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China’s robotics firms shift from viral demos to real-world deployment
The World Robot Conference in Beijing highlighted a push to move humanoid trials into public services, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and emergency response.
China’s robotics industry is facing a turning point as the focus at the World Robot Conference in Beijing shifts from attention-grabbing humanoid stunts to producing real-world returns, according to reporting from SCMP Economy. The conference kicked off on Wednesday with robots performing tasks such as playing table tennis and drum solos, a strategy that helped the sector attract global attention and capital over the past couple of years.
SCMP Economy reports that executives, investors, and policymakers at this year’s summit emphasized the need to scale beyond small-scale trials. Xu Xiaolan, president of the Chinese Institute of Electronics and a former vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said the embodied intelligence industry is at a “critical juncture” and that the core goal over the past two years has been pushing applications into the real world.
Xu said emerging uses include public services, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and emergency response, and he linked the next phase to mass production. Morgan Stanley, in a report published ahead of the conference, said competition will transform as firms need to deliver robots that offer reliability, autonomy, and economic value in real operating environments, rather than performance based mainly on locomotion.