Viewing New Highlights of the Intelligent Economy from the Zhongguancun Forum Annual Conference

Beijing in March is in full spring bloom, and the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum Annual Conference kicks off as scheduled. Making coffee, sorting packages, playing the piano and drums… At the event site, all kinds of robots showcase their signature skills, vividly reflecting the new atmosphere of artificial intelligence rapidly moving into everyday reality.

“Customer No. 23, please pick up your meal.” Following the voice, the humanoid robot “Mozi” from Qianxun Intelligent (Hangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. skillfully threads candied hawthorn—coated in sugar—through a bamboo skewer. The food-delivery robot “Kuafu” from Leju Tongyan (Beijing) Robot Technology Co., Ltd. steadily delivers the meal tray to the customer. After completing delivery, “Kuafu” gestures “heart” at the onlooking guests, prompting waves of praise.

Unlike the solo-unit demonstrations and show performances of the past, this year’s robot café features several heterogeneous robots under unified scheduling, each showcasing their strengths: the greeter robot enthusiastically greets people and guides order placement; the production robot waves its “arms,” makes fresh candied haws and sugar-roasted hawthorn; the delivery robot weaves back and forth, delivering accurately— from placing an order to receiving food takes less than two minutes. Throughout the entire process, there’s no need for human intervention. With clear division of labor and precise movements, the robots make you feel as if you’re in a future restaurant.

Guests visit the robot café. Photo by Juhuan Zong, Xinhua News Agency

“When multiple orders run concurrently, how do multiple robots get allocated and coordinated, and how are the delivery robots assigned? These steps are a concentrated demonstration of the robots’ brain-like scheduling and control capabilities.” Wang Qiang, director of the embodied operations algorithm at Leju Robotics, said that the café was well received as soon as it opened. “Yesterday, we operated for about 5 hours and received more than 130 orders.” Wang Qiang said that in the not-too-distant future, companies will find more application scenarios suited to embodied intelligence, so technology can truly serve people’s lives.

In addition to the service industry, several humanoid robots from Leju have already been applied in industrial scenarios. According to reports, in 2025 the company delivered thousands of full-size humanoid robots “Kuafu” in total. Currently, industry momentum is rising rapidly; a period of breakthrough in technology and growth in the market has arrived.

Guo Qing Xu, a staff member at Lingxin Qieshou (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., also sensed changes in the market: “In the past nearly one year, the sales of the dexterous hands have grown by nearly 10 times. Currently, our share in the high-freedom dexterous hand market exceeds 80%.” At the Zhongguancun Forum Annual Conference, the mechanical hands brought by Lingxin Qieshou attract many eyes—nimble and ingenious, plucking strings to play music, threading needles, and drawing attention.

A needle-threading robot senses the positions of the needle and the thread through visual and tactile sensors, aligns them, and with its “two hands” smoothly threads a straight, millimeter-level thin filament through the needle’s eye. “Our dexterous hand costs one-tenth—sometimes even one-twentieth or one-fewtieth—of similar products abroad. In the future, costs will be even lower, enabling it to enter more people’s daily lives,” Xu Guoqing said.

At the regular exhibition at the Zhongguancun Exhibition Center, a robot equipped with a dexterous hand is demonstrating needle threading. Photo by Juhuan Zong, Xinhua News Agency

In the brain-computer interface field, landing and transformation of technology are also accelerating. Last year’s much-discussed brain-computer interface “North Brain No. 1” once again became the focus of attention this year at the Zhongguancun Forum. Yuan Yanning, a staff member at the Beijing Institute of Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Research, said that “North Brain No. 1” adopts a semi-invasive wireless brain-computer interface technical route, and from early 2025 to now it has completed 7 cases of human implantation.

“ This year, ‘North Brain No. 1’ will officially launch a comprehensive registration clinical GCP trial. It mainly targets patients with cervical spinal cord injuries, and is expected to enroll 50 to 100 patients in total throughout the year.” Yuan Yanning said. The brain-computer system “North Brain No. 2,” which adopts a fully invasive technical route, is expected to begin clinical validation this year.

The rapid advancement of frontier technologies is inseparable from strong support from the industry. A related person in charge at Beijing Zhongguancun Capital Fund Management Co., Ltd. said the company has established a special North Brain fund with a scale of 400 million yuan, and supports the R&D and industrialization of “North Brain No. 1” through a directional fund model. “We’re not just investing money; we’re also building bridges.” Relying on the innovation ground of Zhongguancun, they are connecting the entire workflow from lab to clinic and from R&D to the market, helping the technology speed up its rollout and ensuring that this once out-of-reach frontier technology truly benefits patients.

When robotics learns to collaborate “at work,” when mechanical hands can thread needles and pluck strings into melodies, and when brain-computer interfaces step by step move from science fiction into reality—every pulse of technological innovation is quietly changing our lives, and it also more clearly sketches out the new industrial landscape of artificial intelligence moving from “showcasing” to “deployment,” from “single-point” to “collaboration.”

Source: Xinhua News Agency

Author: Dai Jinyue

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