Four novelties in one day: What AgiBot showed at WAIC 2026

AgiBot, a company founded in 2023 by former Huawei engineer Peng Zhihui, demonstrated at this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai that it is serious about its position in the robotics market. The company, which previously expanded into the US market through CES 2026 and appeared in Europe at Paris's VivaTech, unveiled four new devices covering the commercial, educational, and industrial segments.

The main star is the A3 Ultra — a life-size humanoid robot. It measures 174 centimeters, weighs 60 kilograms, and features 51 degrees of freedom (51 DoF), meaning it can move as fluidly as a human. Each arm can carry up to 5 kilograms, and thanks to a built-in dual battery system, it can operate for up to 8 hours. The robot supports direct charging, hot-swappable batteries, and autonomous recharging.

Navigation in complex environments is handled by a sensor suite including 3D LiDAR, RGB-D, fisheye, and binocular cameras, complemented by GPS, RTK, and UWB localization. The robot's brain is the NVIDIA Thor chip, which provides AgiBot with the computational power needed for real-time autonomous decision-making. The A3 Ultra is designed for commercial and service deployment — from receptions through retail to public services.

X2 Edu: A robot for students to learn on

The second novelty is the X2 Edu, a smaller humanoid platform designed for education and robotics research. Standing approximately 130 centimeters tall with 29 degrees of freedom, it offers an open hardware architecture — developers and students can expand the robot with additional sensors, computing modules, or end effectors. The payload capacity is 3 kilograms, and the modular design makes it relatively easy to adapt the robot to specific educational or research needs.

For Czech technical universities and secondary schools, which are increasingly incorporating robotics into their curricula, this is an interesting signal — similar platforms could significantly reduce the cost of teaching physical AI in the coming years. However, it is not yet known when and at what price the X2 Edu will be available in Europe.

G2 Max and OmniHand 3 Ultra-M: Muscles and fingers for industry

The third novelty is the G2 Max, a heavy-duty robot for industrial handling and palletizing. It combines powerful arms, adjustable working height, omnidirectional mobility, and a quick battery-swap system for continuous factory operation. The fourth product is the OmniHand 3 Ultra-M — a robotic hand weighing just 630 grams. Despite this, it features 20 active degrees of freedom and can grasp objects weighing up to 5 kilograms. It uses visual-tactile sensors for precise and sensitive manipulation — a technology that is key, for example, for electronics assembly or handling fragile objects.

From the lab straight to the factory: 15,000 robots produced

The biggest attention, however, was not drawn by the products themselves but by the data from real-world deployment. AgiBot announced it has already produced its 15,000th robot — a number that puts the Chinese company at the forefront of the race for mass production of humanoids. For comparison: Tesla Optimus is still in the limited testing phase, Figure AI and Apptronik are just beginning their first commercial pilots, and Boston Dynamics remains focused more on specialized solutions.

AgiBot also showed that its machines are no longer just working on stages. At Longcheer Technology's factory in Nanchang, G2 humanoid robots are running a real tablet quality inspection line. The entire process — from material collection through precise component placement to interaction with inspection equipment — is handled autonomously by the robots. The production line was integrated in 36 hours, handles approximately 3,000 tablets per shift daily, and the robots have already worked over 64 hours of continuous operation with less than 4% downtime.

That is a significant figure. In robotics, it has long been the case that deploying humanoids into real operations runs into problems with reliability, precision, and integration with existing factory equipment. The data from Nanchang suggests that AgiBot is beginning to overcome these obstacles — without requiring major modifications to production lines.

What this means for Europe and Czechia

AgiBot sent a clear signal at WAIC 2026: China is transitioning from experimental robotics to industrial scale. For European companies, this means new competition but also opportunity. While European firms such as Germany's NEURA Robotics (which recently received a record investment of 35 billion CZK) or Switzerland's ANYbotics are betting on quality and safety, Chinese players are pushing for volume and speed of deployment.

For the Czech Republic, one of the most industrialized countries in the EU, this trend is particularly relevant. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), Czechia ranks among the top 15 countries with the highest density of industrial robots in the world. With the arrival of affordable humanoids like AgiBot's G2 Max, robotization could expand into smaller businesses and new sectors — from logistics to agriculture to services.

The question remains one of regulation. The European AI Act classifies certain robotic systems as high-risk, which could slow the deployment of autonomous humanoids on the European market. AgiBot is nevertheless already active in Europe — at the May VivaTech in Paris, it showcased dancing robots and openly talks about European expansion.

What comes next

AgiBot is building what the industry calls a "full-stack" approach — it doesn't just manufacture hardware but also develops its own AI models, simulation environments, and infrastructure for collecting training data. The key advantage is the feedback loop: every deployed robot generates data that improves the entire system. This is the same principle behind the rapid progress of large language models — only applied to physical machines.

It is not yet clear how much AgiBot's new products will cost or when exactly they will arrive in Europe. The company, however, makes it clear that its goal is not to win a beauty contest at conferences but to get robots into real operations. And in this race, it has just gained a solid head start.