Astribot's T1 humanoid robot debuts at WRC, starting at 89,900 yuan

At the 2026 World Robot Conference (WRC), the Astribot booth drew attention with the debut of T1, its latest generation of cable-driven humanoid robots. The robot starts at just 89,900 yuan, a price point that lands in the mid-to-high-end consumer electronics range while most humanoid robots on the market sell for hundreds of thousands to over a million yuan.

On-site demos included more than 20 demanding household tasks such as packing a backpack, a job that requires long-horizon reasoning, deformable-object manipulation, and millimeter-level precision at the same time. Another robot played tabletop ice hockey against a human in real time, and a third handled voice reception, grabbing products, and delivery fully autonomously.

Astribot describes its approach as "full-stack," built from three parts: AI models, an embodied operating system, and cable-driven hardware. Its foundation model Lumo-2 is described as the industry's first implicit world action model for home scenarios; the team published results from 22 real-robot home tasks and says Lumo-2 outperforms leading international models including Pi 0.5 and FAST-WAM in timing reasoning, physical understanding, precision, long-horizon control, and dexterous manipulation.

On the model layer, DuoCore is a fast-slow system designed to deploy leading models into low-compute commercial settings without requiring expensive GPU clusters. Astribot says DuoCore is already running in popular shopping districts across several Chinese cities, with the MART robot at WRC serving as its showcase.

At the operating system level, Astribot OS embeds AI capabilities into the bottom layer of the system: a user describes a scenario, and the system handles understanding, capability scheduling, and execution assembly to generate an app. The company says what once took a team of engineers can now be done by one person in two days, and it hosted a "one-sentence app generation" robotics hackathon in Shenzhen during WRC.

On the business side, Astribot says its products are already deployed in real scenarios: a partnership with JD brings the MART robot into shopping districts in multiple cities for reception, guidance, and delivery; collaborations with Ant Wanbo and Guoda Pharmacy put robots in smart pharmacies for nighttime high-frequency sorting; and ZKCT and Xian Gong Intelligent use its robots for interactive terminals and industrial logistics. In 2026 the company completed a B-round of over 1 billion yuan at a valuation exceeding 10 billion.

Founder Lai Jie, previously the first employee and architect of Tencent's Robotics X lab and a former leader of Baidu's Xiaodu robot team, has 17 years of experience in AI and robotics. As the industry moves from the "complete machine boom" to a "mass production era," Astribot is betting that models, OS, and hardware must evolve together to create a true system-level advantage.

What to watch next: whether T1's 89,900 yuan price can accelerate humanoid robots' move from trade shows into homes, how Lumo-2 and DuoCore perform in real deployments, and whether the full-stack bet pays off under scrutiny from both capital and the market.