China’s humanoid robot makers pivot from ‘body’ to ‘brain’ as commercial race heats up

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.