From spectacle to scale: why China’s robotics firms face a ‘critical juncture’

At China’s annual World Robot Conference (WRC) that kicked off on Wednesday, the hall was filled with humanoid robots wowing visitors with feats of dexterity: from playing table tennis to performing drum solos.These eye-catching displays have helped China’s Robotics industry win global attention – and raise huge amounts of capital – over the past couple of years. But at this year’s summit, the overriding sentiment among executives, investors and policymakers was starkly pragmatic: the era of viral parlour tricks is over.Across the industry, the race is now on to make the leap from small-scale trials to large-scale deployment, as firms come under pressure to generate real-world returns. Xu Xiaolan, president of the Chinese Institute of Electronics and a former vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said on Wednesday that the Embodied intelligence industry was at a “critical juncture”.