China’s UBTech partners with Airbus to bring humanoid robots to aviation manufacturing

Chinese humanoid developer UBTech Robotics has struck a deal to supply European aviation giant Airbus with robots for its manufacturing facilities, the latest step in efforts to expand industrial applications of its robots outside China.Airbus purchased UBTech’s Walker S2 robot as part of a plan to jointly explore robotics applications in aviation manufacturing, Shenzhen-based UBTech said in a statement on Sunday.The deal follows a similar partnership last month with US semiconductor maker Texas Instruments (TI), underscoring the Chinese firm’s accelerated overseas push to deploy humanoid robots in a wide range of manufacturing sectors such as aviation, semiconductors, vehicles and consumer electronics.TI had been deploying and testing UBTech’s Walker S2 on its production lines, according to a December report by state-run Securities Times.The Airbus logo is pictured outside the entrance to its campus in Blagnac, France. Photo: AFPIntroduced in July last year, Walker S2 stands about 1.76 metres tall and is equipped with dexterous arms and hands and a vision system to enable humanlike movement and perception of its surrounding environments in a factory.