Wubounded Power Unveils Robot Barista at World Robot Conference, Showcasing Physical AI in Real-World Café
At WRC 2026, Wubounded Power teamed up with Korea's HOLLYS to demo a robot-staffed café, featuring its MWA™ brain, and announced nearly $100M in orders.
The company, founded by former Horizon Robotics self-driving lead Zhang Yufeng and co-founded by ex-Li Auto algorithm leader Xia Zhongpu, brings a background in autonomous driving to physical AI. Its approach to robot intelligence diverges from the mainstream VLA (vision-language-action) direct mapping. Instead, Wubounded Power uses what it calls MWA™, a dual-engine system combining a latent-space world model with reinforcement learning. Zhang explained that VLA relies heavily on imitation learning and lacks a true causal understanding of physics. The world model compresses the environment and predicts how actions change the state of the world, while reinforcement learning enables the robot to refine its strategies through trial-and-error in real interactions, similar to how a child learns the boundaries of fire.
The hardware side includes the K15, a dual-arm wheeled semi-humanoid robot, and the Anyverse ADA robotic arm with 7 degrees of freedom, a 30 mm wrist flip radius, and full-joint force sensing. The company also introduced a family of central compute platforms covering 600 INT8 TOPS to 4000 FP4 TFLOPS. These components work together in the coffee shop task, allowing the robot to handle complex long-horizon sequences like fetching a cleaning basket, wiping tables, and removing waste, while adapting to dynamic changes such as moving customers and scattered items.
Wubounded Power's MWA™ has topped the RoboCasa GR1 TableTop leaderboard, according to the report. Beyond the café, WRC also featured a three-robot collaborative task and a peg-in-hole style fine manipulation demo called “fingertip bead threading,” both powered by the same model.
On the commercial side, in July 2026, the K15 received the EU's industrial CE certification (CE-MD/RED/EMC + EN ISO 13849 + EN18031), making it the first Chinese embodied-intelligence robot to achieve this. The company reports nearly $100 million in orders from Europe and Asia, with the first batch of K15s shipped to France in July to enter a factory owned by Envision Group. Partnerships with ZF LIFETEC and Oumo Group are also in place for production-line collaboration. Wubounded Power says it aims to scale test runs and expand from service to industrial scenarios, eventually creating a fleet of thinking, working, trustworthy machines.