On what at first glance appeared to be an ordinary workday in March this year at the factory of China’s leading EV manufacturer, Zeekr, a small team of workers went about their usual tasks: lifting boxes, assembling car parts, and performing quality checks. But unlike any typical shift, none of them paused to rest or even stopped for a drink of water. The reason—they were not human. These UBTech robots, powered by a multimodal reasoning model based on DeepSeek R1, were the first publicly known group of humanoid robots deployed as a coordinated team to carry out a wide range of tasks in a complex, real-world industrial setting. Just a few months later, UBTech unveiled the Walker S2, the world’s first humanoid robot capable of autonomously changing its own batteries—potentially enabling uninterrupted, twenty-four-hour operation on the factory floor without any human assistance.

Full research : Beijing believes that true AI dominance will come from systems capable of autonomous operation in the physical world—AI-powered robotics, or embodied AI.