Laurie Chen
BEIJING, Aug 18 (Reuters) – China’s humanoid robot makers have spent the past two years dazzling investors with machines that can breakdance, throw punches and even set marathon records. This week in Beijing, they face a tougher test in proving their inventions can work reliably to generate economic value.
More than 300 companies are expected at the World Robot Conference from Wednesday through Sunday, showcasing over 2,000 exhibits and launching more than 150 products, according to Beijing authorities.
The conference coincides with the Shanghai stock market debut of Unitree, one of the world’s largest humanoid robot makers by sales volume, after an initial public offering that was more than 8,000 times oversubscribed by retail investors.
Unitree founder Wang Xingxing will address the conference’s main forum on Thursday on the next decade of the humanoid industry, according to the Beijing municipal government.
The event comes as investor enthusiasm around Chinese humanoids reaches new heights, but the conversation is shifting from viral demonstrations to commercial reality. Investors and customers are increasingly judging robots not by how spectacularly they move, but by how productively they work, how much human supervision they require and whether they can earn a return on their cost.
Although robots in China are starting to replace human workers in niche applications such as hotel food deliveries and on some assembly lines, large-scale adoption across industries beyond limited pilot projects has yet to occur.
FROM DEMOS TO DEPLOYMENT
Some in the industry argue that reckoning is overdue. Lumos Robotics, a Mitsubishi Electric-backed startup exhibiting at WRC, has focused its MOS robot on industrial inspection and material handling rather than household or entertainment applications.
CEO Yu Chao told Reuters the companies most at risk in China’s crowded embodied-AI sector were those developing robot bodies, models or data in isolation without proving their technology in actual applications.
For Yu, the eventual shakeout will come down to a simple question: can a robot create value for a customer? Companies that cannot, he said, “will be washed out.”
Georg Stieler, a robotics analyst who advises industrial companies in China, estimates that 50% to 70% of humanoid robots produced this year could end up in “data factories”, where they are used to collect training data rather than perform productive work for paying customers.
