Shanghai hosts robot carnival to convince public the future is already here

Hundreds of families streamed to a research and development centre on the outskirts of Shanghai on a holiday, where more than a hundred robot companies displayed machines that make coffee, fold shirts, climb stairs and fight water-balloon battles. Organisers called the event “Carnival”, framing it as part of a broader national push: China’s latest Five-Year Plan defines embodied AI as a strategic goal, and the domestic industry already supplies about 90% of 13,000 bipedal and dual-arm robots delivered worldwide in the past year.

At the venue, showcase performances featured a human-like robot in a sparkling shirt delivering a drunken punch, another executing a face-salsa, and a small robot lion band waiting for its turn on stage. The audience responded with shouts of “more, more, more”. Adjacent stalls demonstrated robotic arms folding laundry, and a DexForce robot prepared coffee. Yang Duan, a product manager at the company, said the machines are intended to free people from physical work and routine tasks. Teams also taught children to guide a four-legged robot up stairs, while an improvised arena hosted a dual-robot water-balloon duel that the judge declared a tie.

The most striking figure does not appear on stage but in delivery reports: close to 12,000 units out of all human-like robots shipped worldwide in 2025 were manufactured in China. This scale reflects a full supply chain—from motors and controllers to language-model integration and motion control—consolidated in a single ecosystem. The Five-Year Plan provides the policy framework, but the ability to produce at this volume stems from years of investment in off-the-shelf components and an available engineering workforce.

Engineers on the ground acknowledge the gaps between demo and reality. High weight and shifting centre of gravity make bipedal walking a still-unresolved safety issue; short battery life limits continuous operation to a few minutes; and unit prices remain far from economic viability for household tasks. Many researchers doubt that the human form is the most efficient configuration for physical automation, noting that wheel-based arms or quadruped robots achieve balance with less complexity. Demonstrations at the carnival take place in a controlled setting with human operators behind the scenes, not in unpredictable home environments.

The impact is measured not only in sales but in public awareness. Alongside the Shanghai event, malls and tourist sites in other cities showcase human-like robots, and Beijing has already held half-marathons for bipedal robots. The Chinese public has responded positively, at least this weekend, and the mass-exposure strategy appears to generate a level of technological legitimacy that closed labs struggle to achieve. The open question remains how much of this enthusiasm will translate into purchasable, maintainable products that operate without a dedicated technical team.