There are no new stories for this generation of robots, only real problems.

Just one month after WAIC (World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2026) concluded, robots have "moved" from Shanghai to Beijing, showcasing their full capabilities at WRC (World Robot Conference 2026).

Unlike WAIC, WRC brings together two groups of attendees: those who come for the fun of the spectacle, and those who come to dig into underlying technical insights.

Some elderly visitors brought their grandchildren on summer vacation to the exhibition. After an on-site robot finished making a pizza, an elderly man asked the staff for the pizza for his granddaughter. When the staff handed it over, they specifically added a note: "It might not taste good."

The booth of Galbot was completely crowded. An elderly couple was chatting in a distinct Northeast Chinese accent. The old man asked, "Which organization is Galbot affiliated with?" His wife standing beside him replied crisply: "No idea." The back-and-forth exchange, with the characteristic straightforwardness of Northeast dialect, made people burst into laughter. But this did not stop the two from continuing to watch the demonstration with great interest.

In contrast, another group of attendees hurried around with clear goals, exchanging technical details and robot solution plans.

Therefore, I heard two completely different voices at the WRC site. The "spectacle-focused crowd" saw: Why are robots still folding clothes and grabbing express parcels? It hardly seems to have changed compared to 2025. But those who truly understand the technology are focused on a different set of issues. They step forward with bright eyes to communicate, asking about the implementation behind the robots: what model is used, how much data has been accumulated, whether it can complete long-horizon tasks, and whether the accuracy reaches the centimeter level or the millimeter level.

A comment from Gao Jiyang, Founder and CEO of Xinghaitu, offers an explanation for this seemingly contradictory phenomenon. He believes that the embodied intelligence industry has entered an explosive growth period, but the so-called "GPT moment" of embodied intelligence needs to meet two conditions at the same time: first, the technology truly reaches the critical point, and second, everyone realizes at a certain moment that this moment has arrived.

In other words, technological changes may have already occurred, but these changes have not yet been perceived by all people at the same time.

Wang Qian, Founder and CEO of Zilianliang, believes that embodied models are "following the path that language models took five years ago". From the exchanges between Tencent Technology and a number of industry insiders, a fairly obvious consensus has formed among practitioners: everyone is actively trying to solve specific problems, and believes that that moment will eventually come. At the same time, more consumer-oriented audiences are still measuring the current development level of embodied intelligence with the imagination from science fiction movies.

At the WRC site, Tencent Technology exchanged views with the founders of many leading enterprises such as Xinghaitu, Mochi Intelligence, and Qiantuo Robotics, trying to find the changes happening in the humanoid robot industry and the "Delta" belonging to this industry. (Note: Delta (Δ) is a mathematical concept that represents the amount of change or difference.)

01 Scenarios, or Scenarios

Just like the WAIC in Shanghai, the robots at this year's WRC are all "working". Compared with 2025, this was originally a very significant change. But with the foreshadowing of WAIC a month ago, demonstrating application scenarios seems to have become a must-have option for robot exhibitions at WRC.

What kinds of work are they doing? Tencent Technology observed on site that they can be roughly divided into the following categories.

The first category is folding clothes. Galbot's robot folded white shirts on site; on the double-layer booth of Xinghaitu, a bright and open space was specially reserved on the first floor to demonstrate clothes folding. Two grippers jointly pick up a T-shirt and cooperate to complete subsequent operations.

The scene in front of people makes them trance back to 2024. In that year, Tesla released a video of Optimus folding T-shirts, but Musk later admitted that there was remote control operation in the demonstration. For this reason, "folding clothes" is no longer considered new by many people, but it is still a classic scenario that WRC repeatedly demonstrates almost every year.

Why is everyone focusing on folding clothes? The staff at the Xinghaitu booth told Tencent Technology that clothes are flexible objects whose shapes keep changing during operation. For robots, folding clothes seems trivial in daily life, but it is actually a rather complex task. Huang Qingqiu, Co-founder and CTO of Mochi Intelligence, said: "Only by choosing a sufficiently complex scenario can we obtain sufficiently rich and diverse data, and then train a basic model with stronger capabilities."

Another common task is item picking. In terms of object grasping, Leju and Zilianliang target logistics scenarios, while Mochi Intelligence puts robots into daily environments to handle scattered sundries.

(Left: Leju Robot, Right: Mochi Intelligence)

In addition, there are some scenarios closer to consumers. For example, Galbot's Galbot G1 enters a convenience store to pick up items, and some robots try to make coffee and pizza on site.

Judging from the performance of robots in these scenarios, compared with the past, two changes in this year's robot demonstrations are particularly obvious.

First, robots seem to begin to "think". More accurately, they can make judgments based on the execution results of tasks and perform autonomous error correction.

For example, in Xinghaitu's clothes folding demonstration, if one of the grippers fails to clamp the clothes, the robot will not stay in place, but will re-judge and try repeatedly until it successfully clamps the clothes. The same is true for logistics picking. When the Zilianliang robot finds that the object has not been successfully moved to the target position, it will actively adjust its movements and re-execute until the task is completed.

(Left: Zilianliang Robot demonstrates logistics picking, Right: Xinghaitu demonstrates the clothes folding scenario)

Second, the task chain that robots can complete has become longer. For example, UniX AI tried to make robots brew Kung Fu tea. The whole process includes scooping tea, adding tea leaves, pouring water, steeping, pouring out tea soup and filtering, and the robot needs to complete multiple connected steps continuously. However, the full complete demonstration was not seen during the exhibition visit.

Although from this WRC, robots have begun to enter more scenarios and can complete longer task chains, there is still the hardest threshold to cross before they can truly "do the job well": the last few centimeters, or even a few millimeters.

Wang Xingxing stated at WRC that if a robot can be brought into any unfamiliar environment, even into a home, and can complete about 80% of the tasks, embodied intelligence will approach the real critical point, and the industry will usher in an explosion. But it is still difficult to achieve at this stage. "At present, the alignment between the input and output of AI models and real robots is not enough. If you ask it to move, assemble things together, or move an object to a certain position, the general direction is fine and it can basically execute; but at the last few centimeters and last few millimeters, the success rate and deviation cannot match the real world well."

02 Hardware is no longer a difficulty

An important prerequisite for application scenarios to become the focus of this year's WRC is that robot bodies and motion control have crossed the early technical threshold. For many manufacturers, making robots walk, run and jump stably is no longer the most difficult problem.

This change is mainly reflected in two aspects: first, the technical threshold is decreasing, and second, the hardware cost continues to drop.

First, the motion control technology of robot bodies has converged.

At this year's WRC, Unitree G1 danced group dances again. Jiasu Jinhua brought robots on stage to perform lion dances, and even made them imitate Michael Jackson; on the other side, Qiantuo's robot walked over with quite natural steps, then turned around and started boxing.

Robots turned the exhibition booths into stages, and the onlookers raised their mobile phones to skillfully shoot videos one after another. Although such scenes have been very common in the past few years, what is uncommon is that compared with a few years ago, the exclamations from the crowd seem to have decreased somewhat.

Two years ago, as long as a robot could stand firmly and walk a section of road smoothly, it was enough to attract everyone's attention. Now, with the gradual maturity of motion control capabilities, walking, running, jumping and completing a set of preset actions are becoming the basic skills of humanoid robots.

This also explains why manufacturers have begun to compete to demonstrate clothes folding, express parcel picking and Kung Fu tea brewing.

But Zhao Tongyang, Founder and CEO of Qiantuo Robotics, said, "Motion control is a field that never reaches the end."

Although motion control has made rapid progress in recent years, for example, Qiantuo Robotics can already participate in boxing matches; at robot sports meets, some robots run at high speeds, even faster than humans. But measured against the level we really want to achieve, the current performance may only get 60 points.

Second, the cost of manufacturing robots is also decreasing.

Zhao Tongyang told Tencent Technology that in the past few years, the core components of humanoid robots have been greatly reduced in price: the price of ball screws has dropped about ten times in three years, and the price of reducers has dropped by half. With the expansion of supply chain volume, the cost of complete machines will continue to decline.

A practitioner in the embodied intelligence industry took the integrated joint module as an example. In 2025, leading domestic suppliers began to reach an annual shipment volume of 100,000 sets. Among them, E Technology delivered about 95,000 sets for the whole year, and Quanzhibo and Inx both disclosed shipments exceeding 100,000 sets.

As of the first half of 2026, the cumulative shipment of Quanzhibo's integrated joint modules has exceeded 120,000 sets, and the shipment volume in June alone exceeded 60,000 sets. While the shipment scale expands, the price of joint modules is also decreasing. According to public information, Quanzhibo disclosed that the average price of industrial-grade joint modules in 2025 was about 1,500 yuan per set, and it is expected that the joint cost will maintain an annual decline of about 10%.

An investor focusing on the robot track also told Tencent Technology that the joint module manufacturer he is in contact with has seen its product price drop almost every year.

Of course, hardware still has its threshold, but with the gradual maturity of the supply chain and the mass shipment of core components, it is no longer the only bottleneck restricting the development of embodied intelligence.

The listing of Unitree marks that robot bodies, relying on supply chains, large-scale production and component reuse, are making robots cheaper and cheaper. This will also drive the maturity of the entire upstream and downstream hardware industrial chain, and in the future, the manufacturing cost of hardware will become lower and lower. However, Zhou Wei, Founding Managing Partner of Creation Ventures, said that cost reduction is only the first step. Only by quickly getting through the business closed loop and generating real cash flow can upstream and downstream suppliers build together to support the development of downstream sectors.

Just like 15 years ago, Xiaomi made Android phones quickly accessible to the public at a price of 1999 yuan, robots are also going through their own price reduction cycle.

At the WRC site, the lowest selling price of the vbot robot dog has reached 11988 yuan, which is close to the price of a high-end Apple mobile phone. Robots have not really entered thousands of households yet, but at least in terms of price, they have moved from the distant laboratory to a range that ordinary consumers can seriously consider.

But to make robots truly integrate into daily life, it is difficult for a single company to complete this alone. Therefore, we also see the phenomenon of "huddling together for warmth" in the robot industry.

03 Robots, investing in robots

The most direct way of this "huddling together" is investment.

While carefully controlling advertising and marketing expenses, robot companies invest their limited funds in peers in the industrial chain, and even co-invest in a company with potential competitors. According to statistics from IT Juzi, from January 1 to August 19, 2026, 18 robot-related enterprises have made external investments, involving a total of 36 investment events.

In other words, robot companies no longer only focus on researching and developing their own products, but also begin to act as VCs, investing in basic models, scenario data, robot joints, tactile solutions and operating equipment. Zhou Wei believes that this is a positive signal, indicating that enterprises and technologies are distributed in different links of the industrial chain, and gradually form a collaborative synergy, which helps to build a healthier industrial ecosystem and business model.

The unusual part of this phenomenon is that robot companies are generally not "rich" and do not make large investments. Embodied intelligence is an extremely capital-intensive industry, and body research, model training, data collection and production line construction all require continuous investment. For enterprises with a financing scale of only tens of millions of yuan, the funds they get are often only enough to get an admission ticket.

Therefore, many robot companies are very restrained in advertising and marketing investment. Even Unitree, which has achieved large-scale revenue, has not burned large sums of money on advertising. In 2025, Unitree Technology achieved operating revenue of 1.699 billion yuan,