What is it?
Mobile World Congress Shanghai, the Chinese edition of an event that draws more than 100,000 people to Barcelona every year, ran last month with a somewhat smaller crowd (37,300, according to the organisers, GSMA) in attendance. But what it lacked in human beings, it more than made up for in robots. They were everywhere. Dancing robots, barista robots, piano playing robots and, not as surprising as it would have been a few years ago, soccer playing robots.
A penalty shootout between robots was possibly a highlight of MWC Shanghai, but with precisely zero of the tension that goes with the same activity at the football World Cup. By now, the name of the winning robot is utterly forgotten, except by the team that built and programmed it.
The real significance of these robots was the demonstration, in Shanghai, of their versatility. At the Mobile Broadband Business Forum, an event hosted by Huawei on the sidelines of MWC Shanghai, the highlight was a showcase of AI, with a laser focus on its productive use in robotics.
Gone was the traditional cute robot dog prancing around the corridors of exhibition halls to demonstrate articulation for the thousandth time. Instead, four robot dogs were on duty for serious business: each was fitted with a different payload.
One carried a six-axis robotic arm on its back, another a ruggedised communications module of the kind used in disaster zones, and a third a surveillance turret bristling with sensors for inspection work. The fourth patrolled the venue on wheeled legs with a stabilised camera rig mounted on its back, serving as the roving eyes of the pack. A fire extinguisher rode on a cargo shelf on the back of yet another robot, ready to be hauled to wherever those eyes spotted trouble.
That division of labour was a walking illustration of a point made by Huawei deputy chairman of the board and rotating chairman David Wang at the forum’s Top Talk Summit, on the opening day of MWC Shanghai: embodied AI robots equipped with 5G-Advanced modules have become indispensable in firefighting and emergency response.
All four dogs came from TD Tech, a company jointly controlled by Huawei and Chinese state-backed investors, and each carried a 5G-Advanced connectivity module promoted for its low latency and power efficiency.
In a separate demonstration, another dog fetched goods in a mock supermarket, directed by what Huawei calls an agent communication network, which matches each task to the machine best equipped for it.
Chinese carriers showcased the commercial use case. China Telecom is working with AgiBot, the Shanghai company that said it produced its 10,000th humanoid robot in March and led global humanoid shipments last year, on a robotics-as-a-service model for aviation and logistics. China Unicom has also got in on the automated action, and deploys robots for hazard inspection in chemical plants.
A few metres away, a humanoid robot in a tuxedo and bow tie, a Huawei “5G inside” badge on its shoulder, played a grand piano, its fingering generated on the fly by an AI that analysed the song, mapped it to the robot’s tendon-driven hands, and streamed the instructions over a 5G-Advanced connection. A screen alongside displayed the uplink speed and latency – lag between signal being sent and received – in real time. It hovered around 20 milliseconds. The music was the sideshow; the demonstration was that a robot’s brain no longer has to be built into its body. Offload the heavy computing to the network, and the machine itself can be lighter, cheaper and longer-lasting on a single charge.
The most revealing sight at MWC itself, though, was the least glamorous. At one stand, I watched two technicians hoist a humanoid robot out of a foam-lined flight case, one cradling its head like a newborn’s. These machines travel in padded coffins, get carried to their marks, and perform behind safety barriers with handlers in attendance. The gap between that scene and a machine you would trust in your kitchen is the gap the industry still has to close.
A robot barista in the hotel lobby adjoining MWC produced a respectable flat white, from behind a perspex screen, with a human supervisor a discreet step away. But that is an entire hospitality industry generation away from your kitchen.
All of which builds the case for my argument that robots, as a class of gadget, are ready for prime time. But read the fine print. The only true robots that have already had years in prime time are the arms bolted to assembly lines. The International Federation of Robotics counted 4.66-million industrial robots in operational use worldwide in 2024, up 9% on the previous year, with 542,000 new units installed that year. That is still more than double the number of a decade earlier, and China’s operational stock alone exceeds 2-million.
Almost every phone raised in Shanghai to film a dancing humanoid was assembled with the help of those arms.
The industrial arm never learned to dance. It performs one task, millions of times, to tolerances measured in fractions of a millimetre, and has done so since General Motors installed the first Unimate in 1961. It has no head to cradle and no flight case, because it never leaves the factory. That single-mindedness is exactly why it works, and why the humanoids of Shanghai are still auditioning for jobs the arm has had for 60 years.
How much does it cost?
Humanoid robots now start at prices the gadget world can comprehend: Unitree’s G1 sells for $16,000, about R265,000, and its R1 model comes in at roughly $6,000, or around R100,000. A full-size machine remains serious money. The Unitree H1 lists at $90,000, close to R1.5-million, and a commercial humanoid pilot programme, including software licensing and integration, runs from $150,000 to more than $500,000 per unit, or R2.5-million to R8-million-plus. A collaborative robot arm, by comparison, costs from about R410,000 installed as a complete working cell, and then earns its keep, around the clock, for a decade or two.
Does it make a difference?
Industrial robot arms have made an impact for 60 years, in every car and phone factory on the planet. For humanoid robots, on the other hand, it is about the business model rather than a breakthrough: robotics-as-a-service subscriptions make the machines accessible without the capital cost of outright purchase, by offloading heavy computing to cloud infrastructure over low-latency 5G-Advanced links.
Subscriptions start at $499 a month, about R8,200, for the 1X NEO home humanoid. They run from $2,000 to $5,000 a month, R33,000 to R82,500, for industrial machines, with break-even against outright purchase arriving at around 20 months. Huawei is backing the category with investment as well as network gear, having pumped a reported 3-billion yuan, about R7-billion, into its robotics subsidiary Dongguan Jimu Machinery, and opened an embodied AI centre in Shenzhen. These costs will also keep coming down. Renting a robot the way one rents software may in future do for this category what the monthly contract did for the smartphone.
What are the biggest negatives?
- Humanoid robots remain fragile showpieces that travel in foam-lined cases and perform behind barriers.
- Their payloads and speed fall well short of fixed industrial arms.
- Maintenance, training and integration add 20% to 40% to sticker prices.
What are the biggest positives?
- A capable humanoid platform cost $90,000 two years ago and $16,000 today. That trajectory is ever-downward.
- 5G-Advanced moves the robot’s intelligence into the network, allowing lighter and cheaper machines.
- The versatility on show in Shanghai signals a category finding its commercial footing.
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge.