The 2026 Yangtze River Delta Robotics and Automation Exhibition and Wuxi Embodied Intelligent Robot Industry Chain Partner Conference opened in Wuxi on June 11, where the China Mechatronics Technology Application Association (CMTAA) released its authoritative report "Top 10 Embodied AI Advances (2025-2026)."
The report identifies a historic inflection point: the global embodied AI industry is transitioning from "technology validation" to "real-world deployment." According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), 51 humanoid robot models were released in China in 2025, with national-level manufacturing transformation funds mobilizing over 180 billion yuan into the sector.
Key Findings:
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Universal Embodied Foundation Models: The VLA (Vision-Language-Action) unified architecture has become the mainstream technical route, enabling end-to-end perception-reasoning-execution闭环. Chinese innovations include Zhiyuan Robot's GO-1 with ViLLA architecture, Beijing智源 Institute's RoboBrain, and穹彻 Intelligence's Noematrix Brain framework emphasizing force-centered manipulation logic.
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Full-Body Motion Control: China's Unitree H1 achieves 360N·m peak knee torque with self-developed high-torque joints. MPC+RL Sim-to-Real pipelines have matured through Unitree's open-source RL Mjlab framework.
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Industrial Embodied AI: Figure 02 logged 1,250+ hours at BMW's Spartanburg plant processing 90,000+ sheet metal parts. In China, Zhiyuan's G2 achieved 99.5% success rate at Longcheer's manufacturing line. UBTECH deployed hundreds of units at NIO, Geely, FAW-VW and Dongfeng-Liouzhou factories.
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Open Source Ecosystem: China's OpenLoong project, led by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center with 12 partners including Zhiyuan, Unitree, and UBTECH, is driving hardware interface and dataset standardization.
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Global Market Data: IFR statistics show H1 2026 global humanoid robot orders exceeding 12,000 units, with Chinese enterprises accounting for over 75% of orders.
The report concludes that the core challenge has shifted from "whether it works" to "whether it's cost-effective," with reliability, energy efficiency, and total lifecycle cost becoming the key differentiators for large-scale adoption.
