Unitree Founder: "Humanoid Robots to Reach Tipping Point of Explosive Growth in 2 to 3 Years"

Wang Xingxing, founder and chairman of Unitree Robotics, a leading Chinese robotics company, has predicted that the humanoid robot industry could reach a tipping point for explosive growth as early as two to three years from now.

According to local media reports including Yicai and the Beijing Daily, Chairman Wang made the remarks during a keynote speech titled "The Next Decade of the Humanoid Robot Industry" at the 2026 World Robot Conference (WRC) forum held in Beijing today.

Wang diagnosed the biggest hurdle in utilizing humanoid robots as their generalizability, emphasizing that technically, the input and output of AI models must be seamlessly aligned with the actual physical movements of the robots.

"I believe this issue will definitely be resolved," he projected, adding, "The industry could reach a tipping point of explosive growth as early as two to three years, or at the latest, five to ten years."

As for the criteria for a paradigm shift, he pointed to "the stage where a robot can successfully perform about 80 percent of tasks instructed via voice or text in 80 percent of new environments it has not previously learned."

Wang explained that although Unitree has been deploying robots into automobile production lines for simple testing and practical application since 2024, they have not yet been widely adopted on a large scale, noting that current robots still fall short of human performance in terms of factory work efficiency and generalizability.

He went on to say that the efficiency drops because humanoid robots must be retrained whenever given new tasks, stating, "We need to make the technology more generalized and refine its capabilities before deploying it on a large scale into specific field sites."

During the event, Wang also demonstrated a Unitree robot equipped with an AI model functioning as its "brain."

In a home-like environment, when a person instructs the robot to bring a medicine box of a specific color, the robot listens, comprehends the meaning, and picks up the requested item.

In his speech, he also emphasized that Unitree is investing the largest share of the company's capital and manpower into AI model development.

Wang, the founder of Unitree, rose to become the richest "post-90s" (born in the 1990s) billionaire following the company's successful listing on the Shanghai stock market the previous day.

On its first day of trading on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR Market) of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Unitree closed at 845 yuan (approx. 174,822 won), up 460.34% from its initial public offering (IPO) price of 150.80 yuan.

Based on that day's closing price, Wang's stake was estimated to be worth 106.9 billion yuan (approx. 22.1197 trillion won).

(Photo: Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.