China's AI-powered humanoid robots aim to transform manufacturing

1 month ago 40

Brenda Goh, Eduardo Baptista, Qiaoyi Li

Mon, May 12, 2025, 8:01 PM 8 min read

By Brenda Goh, Eduardo Baptista, Qiaoyi Li

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) -In a sprawling warehouse successful a Shanghai suburb, dozens of humanoid robots are manoeuvred by their operators to transportation retired tasks similar folding a T-shirt, making a sandwich and opening doors, implicit and implicit again.

Operating 17 hours a day, the site's extremity is to make reams of information that its owner, Chinese humanoid startup AgiBot, uses to bid robots it hopes volition go ubiquitous and alteration the mode humans live, enactment and play.

"Just ideate that 1 time successful our ain robot factory, our robots are assembling themselves," said Yao Maoqing, a spouse astatine AgiBot.

The value of humanoid robots to Beijing, arsenic it looks for solutions to pressing issues including commercialized frictions with the U.S., colonisation decline, and slowing growth, was underscored erstwhile Chinese President Xi Jinping inspected AgiBot's robots successful Shanghai past month. Xi jokingly remarked during the sojourn that possibly the machines could play successful a shot team.

Another home developer of humanoid robots, Unitree, was besides contiguous successful a gathering Xi hosted for backstage firms earlier this year, wherever helium urged them to assistance China's economy.

As the U.S. negotiates with China implicit tariffs that President Donald Trump had imposed to assistance bring backmost U.S. manufacturing jobs, Beijing is aiming for a caller concern gyration wherever galore mill tasks would beryllium performed by humanoid robots.

In caller years, Chinese humanoid robots person demonstrated expanding feats of agility, including performing somersaults, moving a half-marathon, and adjacent playing football, arsenic Xi mused.

But Reuters is reporting for the archetypal clip details astir however China's advances successful artificial intelligence, partially driven by the occurrence of homegrown firms similar DeepSeek arsenic good arsenic abundant authorities support, are allowing humanoid developers to brace the robots' already awesome hardware with the bundle needed to marque them economically valuable.

Reuters spoke to much than a twelve people, including Chinese humanoid manufacturers, investors, customers and analysts, who described however breakthroughs successful processing robot "brains" volition let these metallic machines to spell from specified spectacles to productive and autodidact workers that could revolutionise the world's pre-eminent manufacturing power.

China aims to physique its borderline by focusing connected information grooming and the sophistication of its AI models, the radical said, with immoderate saying the prowess of DeepSeek was a large aid.

DeepSeek and the Chinese authorities didn't respond to requests for remark astir their roles successful the improvement of humanoid robots.

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