Wheeled robots outsort humanoids at China's WRC 2026
At Beijing's World Robot Conference, wheeled machines are outperforming bipeds on the job
Humanoid robots remained the biggest crowd-pleasers at this year's World Robot Conference in Beijing, but a quieter shift was unfolding elsewhere on the show floor.
While Unitree's bipedal machines played table tennis and squared off in fighting matches, drawing packed crowds, many of the robots actually doing productive work, sorting parcels, loading production lines, and moving materials, were rolling on wheels instead of walking on legs.
That question, posed bluntly by X Square Robot senior engineer Yang Li, captures the industry's growing pragmatism. Bipedal robots impress spectators when they punch, run or jump, but industrial buyers care about payload capacity, reliability and return on investment instead.
X Square's own numbers make the case concretely: during an hour-long controlled test this month, its two-armed WALL-B system sorted 1,816 packages, outperforming the bipedal Figure 03 robot from US startup Figure AI, which managed an average of 1,248 parcels an hour.
At AI2 Robotics' booth, a wheeled robot made coffee and ice cream for conference visitors, switching between a gripper and a dexterous hand depending on the task.
Vice-president Mo Lei said the company's robots have progressed from single demonstrations to handling multiple jobs for one customer and replicating those tasks across different clients.
In factory settings, he added, the more basic test is simpler still: can the same robot reliably work eight to 16 hours a day without failure?
None of this signals declining enthusiasm for humanoids overall. Morgan Stanley data shows half-size bipedal robots remained China's largest shipment category in the first half of the year, accounting for 50% of shipments, ahead of wheel-based humanoids at 29% and full-size bipeds at 21%.
But the bank noted wheeled platforms are expanding rapidly in industrial and commercial settings, specifically because their added stability makes them more practical for manipulation and embodied AI tasks.
Apart from the hardware design, founder of Unitree Wang Xingxing noted that the company is now investing heavily into AI model development in terms of both capital and workforce.
According to the prospectus of Unitree's IPO, the firm plans to invest about 2.02 billion yuan ($300.52 million) into researching an intelligent robot model, which is 48.1% of 4.2 billion yuan the firm had initially planned to raise.
Generalisation – teaching a robot how to cope with an uncertain environment rather than performing programmed actions – was identified by Wang as the last industry-wide problem that can be overcome in two to three years.
It is worth mentioning that, unlike many other firms that presented their newest robot creation, Unitree introduced the seven-axis biomimetic robotic arm R1, priced at 9,900 yuan.
