Yearender: China's humanoid robots step from spectacle toward scalable industrial reality

BEIJING, Dec. 31 (Xinhua) -- It was not long ago that humanoid robots were confined to laboratories, inching forward as experimental engineering prototypes. But this year, they stepped into public view across China, conspicuously, and sometimes theatrically.

Since early 2025, videos of these robots have trended on social media. They have performed folk dances at the Spring Festival gala, labored on factory floors, run marathons and even stepped into boxing rings. And on a few occasions, their developers even felt the need to stage public demonstrations to prove the nimble machines were not in fact humans in disguise.

Together, these instances tell a larger story. In 2025, China's humanoid robot industry moved from a phase of technological novelty to one of increasingly wide social deployment.

The latest Morgan Stanley research report states that China has recorded 7,705 humanoid patents over the past five years -- five times as many as the U.S. -- and accounted for 54 percent of global industrial robot installations.

"Embodied intelligence integrates multiple frontier technologies. China has already entered the top global tier in subfields such as computer vision and natural language processing," said Hao Lulu, an analyst at CCID Consulting under China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

On Nov. 27, the National Development and Reform Commission, the country's top economic planner, said that China is now home to more than 150 humanoid robot companies, and the sector is expanding at an annual rate of over 50 percent, with the market scale expected to reach 100 billion yuan (about 14.22 billion U.S. dollars) by 2030.

FROM SHOWMANSHIP TO SUBSTANCE

Industry observers widely agree that the end goal of the robot stage and exhibition "showmanship" is the creation of real value. What begins as an eye-catching demonstration, they say, must ultimately translate into practical applications, productivity and commercial returns.

Many view 2025 as the year that humanoid robots entered mass production, with China's leading manufacturers accelerating this shift by scaling up from hundreds of units to thousands.

This year, factory floors are poised to benefit from humanoid robots and see a new model of human-robot collaboration. Leading companies like UBTECH in Shenzhen, Kepler in Shanghai and Siasun in Shenyang have demonstrated robots capable of handling, transporting and sorting materials.

Earlier this year, UBTECH's Walker S1 industrial humanoid robots took up posts on the assembly lines of multiple new energy vehicle manufacturers, including NIO and Zeekr, following extensive data training.

It turned a once sci-fi scene into reality: humanoid robots working alongside humans to undertake assembly and quality inspection tasks.

Data suggests the shift has delivered measurable gains. Tan Min, UBTECH's chief brand officer, said the average productivity of humanoid robots currently stands at approximately 30 to 40 percent of a human worker's output, and is expected to rise to about 80 percent by early 2027.

In November, UBTECH began the mass production of its full-size industrial humanoid robot model, the Walker S2, which stands 1.76 meters tall and is capable of autonomous battery-swapping. In the same month, it delivered its first batch of hundreds of Walker S2 humanoid robots, working toward a full-year delivery target of about 500 units.

"Since the start of this year, cumulative orders for the Walker series humanoid robots have surpassed 800 million yuan," Tan said. As market demand continues to rise, the company plans to ramp up capacity to produce 10,000 industrial humanoid robots annually by 2026.

This trend is not driven by market forces alone. Policy support, from top-level planning to local implementation, has also been notable. The recommendations for formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) have called for the forward-looking development of future industries, positioning embodied intelligence as a new engine of growth. Observers believe that the embodied-intelligence sector could lift productivity across industrial manufacturing, commercial services and transport and logistics.

"The boom of the sector will stimulate demand across the entire industrial chain," said An Yun, a researcher at Beijing-based consultancy CIO Manage. "Upstream sectors, including AI chips and operating systems, are set to see major opportunities, and downstream sectors will also find a new, vast blue ocean market."

OBSTACLES REMAIN

Beyond the spotlight, however, obstacles still lie ahead.

At this year's Hongqiao International Economic Forum, Wang Xingxing, founder and CEO of Unitree, likened the current state of the humanoid-robot industry to the period one to three years before the release of ChatGPT.

The direction is clear, Wang noted, but the critical breakthrough has yet to arrive. "A true 'ChatGPT moment' for the sector will come when robots, placed in unfamiliar real-world settings, can complete about 80 percent of tasks simply by following voice or text instructions."

This gap has instilled a sense of urgency. Industry insiders believe the sector must move beyond isolated feats to embrace system integration in 2026, while cutting unit costs and building a supporting ecosystem.

Jiao Jichao, UBTECH's vice president, said 2026 will be a pivotal year for commercialization, arguing that the sector must identify scalable, repeatable use cases driven by genuine demand to transition robots from novelty items to a necessity in certain industries.

But stubborn technical bottlenecks, such as battery life, persist.

Wang Chuang, senior vice president of Shanghai-based AgiBot, said that most humanoid robots can only operate for two to three hours per charge -- insufficient for serious industrial use.

Industry reports echo Wang's point, citing challenges in limited endurance, bulky batteries and thermal management. Widely regarded as a potential solution, solid-state batteries are expected to reach large-scale mass production after 2027.

Dexterity poses another technical challenge. "Human hands are soft and forgiving," said Xu Jun, head of robot applications at a Hangzhou-based embodied intelligence technology firm, while robotic ones are rigid and easily obstructed by their own geometry. Tasks that feel instinctive to people can confound machines, sometimes because a finger is simply in the wrong place.

Solving these problems will require advances in joint modules, high-fidelity simulation and the wider use of digital twins, noted Hao.

Cost is also a main obstacle. For now, cutting-edge research models can cost millions of dollars, and commercial versions often sell for hundreds of thousands of yuan. "Lowering costs requires the entire supply chain to move," Wang said.

Xu, who once worked for the innovation technology department at Chinese automaker Geely, has put it clearly: If humanoid robots can achieve the same work efficiency as human workers, considering the return on investment (ROI) acceptable to enterprises, a price of around 300,000 yuan would be reasonable.

As a whole, embodied intelligence remains in an early stage, said An, describing its development as a marathon of technology, capital and time. The sensible strategy, An suggested, is to begin commercialization in structured, high-demand sectors such as manufacturing and logistics, building self-sustaining business models there, before pushing into industries with more complex environments.