WRC 2026: Wudong Power Shows World Models, Qiyuan Robot Opens Consumer Pre-Orders

At the WRC main forum on Aug. 21, which focused on ecosystem building, the Chinese Institute of Electronics announced the establishment of its World Model Expert Committee. Zhang Yufeng, founder and CEO of Wudong Power, was appointed a committee member and joined a dialogue session on the distance from world models to serving humanity. Zhang laid out the company's technical route of "latent-space world model + reinforcement learning," arguing that embodied intelligence should learn high-dimensional representations and causal relationships that matter for decision-making, rather than pixel-level reconstructions of the physical world.

"World models' real value lies not in depicting the future but in reasoning how actions change the world and making decisions accordingly," Zhang said. He stressed that models must leave laboratories and be tested in real scenarios, proposing a positive loop where application scenarios pull data, data feeds model iteration, and improved models expand use. Wudong Power is using industrial tasks to train manipulation skills, especially in flexible object handling and precision loading, and commercial settings to improve generalization in dynamic environments with changing light, layouts and crowds.

Zhang also spoke at a China-Korea robotics innovation cooperation event on Aug. 20, where he was the only invited Chinese corporate representative. He suggested that China and Korea move from complementary strengths to "co-evolution and co-created standards," combining China's edge in embodied models, supply chains and engineering with Korea's strengths in semiconductors, automotive and manufacturing. At a later roundtable on industrial implementation, Zhang said the industry's view of deployment is changing: commercial deployment is no longer just an engineering expense after foundation-model research, but a key way to validate approaches and collect real data.

Other Wudong Power executives elaborated on technology and applications. Co-founder and CTO Xia Zhongpu, during a roundtable on the technical and industrial singularity, compared the current diversity of embodied AI approaches to the "Hundred Schools of Thought" in ancient China, saying it is a necessary phase before the field converges. "AI entering the physical world is in a Hundred Schools stage. It is a good thing—different systems and collisions will eventually become a new paradigm for physical AI," he said. At a forum on intelligent manufacturing, product solutions general manager Shen Mingda described a five-level evolution from fixed operations to autonomous cross-task generalization in factories, and said Wudong Power is applying automotive-grade reliability and safety standards to turn its general-purpose brain into stable industrial productivity.

Separately, Qiyuan Robot, a subsidiary of Shangwei New Materials, opened pre-orders for the Qiyuan Q1 and Qiyuan T1 on Aug. 23, after earlier trial reservations at the World AI Conference and ChinaJoy and offline experiences in several cities. Customers can reserve through the official Qiyuan mini-program, Tmall, Douyin, Bilibili stores, or offline events. A 1,000-yuan deposit is credited as 2,000 yuan toward the final price, and early buyers receive a first-edition gift box including a signed letter, a founder user collector card and a limited robot figure. They also get an additional half-year warranty, priority access to a dedicated one-on-one customer service channel, and can buy Care protection sets and official accessories at 30% off within 30 days of purchase.

Qiyuan Robot described the Q1 as the world's first small-size full-body force-controlled humanoid robot, about 88 cm tall and 15 kg, designed for embodied development, tech toys and home companionship. The T1, positioned as the world's first deformable personal robot, stands about 100 cm and can switch between wheeled-humanoid and quadruped forms, targeting home companionship, outdoor walking and video creation. The company said the open pre-orders mark the transition from "being experienced" to "being purchased," accelerating the entry of robots into households.

According to Shangwei New Materials' semi-annual report for 2026, the consumer robot business had received 210 million yuan in advance payments for products and had invested 160 million yuan in R&D in the first half, covering AI models, embodied intelligence algorithms, motion intelligence, interaction intelligence and lightweight joints. The company has also partnered with Lens Technology's Blue Thinking Intelligent Robot for an initial 10,000-unit production line and with Wolong Electric Drive for core component production. Policy support is also growing: in June, the Ministry of Commerce and seven other departments issued implementation guidance on accelerating "AI + consumption," listing AI robots as new consumption supply. At this year's WRC, several companies launched C-end embodied products, signaling a sector-wide shift from stage demonstrations to market-focused releases.