SHANGHAI/BEIJING: In a sprawling warehouse in a Shanghai suburb, dozens of humanoid robots are manoeuvred by their operators to carry out tasks like folding a T-shirt, making a sandwich and opening doors, over and over again.
Operating 17 hours a day, the site’s goal is to generate reams of data that its owner, Chinese humanoid startup AgiBot, uses to train robots it hopes will become ubiquitous and change the way humans live, work and play.
“Just imagine that one day in our own robot factory, our robots are assembling themselves,” said Yao Maoqing, a partner at AgiBot.
The importance of humanoid robots to Beijing, as it looks for solutions to pressing issues including trade frictions with the U.S., population decline, and slowing growth, was underscored when Chinese President Xi Jinping inspected AgiBot’s robots in Shanghai last month. Xi jokingly remarked during the visit that perhaps the machines could play in a football team.
Another domestic developer of humanoid robots, Unitree, was also present in a meeting Xi hosted for private firms earlier this year, where he urged them to help China’s economy.
As the U.S. negotiates with China over tariffs that President Donald Trump had imposed to help bring back U.S. manufacturing jobs, Beijing is aiming for a new industrial revolution where many factory tasks would be performed by humanoid robots.
In recent years, Chinese humanoid robots have demonstrated increasing feats of agility, including performing somersaults, running a half-marathon, and even playing football, as Xi mused.
But Reuters is reporting for the first time details about how China’s advances in artificial intelligence, partly driven by the success of homegrown firms like DeepSeek as well as abundant government support, are allowing humanoid developers to pair the robots’ already impressive hardware with the software needed to make them economically valuable.
