From Folk Dance to Drunken Fist: The 1-Year Robot Leap 🤖🚀

If you want to see how fast embodied AI is moving, just look at the stage of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala.

Check out this side-by-side comparison (2025 vs. 2026). In just 12 months, we’ve transitioned from the steady, rhythmic "Yangko" dance to high-dynamic martial arts mastery and urban parkour.

The 2026 Unitree H1 (Fuxi) didn't just walk; it executed:
🔥 3-meter aerial flips and backflips.
🔥 Drunken Fist martial arts with fluid, human-like instability.
🔥 Table-vaulting and complex obstacle navigation.

Why this matters for industry:

This isn't just "showbiz." This performance marks the global debut of high-speed cluster-control technology and new dexterous hands capable of stable gripping and rapid tool-switching.

We are watching the gap between "experimental lab tech" and "real-world agility" close in real-time.

As we move through the Year of the Horse, the "sprint" toward humanoid robots in factories and homes is officially on.

#Robotics #HumanoidRobots #AI #Unitree #Innovation #TechTrends2026 #FutureOfWork #EmbodiedAI

"China is moving quickly to try to dominate the industry. Humanoid-robotics companies are sprouting up from Shenzhen to Suzhou, with more than 140 and counting. Tapping a vast ecosystem of parts suppliers and engineering talent, they are starting to produce humanoid robots at scale and actively introducing them into real-life scenarios in factories, hotels and offices.

Setting the broader industry direction is Beijing, which has identified “embodied AI”—the fusion of artificial intelligence with physical systems—as a cutting-edge technology area China wants to own in the coming five years.

Local governments are showering companies with land and discounted office rent. Banks are offering favorable loan terms.

Since late 2024, Beijing, Shenzhen and other cities have established investment funds totaling more than $26 billion to inject capital into the industry, Morgan Stanley calculates.

Government agencies and state-owned companies are also serving as early adopters, buying up humanoids and deploying them in museums, at events and on the street as robocops performing traffic control. The deployments are helping firms to build a market and collect data to make the robots work better.

Some local governments are offering subsidies to buyers, paying around 10% of the price of humanoid robots to lower the bar for customers to try them.
(...)
With humanoid robots, “China is once again mobilizing state support, supply-chain depth, and rapid commercialization to build a new strategic sector,” said Sunny Cheung, a fellow for China studies at the Jamestown Foundation. Success will depend on who can best solve the myriad technical problems associated with humanoid robots, he said.

The industry is still in its early days, and it may take years to take off—if it ever does. Skeptics say humanoid robots are a bubble, and may never find a true use case."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-is-going-all-in-to-beat-the-u-s-on-humanoid-robots-b9c434d2

#China #Robots #Robotics #EmbodiedAI #HumanoidRobots

Aradhye Agarwal (@AradhyeAgarwal)

CMU 박사과정생 Ayush Jain이 Microsoft Research India에서 발표한 강연 소개 트윗입니다. 주제는 '2D-3D VLMs 통합을 통한 장기(장기간) 임베디드 인식(embodied perception)'으로, 그의 연구와 지도교수 Katerina Fragiad의 연관성 및 MSR 방문 소식이 언급되어 있습니다.

https://x.com/AradhyeAgarwal/status/2013538053172666515

#vlm #visionlanguage #embodiedai #research