China robotics brief #1: Chery opens pre-orders for a family humanoid, and AgiBot schedules a 24-hour shop shift
Issue 1: Chery's AiMOGA takes pre-orders for its Mobo family robot, AgiBot plans a 24-hour shop shift, and China backs robots for home services.
Photo: Vincent Y @USA / Unsplash
On this page
- Chery’s robot brand opens pre-orders for Mobo, a family companion humanoid
- AgiBot will put six humanoids through a 24-hour convenience store shift
- Beijing tells businesses to bring robots into home services, and promises security testing
- China’s first national standards for humanoid robots take effect in April 2027
- AgiBot’s X2 has been answering questions at a Beijing hospital desk
- An Alibaba team trains a Unitree G1 mostly on recordings of people
- Unitree launches an open “World Physical AI Competition” with a headline $10 million a year
- Unitree tells investors that humanoid robots are at an early stage of commercialization
The China robotics brief is a weekly selection of news about robots and humanoids from China that has had little or no coverage in Western media. We work only from primary sources: the company’s own announcement, the government document, the stock exchange filing, the paper. Quotations from Chinese texts are given in the original, followed by our own translation; research papers written in English are quoted as written. Figures from companies are reported as the company’s own claims, and each story carries a label (Announced, On sale, Shipping, Policy, Preprint or Company data) that keeps what has been announced apart from what can be bought or has been delivered.
Chery’s robot brand opens pre-orders for Mobo, a family companion humanoid
21 October 2026 · AiMOGA Robotics release on PR Newswire Asia (Chinese) · Announced
On 21 October, AiMOGA Robotics, the robot company of the carmaker Chery, launched Mobo at an event in Wuhu, Anhui province, and opened global pre-orders the same day. The release calls it the company’s «首款消费级家庭陪伴人形机器人» (“first consumer-grade home companion humanoid robot”). Mobo is 0.9 meters tall with 22 degrees of freedom, speaks more than 20 languages, answers children’s questions, tells stories, chats with older relatives and gives the reminders users set. It keeps separate layers of memory for facts, experiences and lessons learned, and uses face recognition to link each user to their own memories and limit who can call them up. On data, the release says: «MogaCloud支持任务下发与OTA更新，符合回流条件的数据经端侧脱敏和安全校验后进入云端学习与验证» (“MogaCloud supports sending tasks and OTA updates; data that meets the conditions for upload is de-identified on the device and security-checked before it enters the cloud for learning and validation”). AiMOGA gave 35 early users a year of free use, and the company says it has sold more than 3,000 robots worldwide and is present in more than 60 countries and regions. The release gives no price and no delivery date.
Why it matters: Mobo is a humanoid robot sold for company and conversation rather than chores, which makes privacy the main question rather than dexterity. A robot that knows each family member’s face, keeps memories of them, receives OTA updates and sends some data to the cloud for training raises exactly the issues covered in Home robots, cameras and remote operators. The release does not say what the “conditions for upload” are, whether owners can switch the upload off, or where the cloud is hosted. Until a price and a shipping date appear, Mobo belongs in the announced column of Can you buy a humanoid robot for your home?.
AgiBot will put six humanoids through a 24-hour convenience store shift
22 October 2026 · AgiBot announcement (Chinese) · Announced
The video loads from YouTube (youtube-nocookie.com) only when you press play; until then the page sends nothing to YouTube.
On 22 October, AgiBot announced “AI WAVE”, seven releases between 22 and 30 October that end with a test in a real shop: «11月2日至3日，6台G2机器人将走进便利店，在24小时不间断直播中经历午高峰、晚高峰、深夜值班、早餐准备四个完整班次，完成一场“转正考核”。» (“From 2 to 3 November, six G2 robots will walk into a convenience store and, in a 24-hour non-stop livestream, work through four complete shifts, the lunch rush, the evening rush, the late-night shift and breakfast preparation, to complete a ‘probation review’.”) The listed jobs are stocking and arranging shelves, making hot food, collecting trash, making coffee and greeting customers, from 10 a.m. to 10 a.m. the next day. The schedule: a “Physical Reasoning” dataset with a first batch of 150 hours of real-robot data (22 October), the Genie Studio 2.0 platform (23 October), the G2 Max industrial robot (26 October), the Genie Master agent framework (27 October), an upgraded Genie Sim simulator that AgiBot says reaches more than 95% consistency between simulation and real robots on complex tasks (28 October), a foundation model at the AgiBot Innovation Day at the Shanghai World Expo Center (29 October) and a “collective experience learning” method that AgiBot says was validated on a cluster on the scale of a hundred real robots (30 October). In the second post, AgiBot says its 20,000th robot came off the line in September. When this brief was prepared on 23 October, the dataset had been published, as the video above shows; Genie Studio 2.0, due the same day, did not yet appear on AgiBot’s website or YouTube channel, and the other releases remain announced.
Why it matters: A full day in a real shop, streamed live, is a harder test than the edited clips humanoid makers usually publish, because a camera that keeps rolling also shows pauses, failures and interventions. How hard a test it is depends on details the announcement does not give: which store, whether the customers are ordinary shoppers, whether staff or remote operators can take over through teleoperation, and whether the stream will stay online uncut. We will report what the stream shows, not what was planned.
Beijing tells businesses to bring robots into home services, and promises security testing
19 October 2026 · Opinion of MOFCOM and eight other bodies and MIIT press conference transcript (Chinese) · Policy
On 19 October, the Ministry of Commerce published an opinion on technology-driven commerce, dated 13 October and signed by nine government bodies, among them the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the Cyberspace Administration of China and the State Administration for Market Regulation. Two lines concern robots in the home: «推动具身智能技术在商贸领域落地，拓展家庭服务、商贸物流等应用场景» (“promote the use of embodied intelligence technology in commerce and extend its applications to areas such as home services and commercial logistics”) and «坚持科技向善，培育健康规范的机器人、虚拟数字人陪伴等智能服务新业态» (“hold to technology for good, and foster healthy and well-regulated new forms of intelligent services such as companionship from robots and virtual digital humans”). The document sets no budget or deadline for robots. At a State Council Information Office press conference the same day, Wei Wei, head of MIIT’s Department of Science and Technology, said: «今年上半年，我国人形机器人整机产品突破400款，产量超4万台，预计全年将突破10万台» (“In the first half of this year, China’s complete humanoid robot products passed 400 models and output exceeded 40,000 units; the full year is expected to pass 100,000”). He said products are being tested and deployed in more than 300 scenarios, home services among them, and listed among MIIT’s next steps «加强产品质量、网络和数据安全方面的检验检测» (“strengthen inspection and testing of product quality, network security and data security”). Ten days earlier, on 9 October, the central document on “new quality productive forces” published by Xinhua had placed humanoid robots next to intelligent connected new-energy vehicles and AI phones and computers among the “new generation of intelligent terminals”.
Why it matters: Companion robots now appear in a national policy text as a service to “foster”, with “healthy and well-regulated” attached. Read together with MIIT’s line on network and data security testing, our reading is that home robots in China are expected to be judged on how they handle data as well as on what they can do; what such tests will check has not been published. The 40,000 units are a government figure for production of all kinds of humanoids, not sales and not deliveries to households.
China’s first national standards for humanoid robots take effect in April 2027
Issued 28 September, publicized 19 and 23 October 2026 · SAMR national standards portal, SAMR announcement and Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology (Chinese) · Policy
China has issued its first six national standards for humanoid robots, all recommended (GB/T) rather than mandatory. According to the national standards portal, they were issued on 28 September and take effect on 1 April 2027: GB/T 48316-2026 on simulation test platforms for humanoid robots, and the five parts of GB/T 48317-2026, “Technical requirements for humanoid robots”, covering general requirements, environment perception, decision and planning, motion control, and task operation. On 23 October the market regulator SAMR announced a batch of 515 national standards, 16 of them on artificial intelligence, humanoid robots and robots for industrial environments, without listing them by number. The drafters of part 1 include Unitree, UBTech, Xiaomi’s robotics company and Xpeng, and also Ecovacs, the robot vacuum maker, the appliance group Hisense and the telecom equipment maker ZTE. On 19 October, Beijing’s economy and IT bureau published a note from the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, which led part 4, on motion control, stating its principle: «规范能力与性能、不限定技术路线» (“set rules for capabilities and performance, without prescribing the technical route”).
Why it matters: These standards describe what a humanoid should be able to do and how to measure it, so that products from different makers can be compared. A comparison of our own, which the Chinese texts do not make: a humanoid sold in the EU has to meet the mandatory safety requirements of the Machinery Regulation, which applies from 20 January 2027, whether or not it follows the Chinese GB/T standards. The list of drafters is also a reminder that home appliance makers are at the table where humanoid rules are written in China.
AgiBot’s X2 has been answering questions at a Beijing hospital desk
22 October 2026 · AgiBot case study (Chinese) · Company data
On 22 October, AgiBot published a case study of its X2, a half-size humanoid, working at the outpatient guidance desk of Peking University People’s Hospital. The robot is connected to the AI medical assistant of Ant Group’s Afu app and to the hospital’s own knowledge base, and answers questions about which department to see, how to get there, how the visit works and health insurance rules. AgiBot says the robot «承接高频重复的基础导诊工作» (“takes on the frequent, repetitive basic guidance work”). Citing the hospital’s operating statistics, AgiBot says that by 30 September the X2 had worked 66 working days and handled 46,686 interactions, an average of 707 a day with a peak of 1,420 in one day.
Why it matters: Most of the work here is conversation: the answers come from Ant’s medical model and the hospital’s knowledge base, and the robot body adds movement, gestures and a visible presence at the desk. That is the realistic near-term job for humanoids around the public, information and guidance rather than physical care, and it is the same pattern a companion robot like Mobo sells for the home: a body around an AI assistant, as explained in What is embodied AI?. The figures count interactions, not questions answered correctly, and come from AgiBot’s page; no independent figures were published.
An Alibaba team trains a Unitree G1 mostly on recordings of people
13 October 2026, revised 21 October · arXiv preprint 2610.18950 and project page (English) · Preprint
On 13 October, a team from Alibaba Token Hub and Amap, Alibaba’s maps company, posted λ0, a model that teaches a humanoid to move and handle objects mainly from recordings of people. The starting point, in the authors’ words: “collecting robot demonstrations at scale remains costly”. Their dataset, HumanVerse, holds 500 hours of people doing everyday activities, recorded without any robot, with first-person video synchronized with body and hand motion; the project page lists tasks such as folding towels, putting fruit in the fridge and plugging in a router. The model combines a vision-language backbone with an “action expert”, the layout of a vision-language-action model. It is trained in three stages: first on human datasets, then on human recordings converted to the robot’s viewpoint and movements, and finally on a smaller set of task demonstrations from both people and the robot itself. On a Unitree G1 with BrainCo Revo 2 hands, the authors report 62.5% success on real-world tasks (25 of 40 trials) and 90.0% on the SIMPLE simulation benchmark, and estimate that recording a demonstration with a person is about 3.4 times faster than with the robot. The code is under the Apache 2.0 license; the repository states that the pretraining and HumanVerse datasets are not included.
Why it matters: Robot demonstrations are slow and expensive to collect, which is one reason home robots still lean on remote operators. If recordings of people doing chores can carry most of the training, as the authors argue, the cost of teaching a robot new household tasks drops. This is a preprint, not yet peer reviewed: four real-world tasks, 40 trials and the authors’ own comparison with other models, and the final stage still uses demonstrations recorded on the robot.
Unitree launches an open “World Physical AI Competition” with a headline $10 million a year
22 October 2026 · Unitree competition page (Chinese and English) · Announced
Unitree announced the competition at its partner conference in Hangzhou on 22 October, Yicai reported. The competition page lists annual funding of “$10M”, with a note that the amount is «以每年最终奖项评定后最终确定，非固定值» (“finally set after each year’s awards are decided; not a fixed value”). Eligibility reads «面向全球，奖励卓越贡献，不设地域及其他门槛» (“open worldwide, rewarding outstanding contributions, with no geographic or other thresholds”), and the page adds that universities, research institutes, start-ups and independent developers can all win. There are at least eight categories (“8+”), from locomotion, athletics and combat to dexterity, described as household chores and precision disassembly and assembly, and healthcare, described as rehabilitation nursing and daily-living care. The rules «后续公布» (“will be announced later”).
Why it matters: Prize money for household chores and care work points research teams in many countries at home tasks, and Unitree’s page lists its own “high-performance robot platform” as a “global cornerstone” next to the Transformer, GPUs and PyTorch. Until the rules are out, it is not known whether entrants must use Unitree hardware, how results will be judged or who keeps the rights to winning work. “$10M” is a headline figure that Unitree itself says is not fixed.
Unitree tells investors that humanoid robots are at an early stage of commercialization
21 October 2026 · Unitree notice 2026-003 to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, copy on cninfo (Chinese) · Company data
On 21 October, after its closing price gains ran more than 30% ahead of the benchmark over three trading days (16, 19 and 20 October), Unitree filed an abnormal trading notice. It gives a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 388.25 at 20 October, against an average of 39.51 for its industry, general equipment manufacturing, and warns: «人形机器人行业尚处于商业化早期，技术成熟度、下游市场需求培育、产业链配套能力均存在不确定性» (“The humanoid robot industry is still at an early stage of commercialization, and there is uncertainty over technological maturity, the development of downstream market demand and the supporting capacity of the supply chain”). If large-scale commercialization is slower than expected, the notice adds, revenue growth could suffer and the valuation could fall back.
Why it matters: Unitree makes the R1, G1 and H2, humanoids on sale today in its official online shop. In a filing whose accuracy its board takes legal responsibility for, it describes the market as early and uncertain, a more sober picture than product launches give. For anyone weighing a purchase, the notice is a reminder that the companies selling humanoids do not yet know how large the market will be; the state of orders and deliveries is in Can you buy a humanoid robot for your home?.
Coming up: AgiBot’s remaining AI WAVE releases, from G2 Max on 26 October to its foundation model at the AgiBot Innovation Day in Shanghai on 29 October, and the six-robot convenience store shift on 2 and 3 November, all announced and not yet happened. Unitree’s competition rules are “to be announced”, with no date given. China’s six humanoid standards take effect on 1 April 2027.
Topics: robotics, china robotics brief, humanoid robots, home robots, AiMOGA, AgiBot, Unitree, standards