At the 2026 World Intelligent Industry Expo, more than 80 companies launched over 150 embodied intelligent products, demonstrating that the industry is accelerating from the stage of technological breakthroughs to the stage of commercialization. The combat robots have smooth movements, millimeter level precision dexterous hands that can thread needles and lead wires, and multiple robots collaborate to play complete songs.

The robotic dog exhibited by Galileo (Tianjin) Technology Co., Ltd. can independently complete complex movements such as climbing stairs and climbing slopes. The company's products have been widely used in energy, emergency and other fields, and can replace workers to enter high-risk areas for 24-hour inspections, effectively reducing operation and maintenance costs. Tang Ziqi, the head of the Planning and Management Department of Galileo Corporation, introduced that the company has won tens of millions of yuan worth of intention orders at multiple international exhibitions in 2026.

For the first time, the Smart World Expo has set up an independent exhibition area for embodied intelligence, with most participating companies showcasing their complete machine products as the core exhibits. Liu Gang, Chief Economist of the China New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategy Research Institute, stated that embodied intelligence can achieve a closed-loop of perception, decision-making, and execution, breaking the isolation between traditional software and physical devices, and is a new carrier connecting technology and industry.

With the increasing maturity of technologies such as AI big models and motion control, embodied intelligence has become the core track of global cutting-edge technology competition, and industrial development is accelerating comprehensively. Taking Tianjin as an example, a complete industrial chain covering core components, body manufacturing, and system integration has been formed locally, with 104 enterprises in the chain. By 2025, the revenue of the industrial chain will exceed 27 billion yuan, and the output value in the first quarter of 2026 will increase by 10.1% year-on-year, giving rise to a group of invisible crown enterprises with global competitiveness.

The commercial layout of local enterprises is also extending overseas. Tianjin Tianxing Technology Development Co., Ltd.'s dual arm robots have achieved stable exports, with a single unit price of about $4000. The overall order is scheduled until the end of this year, and their application scenarios cover areas such as object handling, production line inspection, education and science popularization. Wang Zhaoyu, the general manager of Tianxing Technology, said that the company has achieved full chain self research, which is backed by a complete ecosystem of related industries: "The Huayuan Science and Technology Park in Binhai High tech Zone, where the company is located, can achieve more than 50% of the industrial chain supporting facilities in the surrounding area

The "Report on the Development of China's New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology Industry (2026)" released by the Smart World Expo points out that with mature supply chains and rich scenario data, the development of China's embodied intelligence industry has shifted from imitation to independent innovation. In the laboratories of the biopharmaceutical and semiconductor industries, the composite robot of Zhongke Huasheng Robotics (Tianjin) Co., Ltd. can replace experimenters in completing experimental processes such as picking and placing orifice plates and pipetting through control systems, visual cameras, etc., greatly improving experimental efficiency and operational accuracy.

According to data from Qichacha, as of May 2026, there are 3025 embodied intelligence related enterprises in China, and the registration volume has continued to increase in the past five years. By 2025, there will be 408 new enterprises, a year-on-year increase of 119.35%. Among them, mature enterprises established for more than 10 years account for 36.26%, and the industrial foundation is solid.

Although the broad prospects of the embodied intelligence industry have become a market consensus, interviewees stated that the industry is still in the early stage of large-scale implementation, and to achieve a leap from "usable" to "easy to use", multiple challenges still need to be overcome.

Firstly, there is a prominent structural contradiction in data supply. 70% of our project time is spent on data cleaning, and only 30% of the time is spent on actual AI training. ”Zhang Yuehai, Chief Consultant of Beijing Xinjiang Suyan Technology Service Co., Ltd., told reporters that the current industrial scene seems to have a huge amount of data. Factories have various systems, but the data format is not unified, the labeling is not standardized, and multimodal alignment is difficult. High quality datasets are very scarce.

Zhang Huanxi, Vice Chairman and Secretary General of Tianjin Robot Industry Technology Alliance, also believes that the current cost of embodied intelligent data collection and annotation is high. Real machine collection relies on expensive physical robots and safety environments. Action sequence annotation involves multidimensional continuous variables, and manual annotation is difficult and has low consistency, making it difficult to form an effective training loop.

Secondly, there is insufficient adaptability to the implementation of core technologies. Wang Xingxing, founder of Yushu Technology Co., Ltd., said that in order for embodied intelligence to usher in a revolutionary moment similar to ChatGPT, it still needs to overcome multiple key technical challenges, among which the lack of generalization ability is recognized as the most core bottleneck in the industry. Zhang Yuehai said, "The laboratory and the workshop are two different worlds. The model that runs smoothly in the laboratory can easily lead to safety accidents when encountering environmental changes and task adjustments in the workshop." The current industry's response plan is often to narrow down the scope of application, not to use general intelligence, only to use specialized intelligence for specific positions, and to minimize uncertainty.

A staff member of a robotics company revealed that the standardization level of products is insufficient, making it difficult to achieve high reproducibility across projects. Different projects need to bear a large amount of costs for customized design, development, and on-site debugging, which poses a challenge to large-scale production. Zhu Shiqiang, Dean of the Robotics Research Institute at Zhejiang University, recently pointed out in a post that the current robotics industry is in a "lively but awkward" stage, with many prototypes and few products that can be truly applied on a large scale. The profitability of complete machine enterprises is still limited, and the core bottleneck lies in the fact that the "brain" multimodal large model and the "dexterous hand" core technology have not yet been truly broken through. Compared with mature industrial robots, the average time between failures of humanoid robots is relatively short, and their endurance is also a prominent shortcoming.

Once again, the industrial synergy mechanism still needs to be clarified. Currently, landing scenarios in the field of embodied intelligence that can operate stably, have controllable costs, and are easy to maintain are still relatively scarce. Zhang Huanxi believes that in the next few years, breakthroughs in embodied intelligence will still focus on closed scenarios such as industrial subdivision production lines, warehousing and logistics, and high-risk inspections. Open scenarios such as homes and public services will require several years of coordinated evolution in technology, cost, and regulations.