The 2026 AI Industry Conference, held October 14-16 in Jinan, arrives as the industry increasingly calls 2026 the "mass-production year" for humanoid robots. In June, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Commission jointly launched an annual humanoid-robot and embodied-intelligence real-scene training campaign, aiming to drive ten-thousand-unit-scale landing capability by year-end. A batch of humanoid robots has already entered real industrial scenarios in textiles, automobiles and consumer electronics.
At the enterprise level, UBTECH's ten-thousand-unit industrial humanoid super factory in Liuzhou, Guangxi began production in September with planned annual capacity above 10,000 units. AgiBot (Zhiyuan) shipped more than 8,600 units in the first half of the year, achieving tenfold growth. Yobotics recently opened its global first store in a core Shanghai business district.
The embodied-intelligence zone at the conference gathered Unitree, UBTECH, Qite Robotics, Siemens, HollySys, Youbot and others to match Shandong's manufacturing upgrade demand and special-scenario needs for ports and energy. MIIT data show that in the first half of 2026 national industrial and service robot output maintained double-digit growth, with AI products and applications accelerating into the industrial front line.
Humanoid robots are moving from volume shipments toward multi-industry deployment, reflecting a shift from single-point technology demos to systemic, general-purpose landing as the industry's certainty strengthens.
Source: Qilu Evening News · Qilu One Point
