From September 23 to 27, 2025, the 25th China International Industry Fair (hereinafter referred to as the "CIIF") was held at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai). With the theme of "New Industrial Attributes, Boundless Intelligent Innovation," this year’s CIIF covered an exhibition area of 300,000 square meters and attracted nearly 3,000 enterprises from 28 countries and regions. In terms of scale, it has surpassed the 2025 Hannover Messe in Germany, becoming an industry event that has ranked first in exhibition area among comprehensive global industrial exhibitions for three consecutive years.
As a core component of the CIIF, the Robot Show (RS) focused on the theme of "Embodied Intelligence · Leading the Future." It covered an exhibition area of 56,000 square meters and gathered over 350 well-known global robot enterprises. For the first time, the exhibition realized the centralized display of Shanghai's "Four Little Dragons" of robotics (STEP, CHAIFU, SIASUN, JAKA) and the world's "Big Four" robotics companies (Fanuc, ABB, Yaskawa, KUKA) on the same stage—a first in global exhibitions this year.
Highlights of the Exhibition
1. Concentrated Emergence of Heavy-Duty Robots
A distinct gradient exhibition matrix of heavy-duty robots was formed, with models such as Estun’s 1,200 kg-level robot and Yaskawa’s 1-ton-level robot competing side by side. High-load products became the focus of the exhibition, marking the accelerated domestic substitution in key fields. Among them, CHAIFU’s 5-ton heavy-duty industrial robot set a new record for the "load capacity ceiling" of domestic robots. A staff member at the scene said: "Previously, it was difficult to break through the load capacity limit of domestic robots; the launch of this product marks a qualitative leap in our rigid structure technology." Currently, this robot has been adapted to heavy-duty scenarios such as whole-vehicle lifting in the automotive industry and mining equipment handling.
2. Humanoid Robots Marching Toward Commercialization
In a dedicated independent exhibition area, 27 humanoid robot models were displayed in a concentrated manner, including Yuejiang’s Atom and Tesla’s Optimus. Most products have completed the key upgrade from prototypes to pre-mass-production models and have begun trial use in specific industrial and service scenarios, heralding the arrival of "the first year of humanoid robot commercialization."
The GR-3C "Astronaut" humanoid robot brought by Fourier Intelligence stands 165 cm tall and weighs 71 kg. Equipped with up to 55 degrees of freedom (DoF) across its body and coated in a science-fiction-style white finish, it resembles an "astronaut." More notably, the GR-3C features full-body teleoperation functionality: through high-precision motion capture and low-latency transmission, it achieves natural mapping of human movements to robot movements.
3. Green Intelligence Becoming a New Functional Dimension
For the first time, "energy consumption indicators" were listed alongside traditional parameters such as precision and load capacity as core display metrics. Enterprises including Delta, ABB, and Epson launched products with significantly improved energy efficiency (e.g., 20–30 percent reduction in energy consumption) to respond to dual carbon goals and provide enterprises with practical solutions to reduce long-term operating costs.
4. From Individual Intelligence to Swarm Intelligence
Yuejiang Robotics launched the "Factory Intelligent Hub" as a "super brain" for task planning based on scenarios. At the execution layer, robots of different forms—including wheeled, humanoid, multi-legged robots, and robotic arms—realize collaborative operations.
ABB rolled out the "RobotWare Collaborative Suite," which builds a collaborative welding workstation with three robots centered on the IRB 6750S robot. JAKA’s JAKA OTA platform enables collaborative management, remote operation and maintenance, and batch deployment of multiple robots, providing a solution path from single-machine intelligence to swarm intelligence for digital transformation.
5. Scenario-Driven Development
The CIIF clearly demonstrated how robot forms evolve differently according to the needs of specific scenarios—from traditional robotic arms to humanoid robots and then to the integration of multiple forms—reflecting the distinct characteristic of "scenarios driving technological development."
6. Higher Precision, Higher Speed, and Greater Usability
Precision Breakthrough: JAKA’s Zu20 collaborative robot achieves a repeat positioning accuracy of ±0.05 mm (equivalent to the diameter of a human hair). This breakthrough has enabled its batch verification in high-end scenarios such as auto parts and aero-engine inspection.
Pursuit of Extreme Speed: The latest high-speed compact collaborative robot in ABB’s PoWa collaborative robot series (customized exclusively for the Chinese market) reaches an industrial operating speed of up to 5.8 meters per second—the highest among similar products—effectively meeting the strict production cycle requirements of the consumer goods, electronics manufacturing, and other industries.
Significant Usability Improvement: Through technologies such as graphical drag-and-drop programming and wireless teaching, engineers can quickly complete robot deployment without writing complex code, greatly lowering the application threshold for high-precision automation. ABB’s newly launched robot vision system can seamlessly connect to all known cameras on the market and complete system integration within hours, once again confirming that "usability is the key to promoting the popularization of robots."
Robots are no longer just extensions of robotic arms; instead, they are endowed with embodied intelligence featuring the coordination of "hands, legs, eyes, and brain." From Yuejiang’s multi-form "super factory" to JAKA’s JAKA EVO operating system, and from Fourier Intelligence’s GR-3C Astronaut Robot to ABB’s high-speed collaborative robots, these innovative technologies together depict a new vision of intelligent manufacturing where humans and robots coexist harmoniously.