Chinese humanoid robotics companies are doubling down on developing intelligent models, as investors eye advances in robot “brains” as the next step towards real-world commercial use.
Shenzhen-based Dobot said on Wednesday that it delivered its third batch of mass produced, full-size humanoid Atom robots, marking a shift from laboratory concept to an industrialised product.
Dobot, listed in Hong Kong, said its self-developed Dobot-VLA, a vision-language-action model, enabled Atom to react to uncertainties in the real world rather than just perform preprogrammed tasks.
With the model, Atom was expected to “see through” clusters of tasks, “understand” ambiguous instructions and make autonomous decisions to “get the job done”, according to the company. The company previously deployed Atom to serve popcorn in a Shenzhen cinema.
“This ability to adapt autonomously based on the understanding of the environment is the starting point for humanoid robots to create value in industrial applications,” Dobot said.
The announcement came days after its cross-town rival UBTech open-sourced Thinker, the company’s large-scale multimodal model designed for humanoid robots, on GitHub and Hugging Face.
The model, based on a 10 billion parameter model, addressed the “lag” and “spatial inaccuracy” often seen in humanoid robots, the company said on the weekend.
Hong Kong-listed UBTech said its Think-4B model outperformed those by Nvidia and ByteDance in several global benchmarks for embodied AI models under 10 million parameters, using EvalScope and FlagEval frameworks.
With Thinker, UBTech’s Walker S2 robot was able to achieve a 99.9 per cent accuracy in real factory tasks including moving boxes and sorting parts, according to the company.
China’s robotics industry is accelerating a shift from physical stunts that rely on preprogrammed routines to sophisticated abilities that require learning and adapting in the real world, seen as essential for mass commercial adoption in manufacturing and other scenarios.
Shipments of humanoid robots surged significantly in 2025 as commercialisation picked up pace, soaring nearly 480 per cent year on year to 13,318 units worldwide, according to research firm Omdia, with Chinese robotic firms dominating the market.
Despite advancements in shipments and applications, “significant challenges persist, especially with respect to the development of robust robot foundation models and the availability of physical-world data, which remain key bottlenecks”, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Sheng Zhong wrote in a recent research note.
“‘Brain’ development becomes the key focus of industry and capital markets [in 2026], shifting from the ‘body’ in 2025, and prototypes in 2024,” Morgan Stanley said.
The venture capital market is taking note of developments in the software side of robotics. Shenzhen-based humanoid robot maker LimX Dynamics, which recently raised US$200 million in a series B round, last month unveiled LimX Cosa, an operating system for embodied artificial intelligence agents.
X Square Robot, a Shenzhen-based company that focuses on developing foundation models for robotics, completed a 1 billion yuan (US$144 million) A++ round last month.
Meanwhile, Chinese robotic firms continue to push for breakthroughs in the body. On Tuesday, Shanghai-based MirrorMe Tech launched Bolt, a full-size humanoid robot that it claimed achieved a world-record running speed of 10 metres per second, outrunning its own founder in a live sprint shown on video. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
