Over 600 innovative products showcased at the 2024 World Robot Expo, including 27 humanoid robots

　　Robot industry takes big strides toward high-quality development

　　Unitree's humanoid robot G1 can not only squat and stand up flexibly, but also nimbly crack walnuts with both hands; the Stardust Intelligence service robot S1 performed folding clothes, disassembling items, and tossing food in a wok on site; a testing robot mimicked human speech patterns to test an automotive smart cockpit... A few days ago, the 2024 World Robot Conference was held in Beijing. At the concurrently held 2024 World Robot Expo, nearly 170 domestic and foreign robot companies exhibited, and more than 600 innovative robot products were unveiled, including 27 humanoid robots.

　　In 2015, General Secretary Xi Jinping sent a letter congratulating the opening of the World Robot Conference, noting that "as informatization and industrialization continue to integrate, the intelligent industry represented by robotics is flourishing and has become an important symbol of scientific and technological innovation in our era." Moving forward all the way, China's robot industry has grown from small to large and from large to strong, integrating into people's production and life with unprecedented breadth and depth. Today, China has become the world's largest robot market and producer.

　　Industrial robots are being promoted at a faster pace, with new installations in the past three years accounting for more than half of the global total

　　Intelligent handling, intelligent sorting, intelligent quality inspection, screw tightening, parts installation, and in-process material handling—a variety of complex tasks can all be handled: at the World Robot Conference site in Beijing, the Walker S series humanoid robots made a brilliant appearance, attracting many visitors to stop and watch.

　　Accurately identifying the AGV cart arriving at the loading and unloading area, lifting with both hands a cargo box with a maximum load of 15 kilograms, and steadily placing it on the material rack... thousands of miles away, UBTECH's humanoid robot Walker S Lite, which had "reported for work" at the Ningbo Zeekr 5G Smart Factory for three weeks, recently completed its practical training successfully.

　　"The subject of this humanoid robot training was to cooperate with employees at the loading station to carry out handling tasks. This is the first humanoid robot in China to execute and publicly demonstrate a full-process material box handling task, with task completion and execution difficulty ranking among the top in the industry," said Zhao Chunlin, plant manager of the Zeekr 5G Smart Factory. To meet growing personalized demand, the manufacturing industry is gradually transforming from highly automated to fully intelligent, he said. "Humanoid robots supported by artificial intelligence have multimodal perception and autonomous decision-making capabilities, giving them advantages when facing complex and changeable work environments, and they have huge potential and broad prospects in the field of intelligent manufacturing."

　　Compared with humanoid robots, industrial robots have long been widely used in automobile manufacturing and are extending to more industries.

　　Able to automatically position and navigate, automatically plan shotcrete operation paths, and perform one-key fully automatic shotcrete operations, greatly increasing underground shotcrete speed... At the CITIC Heavy Industries coal mine intelligent equipment exhibition area of the 2024 World Robot Expo, a compact shotcrete robot demonstrated its formidable capabilities.

　　"The tracked auxiliary transport robot and shotcrete robot we are exhibiting this time adopt a pure electric design and can be applied in scenarios such as narrow tunnel spaces, harsh underground mine car operating environments, high manual operation difficulty, and prone to safety accidents. While reducing the labor intensity of underground workers, they will also greatly improve operational efficiency and stability," said Ma Mingyang, a technical support engineer at CITIC Heavy Industries.

　　Statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that in the past three years, China's new industrial robot installations have accounted for more than half of the global total, and robot density in manufacturing has reached 470 units per 10,000 workers, an increase of nearly 19 times in 10 years. Service robots have achieved large-scale application in fields such as home services and medical care and elderly care. Special robots play an important role in fields such as space and sea exploration and emergency rescue.

　　The scale continues to expand, and technological strength is also steadily improving: breakthroughs continue to be made in frontier technologies such as multi-information fusion perception and natural human-machine interaction; key components such as reducers, controllers, and servo systems are increasingly refined; and the overall performance and safety levels of industrial robots such as welding and spraying robots and service robots such as surgical and logistics robots continue to improve. As of July 2024, China held more than 190,000 valid robot-related patents, accounting for about two-thirds of the global total.

　　At the same time, governance and regulation are increasingly improving. Relevant departments have successively issued policy measures such as robot industry development plans, the "Robot+" application action plan, and normative conditions for the industrial robot industry; participated in the formulation and revision of 26 international robot standards; established the World Robot Cooperation Organization; published the "Shanghai Declaration on Global AI Governance"; and promoted international cooperation in robot ethics research and regulatory governance.

　　Humanoid robots are accelerating their "evolution," boosted by large models, and are expected to form a trillion-level market

　　Standing 173 centimeters tall, weighing 60 kilograms, and possessing 42 degrees of freedom... At the conference opening ceremony, the cool-looking, newly upgraded Tiangong 1.2MAX lifted the conference emblem with both hands, walked to the center of the stage, and precisely placed the emblem on the launch platform. This was the first on-site demonstration of a humanoid robot's long-horizon task capability.

　　"Tiangong 1.2MAX has multiple built-in visual perception sensors and six-dimensional force sensors, is equipped with an inertial measurement unit and 3D vision sensors, and can perform 550 trillion calculations per second," said Xiong Youjun, general manager of the Beijing Embodied Intelligence Robot Innovation Center. Compared with the previous generation, Tiangong 1.2MAX has greater load capacity, faster speed, longer battery life, and stronger intelligent interaction and task execution capabilities.

　　At present, "Tiangong" has achieved a closed loop of full-chain embodied intelligence capabilities, covering the entire process from perceiving instructions to executing tasks, and can complete complex actions such as voice interaction and unstructured grasping. Next, "Tiangong" will continue technical iteration and functional upgrades to adapt to more complex scenarios.

　　From the "Eighteen Arhats" array at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in early July to 27 humanoid robots appearing on stage at the World Robot Conference at the end of August, humanoid robots have attracted considerable attention. So when can these products achieve mass commercialization, and when can they enter ordinary households?

　　"The humanoid robot G1, released in May this year with a starting price of 99,000 yuan, has nearly completed design modifications for mass production and can be mass-produced on a large scale by the end of the year," said Wang Xingxing, founder, CEO, and CTO of Unitree Robotics. The application of large language models and multimodal models is driving the accelerated "evolution" of humanoid robots, but only after a general-purpose robot large model is developed will terminal humanoid robot products likely emerge in the industrial and service sectors, he said. "I am personally quite optimistic and believe this will take no more than five years."

　　The XR4 humanoid robot from CloudMinds, standing 1.68 meters tall, with more than 50 degrees of freedom throughout its body and carrying the robotGPT cloud brain, has already opened pre-sales at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in early July, with a starting price of 399,000 yuan per unit. "XR4 is suitable for many fields such as scientific research, industry, logistics, elderly care, and home services," said Huang Xiaoqing, founder and CEO of CloudMinds Robotics. At present, the product is mainly aimed at scientific research and education users, with the goal of relying on scientific research forces to jointly promote industry-university-research-application integration. It is expected to achieve small-scale mass production next year and begin promotion and application in fields such as industrial services.

　　"If ranked in order, the scenarios where humanoid robots are most likely to land first are production lines and special positions such as inspection and maintenance, and then service scenarios such as housework and elderly care," said Ren Lei, co-founder of Yuequan Bionic.

　　Wang He, director of the Peking University Galaxy General Embodied Intelligence Joint Laboratory, predicted that humanoid robots' grasping, placing, and carrying capabilities can be applied in factories, retail, services, and other scenarios, and are expected to achieve rapid growth from hundreds to thousands of units this year and next. "In the next 15 years, humanoid robots will certainly grow into a trillion-level market."

　　Prospects for high-quality development are promising; vigorously carry out basic research and tackle key core technologies

　　Tsinghua University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and EFORT and Qizhi Robot established a joint laboratory to jointly research and explore forward-looking technologies and common technology platforms related to perception, decision-making, planning, and control in the field of embodied intelligence; UBTECH signed cooperation agreements with Audi FAW and the Beijing Embodied Intelligence Robot Innovation Center to jointly develop intelligent humanoid robot solutions and promote their large-scale application in automobile factories... At the 2024 World Robot Conference, many participating companies and experts expressed optimism about the broad prospects for industry development, and multiple cooperation agreements were reached.

　　"In addition to formulating the humanoid robot technology roadmap and strengthening basic technology research, we have also done a great deal of work in building the industrial ecosystem," said Xu Bin, general manager of Humanoid Robot (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. As a national and local jointly built humanoid robot innovation center, they have successively launched and operated the OpenLoong open-source community, released the world's first full-size general-purpose humanoid robot open-source reference machine "Qinglong," and also established an incubation platform and launched construction of a humanoid robot industrial park. "An industrial fund with a total scale of 10 billion yuan has also been established, and the first phase of 2 billion yuan is expected to be raised before the end of the year," Xu Bin said.

　　On the path toward high-quality development, the robot industry still has many problems to solve.

　　"From an industry perspective, humanoid robots still face many challenges: first, hardware costs are too high, which restricts large-scale application in the short term; second, increased model parameters and task-level applications place higher demands on edge-side hardware computing power and operation datasets, requiring coordinated cost reduction," said Liu Cong, vice president of iFlytek Co., Ltd. and dean of its research institute.

　　Xu Xiaolan, member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, vice chair of the Central Committee of the China Zhi Gong Party, and chairman of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, believes that developing the robot industry requires coordinated efforts in several aspects—

　　Break through core technologies. Strengthen research in "root technology" fields such as humanoid robots, general large models, dynamics models, and intelligent human-machine interaction for control, multimodal perception, and environment modeling, as well as multi-agent collaboration; actively explore basic theories of humanoid robot human dynamics characteristics, basic theories of brain-inspired perception and cognition, and fields such as new materials, new processes, new structures, and electronic skin.

　　Adhere to application-driven development. Focus on key manufacturing fields such as automobiles, build demonstration production lines and factories for humanoid robots, achieve deep application in typical manufacturing scenarios, expand the application of humanoid robots in scenarios such as mine operations, power inspection, emergency rescue, and security border inspection, and promote humanoid robots' entry into the field of domestic services.

　　Optimize the industrial ecosystem. Support the construction of key humanoid robot laboratories, manufacturing innovation centers, and open-source communities; establish and improve the industrial standards system; strengthen talent cultivation and improve the governance system; and build a robot industrial ecosystem driven by application demand and oriented toward creating new business forms and models.

　　"We must further promote the deep integration of robot scientific and technological innovation with industrial innovation, vigorously carry out basic research on robots and tackle key core technologies, actively improve the 'Robot+' application system, and promote the high-quality development of China's robot industry," said Xin Guobin, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.