China’s robotics industry is turning into a humanoid arms race as start-ups – fresh from big funding rounds – are rolling out new robots in a bid to beat tech giants to real-world deployment. Beijing-based Noetix Robotics unveiled Hobbs W1, a service humanoid with a lifelike female face, a black bob and dexterous hands, as a new wave of venture-backed companies pushes into increasingly humanlike designs. Noetix billed Hobbs W1 as its most humanlike robot to date. The humanoid pairs a skin-toned, expressive face with a metallic silver body that appears to feature an ankle-length skirt silhouette, alongside six-degrees-of-freedom (6-DoF) hands designed for fine manipulation. The company positioned Hobbs W1 as an “all-round” service robot capable of handling receptionist-style tasks and visitor guidance.
Noetix said the humanoid could recognize emotions, sustain natural conversations and operate across professional environments such as hospitality, retail and corporate offices. Founded in 2023 by 27-year-old Jiang Zheyuan, a former doctoral student at Tsinghua University,
Noetix has quickly emerged as one of Beijing’s most closely watched humanoid start-ups. Its humanoid runner N2 finished second at the Beijing Humanoid Games, which organizers described as the world’s first human-humanoid half-marathon. In October, Noetix launched Bumi, a child-sized humanoid priced below CNY10,000 for use in schools and at home to serve as both a tutor and sports coach for children.
Other start-ups include LimX Dynamics, a Hangzhou-based robotics firm, which unveiled its latest bipedal robot, TRON 2 in December. TRON 2 is marketed as a multi-modal embodied robot built around a Vision-Action-Language (VLA) model and whole-body motion control. Its stand-out feature is modularity: the system can be reconfigured into separate components, including an upper-body “dual arms” module and alternative lower-body set-ups dubbed “wheeled legs”, allowing users to tailor the robot for different tasks. Sources described the machine as the “Swiss Army knife” of robots, marking a departure from single-purpose humanoids that dominated earlier commercial offerings. Founded in 2022, LimX Dynamics is targeting industrial deployments, with humanoids designed to lift heavy loads and operate in factories and warehouses.
Deep Robotics is known for its rugged quadruped robots capable of operating across difficult terrain and weather. The company is among a growing cohort of Chinese firms betting that rapid iteration, falling costs and increasingly capable embodied AI will give start-ups an edge in bringing robots out of the lab and into daily use, the South China Morning Post reports.
China has issued five times the number of patents related to humanoid robots than the US, over the past five years, Morgan Stanley said in its latest Robot Almanac. Morgan Stanley said China recorded 7,705 humanoid patents over the past five years, compared with 1,561 in the U.S. Japan ranked next with 1,102. Another major finding was that China accounted for 54% of global industrial robot installations, more than the rest of the world combined.
