BEIJING, Oct. 20 (Xinhua Silk Road) -- During the 26th China International Industry Fair (CIIF) held in Shanghai last week, a special zone for humanoid robots and embodied intelligence was set up for the first time to showcase hard-tech-driven products and new sector breakthroughs.
Instead of showing off technical prowess, intelligent robots, a core carrier for artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with the physical world, have started to perform practical work in multiple fields.
-- Innovation as key driver of hard-tech breakthroughs
As is widely known, robot manufacturing involves multiple links such as robot ontology structure, actuators, sensors, computing units, power supply systems, supply chains and mass production.
At this year's CIIF under the theme of "Intelligent Economy, Smart Manufacturing Without Boundaries", a series of world premieres, cutting-edge technologies and future scenarios were unveiled, demonstrating both original breakthroughs and domestic industrialization capacity.
Centered on five dimensions, namely ultra-large, ultra-small, ultra-light, ultra-precise and ultra-intelligent, this year's CIIF showcased around 400 products across these dimensions to highlight manufacturing innovation.
In the ultra-large category, which focuses on extreme load, extreme scale and extreme power, Shanghai Chaifu Robot Co., Ltd. brought its eye-catching heavy-duty industrial robot CR5000-3700 to the fair.
This May, the single-arm industrial robot, known for its exceptional strength, broke the Guinness World Record with a lifting load of 5,000.36 kilograms.
The ultra-small dimension centers on micro-nano integration, chip-scale packaging and micro devices, expanding the microscopic boundary of precision manufacturing.
For instance, Dosilicon Co., Ltd. can achieve high-density wafer-level chip-scale packaging, with the packaged size nearly identical to that of the bare die.
The ultra-light dimension highlights lightweight materials, compact designs and mobile equipment. Delta Electronics, Inc.'s Din Pro series of industrial power supplies weighs as little as 0.5 kilogram, reducing constraints on installation space.
-- From quantitative change to qualitative change
Currently, intelligent robots are reshaping the landscape of global manufacturing and service industries at an unprecedented pace.
Among the various types of smart robots, humanoid robots represent an arena where Chinese manufacturers are shifting from technological followers to pacesetters in some sub-sectors.
In China, the world's largest application market, a complete and efficient supply chain, increasing policy support and a vibrant capital ecosystem form the core fundamentals for the humanoid robot industry to thrive.
In the first half of 2026, China's shipments of humanoid robots exceeded 40,000 units, accounting for 97 percent of the global total, reflecting the robust growth momentum of the sector, according to a humanoid robot industry report.
Back to the CIIF, a notable change is that humanoid robots are moving beyond the stereotype of merely "singing and dancing" to tackle practical problems in real production. Among core parts producers, many exhibitors brought their self-developed high-computing-power chips. Embodied intelligence is also being rapidly deployed onto production lines.
For example, the six-armed MAHAKBOT embodied intelligent robot developed by Shanghai SAGE Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. has 111 degrees of freedom. Its six robotic arms can be flexibly grouped and perform multi-directional collaboration to form a capsule-like spherical working space.
While a single breakthrough in product development may not be extremely difficult, the going-global of an entire industry relies heavily on systematic capabilities forged through collaborative innovation among upstream and downstream enterprises across the industrial chain.
This systematic, collaborative innovation rightly speaks for the burgeoning smart robot industry of China, which boasts a full industrial ecosystem covering core components, dedicated chips, sensors, operating system development and system integration. (Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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