A joint 'Embodied Intelligence Development Report (2026)' by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and Tsinghua University finds that robots achieve only a 12% success rate on real home-environment tasks, against 89.4% in simulation; the best real-machine benchmark tops out at 24.4% versus 100% for human experts.
The report adds that whole-machine price accounts for only 40% to 60% of total cost of ownership, with annual integrated maintenance for a single wheeled-arm or bipedal robot running 500,000 to 700,000 yuan — higher than the labor cost of many roles. In the first half of 2026, domestic embodied-intelligence financing reached 322 deals worth 93.5 billion yuan, about five times the year-earlier period, while global humanoid shipments exceeded 22,000 units with five Chinese manufacturers accounting for 86%.
Market cooling is visible: humanoid daily rental rates fell from tens of thousands of yuan in early 2025 to a few thousand in 2026, and second-hand engineering prototypes dropped from 300,000-800,000 yuan to 30,000-60,000 yuan. The takeaway is that capacity to manufacture and capacity to perform are two different things.
Source: AI Daily / CAICT-Tsinghua (paraphrased and translated from Chinese industry reporting; reprinted for informational purposes with attribution).
