Humanoid robot production goes exponential, led by China - Telecoms
A new report from analyst firm Omdia reveals that China has a massive head-start when it comes to the manufacture of this year’s hot technological trend.
Key takeaways
The most recent development in humanoid robotics comes from a proof‑of‑concept completed on 15 January 2026, in which Humanoid’s wheeled HMND 01 Alpha robot was deployed in live operations at Siemens’ Electronics Factory in Erlangen, achieving the target throughput of 60 tote moves per hour, handling two tote sizes, running autonomously for over 30 minutes and maintaining more than eight hours of uptime. This marks the first real‑world industrial test of Humanoid robots and paves the way for a broader partnership aimed at scaling deployment in logistics environments. At the same time, CES 2026 in Las Vegas showcased a wave of new humanoid prototypes—from generative‑AI‑driven models like Italy’s Gene.01 and LG’s CLOiD to Chinese units such as Unitree’s T800 and a high‑speed humanoid claimed to run 11 mph—but observers noted frequent reliability issues, with several bots stumbling, losing balance or failing to perform tasks without human assistance, underscoring that while commercial interest and investment are surging, practical, autonomous performance remains a work in progress.
A new report from analyst firm Omdia reveals that China has a massive head-start when it comes to the manufacture of this year’s hot technological trend.
Scott Bicheno, Editorial Director
January 9, 2026
2 Min Read
source: fourier intelligence
As we
observed yesterday, everyone who’s anyone in the tech world will be banging on about humanoid robots this year. You don’t need to be a fan of science fiction to have been able to extrapolate the current AI mania in the direction of sentient robots and now the race is on to dominate a potentially limitless market.
According to a new “By late 2025, embodied intelligence shifted from prototypes to scaled pilots, driven by Chinese volume production and US AI innovation,” wrote author Lian Jye Su in the report. “True general-purpose robots – autonomously handling diverse, unstructured tasks – remain emerging. Still, the convergence of AI models, dexterous hands – 16 degrees of freedom (DoF) hands – and end-to-end imitation and self-reinforcement learning has made them viable for industrial, service, and eventual household roles, marking the dawn of widespread embodied AI.”
Related: CES 2026 roundup – the tech, the gadgets, and the odd stuff Omdia reckons the global market for general-purpose embodied intelligent robots will more or less double every year for a while and will reach 2.6 million by 2035. That’s a lot of robots. Coupled with the enormous investments in AI it’s easy to see the sophistication of these robots increasing at a similar rate. Welcome to the future.
About the Author
Scott Bicheno
Editorial Director
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