Chinese company UBTECH and FAW-Volkswagen, Volkswagen's joint venture in China, signed a strategic cooperation agreement on October 8 to develop and test humanoid robots for factory logistics and smart manufacturing.
The parties plan to create demonstration scenarios and evaluate the robots in real production conditions. At the same time, robot orders, specific logistics tasks, and a timeline for full-scale deployment have not yet been announced.
The partnership continues work that began back in 2024. At that time, the UBTECH Walker S humanoid performed bolt tightening, component installation, and part movement on the assembly line, while the Walker S Lite took part in training for vehicle quality control and was connected to the plant's automation system.
UBTECH is ramping up production capacity: last month, a 14,000-square-meter humanoid robot factory opened in Liuzhou, designed for more than 10,000 robots per year. FAW-Volkswagen has five production bases in China that could become testing sites.
The humanoid market is growing rapidly: according to IDC, nearly 25,000 such robots were shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026 — 5.3 times more than a year earlier. Agibot became the leader with more than 8,600 units.
For now, this is a testing program, not a deployment. Whether humanoids become full-fledged "employees" of car factories will depend on whether they can consistently perform repetitive tasks in shift mode.
Sources: TechRepublic, Interesting Engineering, IDC.