China Showcases Humanoid Robots at Shanghai Carnival — SkimNews
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- China accounted for nearly 90% of the more than 13,000 two-armed, two-legged robots delivered globally last year, and embedded AI is a key facet of its latest five-year plan.
- An R&D center on Shanghai's outskirts hosted a robot "carnival" on a public holiday, drawing curious families to a hub housing more than 100 robotics companies.
- DexForce exhibited a humanoid making coffee, while other booths showed robots folding laundry, programming quadrupeds, and staging water-bead duels for cheering crowds.
- Yang Duan of DexForce said humanoids "can free people from physical work and mundane chores" — a pitch the audience endorsed by chanting "More, more, more" as a robot performed drunken boxing and a front flip.
- Chinese firms are pushing past global skepticism about the humanoid form factor, rolling out robots to shopping malls and tourist attractions in multiple cities, with bipedal bots in Beijing now running half-marathons.
- Humanoid progress elsewhere has been slowed by safety challenges from weight and balance requirements, high prices, and short battery life — hurdles the article notes Chinese firms are sidestepping via entertainment-first rollouts.
Why it matters: China already controls roughly 90% of global two-armed humanoid production, and the carnival strategy turns public spectacle into an adoption funnel — normalizing robots as cultural fixtures while Western competitors remain stuck on the technical bottlenecks of price, battery life, and bipedal safety.
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